Now I Know How Hester Prynne Must Have Felt

Not being hip is a terrible curse.

It means becoming an object of ridicule while those shrewder than you laugh at Dennis Miller. It means getting a phone message from a smirking someone at “Weird TV” declaring that some of the humor on ABC’s Academy Awards telecast that you wrote about this week “went right over your head.” It means not fathoming the clever and urbane cutting-edge humor of new prime-time comedies. It means being found out and exposed as a fraud when you pretend to be more sophisticated than you are.

For example . . .

Among the mail responding to my recent slam of Dana Carvey’s new ABC comedy series--the one whose individual episodes adopt the name of that week’s primary sponsor--was a lacerating letter whose perceptive authors, J. Michael Dalton and John M. Atkinson of San Pedro, had seen right through me.

After labeling me closed-minded, infantile, a failed creative writer, a snotty, jealous lout, a slut and a timid soul lacking, um, oval male sex glands, the writers abandoned their restraint and got to the point:

“You are the worst critic in America. For most of our adult lives, we have watched you miss the point on everything our generation has put in front of you. Anything slightly outside the mainstream probably makes you realize how fat you are getting, how little hair you have left, or how sad and disappointed you have become in life. How does it feel to know you will never again have sex with a woman under the age of 45?”

Now that’s what I call a straight line begging for a punch line.

Instead of biting, though, I decided to accept this letter as constructive criticism, learn from it and improve. Yes, no more leisure suits for me, the ones I like to wear with an open collar that shows off my medallions and white shoes that match my white belt. No more Nehru jackets, either. And no more fatty foods. Plus, no more sweeping my hair across my scalp and then spraying it stiff in a futile effort to disguise my baldness. No more Mr. Peoria for this guy.

Thus, it was a new, hipper me who gave Carvey’s Tuesday night series another chance by watching the second and third episodes, opening my mind to the avant-garde in hopes that I wouldn’t embarrass myself again by missing the point.

And . . . I didn’t.

The Epiphany was immediate. Carvey’s second episode on March 19 was a screeching U-turn away from the previous week’s oafish political jokes and other bits of numbing satire that I had viewed through then-unhip eyes. Instead, what I found in Episode 2 was an extraordinarily funny half hour of sketch comedy that was almost “SCTV”-esque in its ability to wittily and acutely skewer pop culture. And also like “SCTV,” to do so consistently by artfully using absurdity to spoof absurdity, beginning with a Johnnie Cochran rip and ending with “Dick Clark” and “Ed McMahon” hosting an edition of “Celebrity Bloopers and Dark Sides” that spied on “Paul Hogan” going berserk when learning he’ll be playing Crocodile Dundee forever.

In between came devastating takeoffs of a hockey goalie, “Entertainment Tonight” (the legs of the female host exposed, the male’s hidden behind a desk) and “Charles Grodin” haltingly doing his CNBC talk show (while putting himself into a trance). Moreover, just when you thought it couldn’t get funnier than weighty, self-important “Oliver Stone” filming his slightly revisionist “Washington”--a revealing history of the Founding Fathers with “Antonio Banderas” as coke-snorting George Washington and “Al Pacino” emoting outrageously as John Adams--it did.

“The Ambiguously Gay Duo,” an animated kids’ series about a distinctive pair of superheroes, was so brilliantly, side-splittingly hilarious that I wheezed myself into an asthma attack.

*

I could hardly wait to see Episode 3 and then redeem myself with a second column praising Carvey’s show and imploring those who had abandoned it (Episode 1 won its time period following “Home Improvement,” but Episode 2’s ratings dove dramatically) to give it another shot, as I had. I would guarantee them that they would be rewarded.

But that was before I actually saw Episode 3 on Tuesday.

Was it me? Had my newly acquired hipness worn off after just one week, causing me to again miss the point? Or was Episode 3 really that mirthless--almost as mirthless as the premiere, a half hour so banal (at least from the perspective of the unhip) that it prompted two sponsors of the series, Taco Bell and Pepsi, to withdraw.

The only sketch that came close to working this week was “The Eleven O’Clock News That’s Easy to Take,” with anchor Carvey and others using gentle voices and cuddly animals to soften the day’s events. But a lame Oscarcast parody driven by ugly, ignorant stereotypes of non-Americans? Carvey and Phil Hartman in a moribund “Ross Perot”/”Larry King” interview whose worthy impressions were not supported by good writing? And a stunningly tedious “Nightline” segment with Carvey’s prunish “Ted Koppel” (probably his least effective character) trying to interview gnarled and age-ravaged “Bob Dole” and “Strom Thurmond”?

Yup, it really was that mirthless, soaring right over the heads of those of us forever doomed to wear the scarlet “U” reserved for the unhip. Being out of touch with innovation is a terrible burden to bear, but we are who we are. Now, as for my sex life. . . .