Irony Deficiency Not a Problem for Bernhard

Without irony as a weapon and celebrities to skewer with it, much of Sandra Bernhard’s comic career as we know it would be nothing.

Since Sept. 11, some pundits have insisted that irony will no longer play. Furthermore, they reason, a nation shocked into alertness can no longer be distracted en masse by Madonna’s newest make-over or whoever’s latest squeeze. If they are right, Bernhard could be out of a gig.

The comedian made her first mark in 1983 playing a celebrity-obsessed stalker in “The King of Comedy.” She turned up as Madonna’s buddy--and maybe more--in the documentary “Truth or Dare.” From 1991 to 1997 she played a bisexual waitress on the sitcom “Rosanne.” She cemented her own ambiguous and ironical persona as a comic and a pop singer in the 1990 performance film “Without You I’m Nothing.”

Now comes “Hero Worship,” a stage show of comedy and songs that Bernhard brings to the Knitting Factory in Hollywood tonight through Thursday. Never mind the supposed shift in the zeitgeist; Bernhard is confident that irony will work as long as human folly endures and that celebrities will always be with us, contributing more than their fair share of satire-tempting behavior. Not only can she crack ironic jokes after Sept. 11, but she also intends to crack jokes about Sept. 11.

“There’s endless fodder for me that I find funny,” she said last week by phone from the apartment in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood where she lives with her 31/2-year-old daughter, Cicely.

At one point in her new show, Bernhard speculates wryly that the celebrities who answered phones during the “America: A Tribute to Heroes” telethon for victims of terrorist attacks were just chatting with their celebrity pals.

After declaring that she hopes all contributions will indeed go to victims’ families, she riffs on the irony of such a windfall: “Only the other day down the Village I was trying to buy this brownstone for $3.5 [million]. Some fireman’s kid was bidding against me.” She burlesques the sexual mores of Islamic fundamentalists, heedless of multicultural correctness.

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Topical Bits About

Sept. 11 and Aftermath

Bernhard’s first performance after the terror attacks came on Oct. 19 at an American Liver Foundation benefit in San Francisco. She says topical bits about Sept. 11 and its aftermath just came spilling out.

“I didn’t think it out. I found an instinctive way of making it funny and palatable. Initially, of course, I was a little nervous. Everybody was badly shaken and concerned, but my job is to shed some deeper light on these experiences. I can filter out things that obviously don’t have any entertainment value. It all worked, and people laughed.”

Bernhard, 46, readily cops to being an ironist, but she sees nothing inappropriate in that these days. “People [mistake] cynicism and smugness for irony. It takes somebody who has insight to be ironic. It just takes a [smart aleck] to be cynical.

“I want to see the betterment of the world,” she adds. “This is no time to get soft and stupid.”

Besides, Bernhard says, it’s too late to stop now. “I was a fledgling mistress of irony as a teenager. I was kind of a class commentator as opposed to class clown.” Her lip got her thrown out of classrooms, she says, but it never landed her in any serious trouble.

Nor, Bernhard says, has poking fun at celebrities earned her any deep grudges that she knows of. Mariah Carey has come in for special ridicule in her recent routines. Convinced that actress Angie Harmon lied about her age in an interview, Bernhard sings a plaintive ballad in “Hero Worship” urging Harmon to stand up against ageism.

“I think most of the people I take the [starch] out of end up agreeing with me,” Bernhard says. “People who do a lot to stay in the public eye can veer in dangerous directions. [The satire] is all based on what goes on in their career at a particular time.”

Part of what distinguishes Bernhard is her ability to be a courtier in the celebrity realm--hobnobber with Madonna and Roseanne, emcee at fashion awards shows--yet also to satirize it. “She is not a tourist flying over a landscape. She ... understands the foolishness of a lot of American guff and is nonetheless an inhabitant,” film critic Stanley Kaufmann wrote in a favorable review of “Without You I’m Nothing” for the New Republic.

Bernhard says her days caught up in Madonna’s whirl taught her to keep some distance from celebrity’s most intense vortexes. “It is hard not to get swept up into that world when you’re hanging out with somebody of her [stature]. It’s not something I would do again. She came to my show, it was flattering, we hung out.

“I learned that was not the kind of fame I was interested in and it was not the kind of career I wanted to emulate.”

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Finding Friends

of Substance

Bernhard says that what troubles her most about Americans’ celebrity-hunger is “the ease and access that relatively untalented people have” in commanding the spotlight. Among her friends these days are Chrissie Hynde and Marianne Faithfull, rock stars recognized for their artistic substance as well as their celebrity sizzle.

For a week last August, Bernhard was host of “The Sandra Bernhard Experience,” a talk show on the Arts & Entertainment network that she saw as a vehicle for exposing deserving talents during in-depth discussions.

The five-night trial, which wasn’t picked up, was given a special Thanksgiving turkey award by Times writer Howard Rosenberg for a surfeit of “Bernhard babbling neurotically about herself.” Bernhard says she still is eager to host a TV talk show and is seeking another outlet.

Bernhard isn’t all ironist. She loves the heart-on-a-lacy-sleeve music of Stevie Nicks. And, she says, she has been moved by the impact of Sept. 11.

“The immediate unification of people was beautiful, the gentleness and vulnerability and caring. I think it has on a deep level changed a lot of people spiritually, and that’s fantastic. But you have to maintain that and not become complacent again. I would imagine it’s going to take more tough experiences for people to make a giant consciousness shift. I’ll be glad to stop doing [irony] if that happens.”

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Sandra Bernhard’s “Hero Worship,” Knitting Factory, 7021 Hollywood Blvd. Tonight through Thursday, 7 p.m. $25. (323) 463-0204.