That’s Entertainment?

“Back in the Elizabethan days, there were three things that people could do for an evening’s entertainment after dinner,” playwright Edward Albee noted recently during an interview on National Public Radio. “They could go to executions, which were sold out pretty quickly. They could go to bear baiting, which then sold out. And if they couldn’t get into executions or bear baiting, then they’d go see ‘King Lear.’ ”

That’s just the sort of egalitarian view of entertainment espoused by Penn Jillette. Movies, TV, plays--”show business,” Jillette says, “is what we do after the chores are done.” Indeed, watching the variety show “Penn & Teller’s Sin City Spectacular” on the cable network FX, it feels like the Elizabethan days all over again. No executions or bear baiting (yet), but the show, whose first-season finale airs Sunday night at 10, has offered everything from a musical number by the Broadway cast of “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” to a guy who stuck firecrackers into his behind and, well, lit the fuse.

Jillette, one half of the eccentric illusionist team Penn & Teller, is unabashed in his carnival barker’s take on show business, which makes him an ideal impresario for today’s brand of variety show. As Penn sees it, talk shows are boring because the guests just sit there like celebrity statues; “Sin City,” on the other hand, insists its participants do something. When actress Catherine Bell visited the show’s Las Vegas stage, for instance, she didn’t talk about her CBS series, “J.A.G.” Instead, she translated dirty limericks into Farsi.

“I would like to guarantee when you watch our show that there will be something you won’t like,” adds Jillette. “I used to love that on Ed Sullivan. I would tune in to see the Who, and I would end up seeing plate spinners.”

Take a format associated with a bygone era, add a nebulous, ‘90s buzzword (“edgy”), and factor in the need to do anything to grab an increasingly fragmented audience, and you get shows like “Sin City” and “Happy Hour,” the latter an eye-candy free-for-all that debuted last week on the USA Network and airs Saturday nights at 9 p.m. While not a harbinger of a variety show rebirth, these series illustrate that the format hasn’t quite been put out to pasture. True, the broadcast networks long since abandoned the genre, believing that the multi-set household and the remote control killed the audience for such programming. But there’s always cable TV, where there’s an abiding need to fill time with original series, done cheaply and sometimes outrageously, as everyone gropes for a signature show a la Comedy Central’s breakout hit “South Park.”

But if the audience for the variety shows of old (from “The Ed Sullivan Show” to “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour”) was the entire family, today’s purveyors have a more targeted demographic in mind--the advertiser-friendly, teenage and young adult males who make professional wrestling the titan of cable viewing.

“I wanted viewers to be surfing the dial and say, ‘What the hell is this?’ ” says “Happy Hour” executive producer Howard Schultz, who previously created the dating show “Studs” for Fox.

Hosted by brothers Dweezil and Ahmet Zappa, “Happy Hour” features B- and C-list celebrities playing parlor games, a house band with dancing girls and a studio audience that seems ready to implode if things get any happier. “It’s like a nightclub at 1:30 in the morning, when everyone’s drunk and dancing their ass off,” is how Schultz describes the show, which he says is based on a French variety show called “Le Fievre” (“Fever”). In fact, Schultz adds, Europe and South America are hotbeds for shows like “Happy Hour.” Witness “Sabado Gigante,” which originated in Chile and has since become a long-running hit for the Spanish-language network Univision.

Not surprisingly, given its “what the hell is this?” approach, “Happy Hour” has earned plenty of scorn in early reviews. Schultz says he doesn’t much care, since his target audience doesn’t pay attention to stuffy critics, anyway.

Or, as Jeremiah Bosgang, FX’s senior vice president of production and development, puts it: “You just don’t hear a lot of guys saying, ‘Honey, watch the kids tonight. “Dharma and Greg” is on.’ ”

The cable network’s ventures into “edgy” variety include “Sin City,” which will likely be renewed for another season, and “Bobcat’s Big Ass Show” starring comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, which is currently on “hiatus,” according to FX.

“It’s precisely because [variety] is not being done on the networks” that cable has become an ideal home for the format, says Bosgang. “The challenge for us in cable is, how can we be alternative? How can we offer what the bigger guys are not offering?”

They may offer variety, but will viewers come? So far, the answer is a resounding no. Despite critical praise, “Sin City” averaged about 260,000 viewers its first season, according to Nielsen Media Research. By contrast, reruns of “The X Files” average 410,000 for FX.

Among the broadcast networks, meanwhile, you really have to relax traditional images of the variety show before finding something that might fit under that heading. There are shows like Fox’s “Guinness World Records: Prime Time,” CBS’ “Kids Say the Darnedest Things” and ABC’s “The Big Moment,” but what are they, exactly?

On “The Big Moment,” which debuted last Saturday night at 8, a contestant has a week to record himself practicing some stunt (memorize pi to the 100th decimal point), then perform the trick for cash in front of a studio audience. ABC calls this a comedy/variety series, but it’s really a reconstituted “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” with an “EDtv” bent.

“To me what killed variety is the multi-set household,” says Ted Harbert, the former ABC Entertainment chief whose tenure at that network included a few stabs at a true variety show (i.e., 1988’s short-lived “Dolly,” starring Dolly Parton). These days, says Harbert, “viewers are not only allowed, but encouraged, to be selfish” in their viewing habits.

In so doing, viewers in effect create their own variety shows simply by pressing the remote control from niche channel to niche channel. Jillette cringes at this. He also cringes at the shabby treatment variety acts receive from the likes of David Letterman, Jay Leno, et al.

“If you can shoot milk out of your eyes, and you go on [‘The Late Show With David Letterman’], then he has to pretend that he was the one who discovered it was stupid,” he says.

“We’re so stuck on thinking that form and venue are everything. But we really do know that the sweet devil is in the details. We’re doing as best we can [to do] the most old-fashioned variety show as possible.”

Does he mean an old-fashioned variety show in the mold of Ed Sullivan?

No, Jillette corrects, “going back 8,000 or 9,000 years.”