Thanks for the Side-Splitting Memories

He had a voice coated with essence of FM deejay, and a wily way of using it for comic effect.

Friday’s 25th-anniversary Groundling Theater tribute to the late Phil Hartman, who would have turned 50 that day, included a collection of Hartman bits and vocal embellishments caught on tape. The video excerpts showed Hartman on Letterman, on “Saturday Night Live,” and on stage at the Groundlings--”this warm little place he loved so much,” said Phil’s brother John at the salute to one of the Groundlings’ most successful alums.

Highlight compilations of any comedian’s work go straight for the catch phrase, the big payoff. Whatever leads up to the payoff gets left behind, and with it, a sense of how the performer builds and riffs on a routine. It’s a shame. Hartman scaled the heights of outlandish smarm, yet he was the opposite of, say, Bill Murray. Hartman’s highdives into insincerity, his deadly impersonations of everyone from a Germanic John Wayne to a formidable Barbara Bush were fierce, fearless, transformative events. He was a naturally funny man but tightly coiled, eagerly chameleonic.

His talent took him places. “My whole family basked in Phil’s limelight,” said Doris Hartman, Phil’s mother, at Friday’s post-performance dedication of a lobby plaque in Hartman’s memory.

Capped off by champagne, the dedication tail-ended “Groundlings 25 to Life,” the company’s latest show. Like so many across this vast sketch-comedy universe, this one gets by on the strength of its best performers. There’s a huge drop-off, however, from the A team to the B team. The B team is more like the G or H team.

Let’s accentuate the positive, shall we? The ringers are Kevin Ruf, as a highly enthusiastic Danish masseuse; Michael LoPrete as the inbred cracker to beat all, enlisted by a couple of Civil War Yankee prisoners to aid their escape; Holly Mandel as a Glendale Community College creative writing student; and Brian Palermo, treading extraordinarily familiar ground as a cruise ship lounge lizard, but amusingly.

These four stand out in these and other skits, for reasons that might be described as The Usual. Acute deployment of cheap dialect humor is one. (The South could sue this entire show for defamation.) Other reasons are more intangible. The A-list in “25 to Life” has ways of making you watch, yet they’re not pigs about it. They go too far and yet go just far enough.

To this first-time Groundlings-goer, a lot of the material couldn’t seem to get its mind off officially overexposed subjects. Like? Show-biz venality and stupidity (a Country Music Awards takeoff; an understudy-in-for-the-star Broadway bit). Female prisoners and bullying wardens. Donny and Marie.

The evening’s three improv segments were hobbled by truly grim audience suggestions. One patron threw out the make-believe movie title of “Land Shark,” which says a lot about the cultural influence of “Saturday Night Live” as well as the pernicious effect of Comedy Central reruns. On Friday, the improv gods did not look down and laugh. Improv puts me in a bit of a sweat to begin with. When things get rough, as they so often do, performers grow desperate and run straight for the single-entendres for cover.

The good folks sustain your interest, though, especially LoPrete, whose brief Adam Sandler impersonation is funnier than an entire Adam Sandler movie. LoPrete really comes alive in the “Rebel Yell” sketch, playing the hillbilly dolt for the ages. Only a coy theme song used as a lame closer--and this show has a lion’s share of lame closers--spoils this segment’s blissfully stupid fun, a highlight of the Groundlings’ latest.

* “Groundings 25 to Life,” Groundling Theatre, 7307 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood. This Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m. Resumes Oct. 15 for indefinite run, Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 8 and 10 p.m. $17.50-$25. (323) 934-9700. Running time: 2 hours.

Cheryl Hines, Sean Hogan, Michael LoPrete, Holly Mandel, Brian Palermo, Jeremy Rowley, Kevin Ruf, Mary Jo Smith, Amy Von FreymannEnsemble

Written by Hines, Hogan, LoPrete, Mandel, Palermo, Rowley, Ruf, Smith and Von Freymann. Directed by Deanna Oliver. Musical director Teddy Zambetti. Set by Richard Hoover. Musicians: Zambetti, Willie Etra, Probyn Gregory. Stage manager Greg Weed.