COMEDY REVIEW : It’s No Joke: $6.4 Million : Comic Relief Sets Record but Overdoses on Bobbitt Humor

After Comic Relief VI, the whole country is probably suffering from an overdose of Bobbittuates.

The Comic Relief benefits--Saturday’s raised a record $6.4 million by the time it signed off its nationwide telecast from the Shrine Auditorium--have always sought to straddle the line between supplying laughs, and lots of them, and sensitively underscoring the plight of the nation’s homeless. It’s no easy task, as comedy and homelessness are obviously not easily meshed, and in the past the result has been a few moments of misguidedly maudlin preachiness.

Saturday’s show, hosted as usual by Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg and Robin Williams, orchestrated the shifts in mood deftly, and even though brevity is generally considered the soul of wit, the epic, 5-hour production moved along at a brisk clip for at least the first 3 1/2 hours. Some of the best--and best-known--comics raced through their prime material in brief sets.

But the barrage of jokes about John Wayne Bobbitt’s ill-fated anatomy was enough to give you the willies. Not since Dan Quayle and family values inspired an outpouring of invective at the 1992 Emmy Awards have there been so many performers gratuitously piling on one topic. Time for a moratorium, OK, guys?

After Bobbitt, the Menendez brothers trial garnered a lot of punch lines. The Angst -on-ice saga of Nancy Kerrigan, Tonya Harding and the goon who came between them cropped up occasionally, along with a few, generally timid, meditations on Michael Jackson. Dennis Miller tried to capture the overall tone with a line that served as the Cliff’s Notes of the evening’s comedy: “My brother and I snuck into our Hispanic father’s bedroom and cut off his (penis) with an ice skate--just wanted to cover all the bases.”

Brett Butler, star of the hit sitcom “Grace Under Fire,” was rushed at one point during her performance by a thug with an iron bar. “Not me, you idiot!” she scolded the interloper. “Rita Rudner! Rita Rudner!” Butler also took the evening’s one shot at conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh--”I was at ‘Schindler’s List’ and he started the wave.”

Goldberg’s own recent tabloid travails were aired at length, as well, mainly by Goldberg herself, though her righteous anger wasn’t tempered with enough genuine wit, resulting in a routine that didn’t evolve much from your standard “expletive-you.”

The entire first half of Williams’ extended set was dedicated to--well, guess.

Later into the program, a few comics pointedly backed off the joke du jour. Kevin Pollak reached back to Ross Perot for a laugh, offering one of the billionaire’s quixotic homilies: “The economy is like peanut butter: If you feed it to a horse and he chews it, it’ll look like he’s talking.” During an edgy, energetic set, Carlos Mencia looked to last autumn’s fires and the riots of 1992 (the cause for looting: a TV newscaster announcing during the riots, “I’m here at a K mart . . . and there are no police anywhere “).

Dave Chappelle and Paul Rodriguez offered funny, sage sets focusing on the country’s racial divisiveness. Rodriguez noted: “It’s 1994, and the only Latinos consistently on TV are the Menendez brothers. We have to kill our mothers to get on TV?” Bill Maher offered the sort of droll, clear-eyed sardonic wit that serves him well on his cable series “Politically Incorrect.”

The evening emphasized younger comics. Alan King, the elder statesman of the performers, came through with a passionate and sometimes harrowingly funny reflection on growing older. The cast of the classic TV series “Your Show of Shows”--Cid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris--appeared, but only to pitch Comic Relief T-shirts.

Iris Stevenson’s Crenshaw High School Elite Choir gave the benefit a rousing start.

From glorious gospel music to Bobcat Goldthwait’s endearingly dopey turn as a magician who transformed the miracles of Christ into rank parlor tricks to Marisa Tomei’s spokesmodel-for-the-homeless waif act, Comic Relief VI had something to uplift and offend everyone.