Comedy Review : Gay-Straight ‘Debate’: Not Pulling Any Punch Lines : The Jason Stuart and Jeff Wayne program starts off with solo bits, then shifts into an exchange of thrusts and parries.

The culture of complaint has a new outlet with comedians Jason Stuart and Jeff Wayne, who are touring their “The Great Gay-Straight Comedy Debate.” Like a quasi-Lincoln-Douglas debate for the ‘90s comedy club set, the Stuart-Wayne faceoff is keen on hitting social hot buttons while pumping up the profiles of the two debaters.

Their tour hit the Improv in Irvine on Monday, and it took a while for the hot buttons to start up the audience. For one thing, the act’s opening structure is oddly complicated: Waynecomes on for a stand-up bit touting the straight white guy’s perspective, then Stuart comes on for a longer solo bit, then Wayne returns for a solo. Only after all this does the debate proper begin. It’s a hackneyed way to give opponents equal time.

In this early section, Stuart’s flamboyant yet self-deprecating presentation absolutely swamped Wayne; by the time Stuart was done with his number, capped with a very funny, dead-on lampooning of a “Star Search” singer, we had almost forgotten that Wayne was even in the room. And Wayne’s we-poor-white-guys theme (it seems to be his only theme) didn’t pull us back into his comedy orbit.

Even before they faced each other at podia on the club’s stage (backed by a tacky banner festooned with the lavender triangle of Gay Pride and the male-female symbols), Wayne and Stuart laid out their program.

Wayne takes the stance of the aggrieved white, heterosexual male who’s blamed for all societal ills and who’s had it up to here with every minority making a claim to rights or power. Stuart argues that gays and lesbians need laws to protect them from bad people and to let them be full citizens.

Rather than going for brownie points, this kind of act opts for whining points. And the irony of “The Great Gay-Straight Comedy Debate” is that Wayne’s heterosexual grabs for more whining points than Stuart, whose constituency Wayne claims whines too much.

It’s no coincidence that Nietzsche is quoted on the back of Wayne’s new CD: “Perhaps I know best why man is the only animal that laughs. He alone suffers so excruciatingly that he was compelled to invent laughter.”

The debate’s weakest exchanges stemmed from this he-who-suffers-most syndrome, yet there was no doubt that Stuart won this section. But in a surprising reversal, Stuart’s aggressive stance in his solo bit gave way to a defensive posture when he was up at the lectern against Wayne’s skilled rhetoric.

When Wayne asked Stuart if some of his come-ons to men don’t constitute sexual harassment, Stuart looked helpless and winded. He who lives by the PC sword dies by the PC sword.

*

Stuart rarely pinned Wayne down as smartly, but he is the more entertaining performer--the Id to Wayne’s Ego. (Wayne’s Id, as presented here, is not a pleasant sight.)

Stuart played off the audience when Wayne began to take the debate a little too seriously, a curious mix of left-wing fun and right-wing lecture.

We could see that they like each other, though, which is why their hug at show’s end, to the refrain of “We Are Family,” didn’t feel like an act. With so few comics out there willing to get political, the ones who are have to stick together--gay, straight or otherwise.