O.C. Comedy Review : A Kinetic Body of Work

When Dana Carvey performs in front of a live audience, he creates about 10 times more onstage energy than your run-of-the-mill stand-up comic. Like Robin Williams, he is a multi-pronged talent who tends to use his entire physical self in his quest for laughs.

During the first of two shows Sunday at the Galaxy, the “Saturday Night Live” veteran mugged, gesticulated, pantomimed and generally worked the stage like someone with multiple personalities, all of them eager to please. No wonder he showed up in a T-shirt, sweat pants and athletic shoes: What he does is fun, but it’s also strenuous work.

By the end of his 75-minute show, he had proven his abilities not only as a comedian but as an impressionist, an actor and even a musical satirist. And he did it all without relying too heavily on his most popular “SNL” characters, the irreparably dense Garth from “Wayne’s World” and the too-prude Church Lady.

His right-on portrayal of a whiny and nerdy sounding H. Ross Perot had the audience in stitches (“He sounds like a hardware salesman,” Carvey said, or perhaps “the wicked witch”).

President Clinton, Regis Philbin, Jimmy Stewart, Katharine Hepburn and George Bush (probably Carvey’s best-known celebrity impression) all were filtered through the 40-year-old performer’s malleable voice and body. The most memorable impression was of actor Hugh Grant trying to weasel out of his recent bust with a Hollywood prostitute: Carvey underscored the absurdity of the situation by hilariously mimicking Grant’s veddy genteel British accent and attitude.

One got the feeling this perhaps was a more caring and mature Carvey. Now the father of two young sons, he related a number of funny but endearing tales from the parenthood wars. At one point, he took on the role of a near-demonic child demanding that his parents supply him with toys he knows are commercial rip-offs. But overall, his anecdotes regarding his kids were laced with love. Life, he noted, is worth so much more when there are people you care about more than yourself.

Still, from the silly orgasmic noises he made while intermittently sipping his Coke from a straw to his rather tasteless story of an enema, he proved he hasn’t been completely tamed.

There were times when his madcap mannerisms were so infectious that they helped camouflage weak material. And for all his gifts as an impressionist and a physical comedian, Carvey’s routines basically lack the additional cerebral and political bite of Williams’ best work.

But when he concluded by satirizing banal rock lyrics and then encored with a bit in which the Church Lady meets Al Pacino’s Scarface, one couldn’t help but laugh.

Jimmy McGee opened with a sexist display of bathroom and locker room humor. Crude jokes about breasts, sex and flatulent dates indicated that McGee knows a lot less about women than he probably thinks. When he tried to reveal a sensitive side, it prompted people to laugh at him, but not at his jokes.