Anything for a Laugh? : Comedy: Stand-up veterans push the envelope, but it’s a personal decision, not one for the censors, they say.

The audience is roaring. Peals of laughter are echoing off the walls of Igby’s comedy club. Eyes are tearing, and knees are being slapped. Dennis Wolfberg is talking about his colon.

The veteran stand-up comedian often closes his sets with an excruciatingly funny 10 minutes on an excruciatingly invasive colon exam he suffered through some years back. A slapstick pastiche of unsympathetic nurses, breezy doctors and gigantic medical implements, it’s not the kind of material anybody could make funny, or would attempt to. But, for Wolfberg, it works.

“I did that bit on ‘The Tonight Show,’ and it was a major turning point in my career. I’m now shallow enough to admit that I’d go after a joke anywhere,” he says with a chuckle. “My material generally comes from my personal experiences and my family and is usually self-deprecating. That’s what I’m comfortable doing. But I also have great admiration for comics who can get laughs with subjects I wouldn’t touch in a million years. Virtually anything can be funny.”

And, in a sometimes thin-skinned society, virtually anything can offend. One person’s colon joke can easily be another’s vulgarity. While most comics cherish their right to do or say anything for a laugh, performers must decide how much of themselves they’re willing to reveal on stage, how hard they’re willing to push an audience and what they’re willing to do for the sake of comedy.

“To me, stand-up comedy is all about telling a secret that people are thinking but no one’s saying out loud,” says Bill Maher, host of Comedy Central’s freewheeling, comic talk show “Politically Incorrect.” “If you capture that, then anything can be funny. There are a lot of issues you need to tread carefully on, but sometimes the best disinfectant for a messy topic is sunlight, and it’s comedy’s job to be that sunlight. Society’s in trouble when comics don’t take advantage of free speech.”

Issues of censorship and freedom of speech are currently hot as debates swirl around proposed curbs on violent imagery in video games, FCC decency clauses, campus speech codes and terms of political correctness. In this climate of battling sensibilities, the nation’s comics may be offering a working system of self-regulation.

In short, audience response makes every comic his or her own best censor.

Comedian Charles Fleischer is known for his wildly improvisational routines, and he guides his antics with a simple set of principles. “A comic can only go by his own perspective. When I’m working, I don’t worry about offending anybody else, only about offending myself. What offends me is anything that messes with the innocence of children or animals. That’s the area I won’t go into for a laugh. Beyond that, I think it’s sometimes good to offend people. It wakes them up.”

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Mark Curry targets his tales of tweaked reality toward a broad audience. The star of “Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper” and host of “Showtime at the Apollo” has an easygoing and likable persona on comedy club stages, but he says he’s occasionally lost an audience’s good will when harsher material misfired. He’s also learned how to climb out of any holes he digs himself into.

“If I go too far with an audience, I can come back. If an audience goes silent on me, I’ll play it off by becoming one of them--switching into my comedy patron voice and saying, ‘Boy, that Curry’s no Seinfeld.’ Or maybe I’ll just tell an audience to deal with it. Personally, I won’t do anything that demeans black people for a laugh, but other than that I’m on stage to talk about what I want to talk about. If the audience disagrees with me, they have the right to sit there, look mean and not laugh.”

As a stand-up performer and star of “Grace Under Fire,” Brett Butler believes that risk-taking is precisely what keeps comedy vital. She is disheartened when she sees comics backing away from material for fear of offending a crowd. “Stand-up comedy is a great American art form, but the scourge of stand-up is the craving for conformity. Too many comics think that getting on stage is the end of the risk, and they take the road more traveled. Comedy should celebrate uniqueness and inconsistency.”

While developing her barbed wit on the comedy club scene, Butler discovered a valuable comedic alternative to self-censorship: Comics may not have to tone down their message if they can repackage the messenger.

“I was often told by club owners that I was too dark, too political and too profane. I eventually responded by bleaching my hair and smiling a lot more on stage. I told the same jokes, and the crowds suddenly thought they were hilarious. It made me wonder who was zooming who.”

“Comedy is taken care of by a free market,” says Penn Jillette, the speaking half of the twisted comedy-magic team Penn & Teller and the voice of Comedy Central. On that channel, he is currently presenting an open letter to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, who has spoken in favor of curtailing violent imagery on television. In the spot, he and Teller helpfully point out the difference between stage blood and real blood and make a pitch for an artist’s right to “give people a rage to live.”

The duo’s stage shows have been known to make use of copious quantities of fake blood in the service of violent illusions. There are limits to what they’ll do on stage, but they are based more on competition than taste. “I’m personally interested in sex, and I love dirty jokes, but I don’t do them on stage because other people do them better. If you talk about love and sex and dating, you’re going head-to-head with Shakespeare and Albert Brooks. We stick with violence.”

Jillette feels that his open letter merely seconds the feelings of one of the country’s Founding Fathers. “The best line for Janet actually came from Benjamin Franklin, who said, ‘Those who sacrifice liberty in the name of safety deserve neither.’ Performers have the right to say what they want to, and anyone paying money has the right to accept or reject the art and entertainment that’s available. Teller and I do what we do because we have something to say, not because we want to shock. Our audience understands that, and the people who are upset by us don’t have to be in our audience.”

Bill Hicks came up short in a clash of comedic tastes last year when a bit he did for the Letterman show was deemed too hot for broadcast television. But he sees no reason to soften his satirical jabs. “The only way to do comedy is to speak from the heart and do what makes you laugh. People appreciate emotional honesty, whether they agree with your point of view or not. I like to be shocked and surprised, so I’m out there trying to shock and surprise myself.”

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Even some comics known for scrupulously clean material support their colleagues who choose to push the envelope of acceptability. “I’ve had children and archbishops in my audience and haven’t had to change a thing,” says veteran comic David Brenner. “That’s my preference.

“But I wouldn’t want anyone to walk into a club and say they were shutting the show down because I hadn’t cursed in 10 years, and I don’t think it should go the other way either.”

It would seem that differences of taste among comics, and audiences, will persist as long as comedy does. Every newly uttered punch line may delight someone and offend someone else. The offended may want to stifle the laughs, but Bill Maher says that any attempt to quell comic speech may simply result in stronger material for the comics.

“A restrictive mood is usually good for comedy, because it gives us something to rebel against. We love that. There’s no way any censor can really win with a comic. We’ll always have the last word, and, more importantly, the funnier word.”