REVIEW : ‘Night Out’: A Verbal Visit to Chippendale’s

“Ladies Night Out,” a Monday evening fixture at the Ice House, is the mental equivalent of women stuffing money into the trunks of a male stripper at places like Chippendale’s.

But instead of ogling and squealing at near-naked hunks, the wall-to-wall female audience at Diana Jordan’s one-woman show, “Female, Fertile and Frustrated,” raucously feeds on verbal images of man as a brainless slob in dirty underwear.

Or as Jordan puts it: “Men have brains--they’re just a little lower.”

Every Monday since March, the raspy-voiced blonde has been regaling female patrons of all ages--plus a handful of men masochistic and courageous enough to brave her barbed arrows--in the Pasadena venue’s 200-seat main room.

Strictly speaking, “Ladies Night Out” does allow men into the club, anti-discrimination laws being what they are. But the female crowd chuckling over penis and designer condom jokes really makes this the San Gabriel Valley’s haven for women.

To be fair, Jordan, a veteran club comic, makes fun of women, too, satirizing their orgasms, menopause and most of the other facts of female life. But even then, the laughs are most often at the expense of men.

“I turned four-O recently--four orgasms in one night,” Jordan remarks. “I was so thrilled I had to wake up my boyfriend and tell him.”

Social pundits could have a field day probing the popularity of the show, which opened for a three-week stand four months ago and has been extended through July.

Basically, the show is a scatological slumber party that confirms once again, and in language too strong for these pages, that women can talk dirtier than men.

Jordan also took occasional aim at herself, notably her experience posing for Playboy for a pictorial on women in comedy (check it out, the May, ‘91, issue). Jordan said it was a strange experience:

“I’d never been naked in front of anyone before who hadn’t bought me dinner first.”

For all its liberating raunchiness, Jordan’s buzz-saw humor never really takes on social or political institutions. For that you have to look to her male comic counterpart, Jeff Wayne, whose politically incorrect/right-wing attack on environmentalists, liberals and the homeless in his recent Ice House show, “Big Daddy’s Barbecue,” was truly subversive in comparison (and which also drew hilarious laughter from women patrons).

What the Ice House ought to do is bill Wayne and Jordan together. The war of the sexes would never be the same.

Women pack the Ice House on Monday nights because Jordan is obviously one of them and touches a pulse.

“Why can’t a man be more like a woman?” runs a key refrain of the show, only half-kiddingly.

Sometimes Jordan’s writing can be very sharp, as in her speculation on God as woman: “In the beginning there were no men. God looked around and She said, ‘This is good.’ On the third day, God took that little part of the brain woman never uses and made man.”

But be forewarned, her humor can also be in terrible taste. Such terrible taste that we really can’t print it here.

Regardless, the Ice House, on whose stage Robin Williams, David Letterman and Lily Tomlin performed in their salad days, can now add female bonding to its entertainment ledger.

And if Jordan’s show is almost predictably salacious, at least it’s a fresh variation on those old dirty comic books we kids used to pass around in the school yard.

No wonder women are flocking to see Diana Jordan. She’s not the first of her kind (imagine Phyllis Diller or Joan Rivers in an all-female back room), but she’s certainly only one of a few women comedians out there pulling women into the ‘90s, designer condoms, sponge jokes and all.

* “Ladies Night Out--Female, Fertile and Frustrated”

The Ice House, 24 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena, Mondays only, 8 p.m. Ends July 26. $10.50 with two-drink minimum. (818) 577-1894. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.