Shearer finds yet another voice

Comic actor Harry Shearer is a serious guy. Of course, plenty of his ilk, from Charlie Chaplin to Richard Dreyfuss, have been noted for their earnest streaks. But Shearer really lives it. At this point, he blogs at the Huffington Post with righteous fury on such subjects as the aftermath of Katrina and the war in Iraq far more often than he appears in films.

In person and online, he can be prickly and combative, so if his aim is to win people over to his view of the world, it’s a good thing that he has his creative side to fall back on, as well as an abundant reserve of charisma and charm. He hosts a variety-style radio program on KCRW-FM (89.9), “Le Show.” This week, he has a new movie coming out, “For Your Consideration,” a satire of awards season, directed by frequent collaborator Christopher Guest and starring Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Bob Balaban, Parker Posey and numerous other members of his inner circle. And now, like Steve Martin, he has gone literary (or at least quasi-literary) with his first novel, a farcical examination of Native American casino culture titled “Not Enough Indians.”

Surveying all this productivity, it’s safe to say that the 62-year-old is quietly but relentlessly carving out a new model for politically engaged, culturally aware working Hollywood: less time courting the establishment’s favor or engaging in instantly gratifying bombast, more time painstakingly sticking it to the powers that be.

The effort hasn’t diluted anyone’s verdict on Shearer’s talent. “His writing has always been effortlessly brilliant,” said Arianna Huffington, the pundit whose website serves as one of his outlets. Matt Groening, creator of “The Simpsons” -- for which Shearer has voiced myriad characters -- seconded that view. “He’s the funniest actor I know,” Groening said. (Shearer has contributed the voices of, among other citizens of Springfield, Ned Flanders, Principal Skinner, C. Montgomery Burns and Smithers.)

Groening is also well acquainted with Shearer’s sincere side. “He’s not ideologically rigid. He’s passionate about the things he concerned with.”

“I’m smart,” Shearer admitted recently, sitting pensively in one of the two side-by-side beachfront cottages he owns in Santa Monica. “But I’ve never been so insecure about myself that I’ve had to beat my audience over the head with it.”

For people of a certain generation and cultural disposition -- that is, anyone who has seen the 1984 mock rockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap” the requisite 15 or 20 times -- Shearer is a legend whose low-key style made the character of bassist Derek Smalls such an entertaining counterpoint to the Lennon-McCartney-by-way-of-Led-Zeppelin bickering of fellow band members David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) and Nigel Tufnel (Guest). Derek was just kind of always ... there, puffing a pipe, face masked by a mass of long black hair and a droopy mustache, waiting to step in when Spinal Tap finally hit the skids to propose a free-form jazz performance in place of the band’s usual hilarious headbanging.

Shearer could write more novels than Stephen King and become a regular on “Meet the Press” and still never deliver more pop-cultural impact than he did with “Spinal Tap.” He insisted, however, that he doesn’t reflect on this as a triumph. “What I recall is how hard it was to get that movie made. And how, when all the people who had initially turned us down wanted to do a sequel, what a pleasure it was to refuse.”

He formed a broad and not unjustifiably smug smile. One could almost hear the claws retract. Shearer is cheerful, voluble, worldly and hard-working. But he doesn’t suffer fools, be they the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which he blames for covering up bad levee design in New Orleans, or philistine Hollywood money men. “I got into this business to have fun,” he said. “The people who have done battle with me over the years have had an agenda to make it not fun.”

It’s a simple philosophy, but one that shapes Shearer’s attitude toward life and politics, as well as his theory of comedy. In a world of jokes gone totally Borat -- which is to say, cruel and remorselessly cynical -- and a political landscape dominated by attack ads and serial dissembling, Shearer represents a patrician alternative. He’s delighted to make his audience uncomfortable, but he’s determined to avoid creating what he calls “an atmosphere of derisive superiority” that doesn’t allow comedic characters to live. Listen to him talk for an hour, and you wonder why Sonny Bono and Fred Grandy made it to Congress and he hasn’t.

Possibly because he has the feeling that legislative politics, as important as they may be, are hopelessly corrupt. This comes through in his new novel, which follows the fortunes of a small town in upstate New York as it recovers from the brink of ruin by having its white-bread citizens declare themselves an Indian tribe so they can open a mega-casino and start bringing in legalized gambling money by the truckload. The story was inspired by the runaway success of the tiny Mashantucket Pequot tribe in Connecticut, which was once on the verge of extinction but now controls the massively profitable Foxwoods Resort Casino.

The novel is good for some easy humor, even if it falls short of fully emulating one of the writers that Shearer says he admires, Carl Hiaasen. “Small-town movers and shakers make me laugh,” he said. “The important thing about the book is that in the end, nobody learns anything.”

The novel created the opportunity for Shearer’s own admirers to gather for a book party in late October at the home of publicist Andrew Freedman. The crowd was the sort that only a personality like Harry Shearer can connect. Here, jazz chanteuse Tierney Sutton. There, Ed Begley Jr. A healthy smattering of wealthy, liberal Westsiders thrown in. Two women promoting artisanal chocolates. Fred Willard, who has appeared with Shearer in such Christopher Guest-directed movies as the folk-troubadour sendup “A Mighty Wind” and now “For Your Consideration” (he also enjoyed a few minutes as a bewildered military officer in “Spinal Tap”). Stephen P. Hull, the head of Shearer’s Boston-based publisher, Justin, Charles & Co. Shearer’s mother relaxed on a sofa. Kids learned to play Texas Hold ‘Em poker while grown-ups sampled cigars.

Wearing an iridescent purple shirt, Shearer welcomed all compliments, endured a microscopic description of the hors d’oeuvres by the chef and patiently posed for photographs. His decades in Hollywood, beginning as a child actor in the ‘50s, have allowed him to feel natural in these sorts of casually affluent settings, in the company of other medium-wattage celebrities. In fact, you could say that this is the variety of fame a secretly serious guy would seek out: the kind that, like so many of his film roles and the numerous characters he has developed for “The Simpsons,” allows him to maintain an under-the-radar attitude.

This position has enabled Shearer to unleash his inner muckraker more or less at liberty, especially where the aftermath of Katrina is concerned. Shearer has divided his time between Los Angeles and New Orleans for years, but he was nevertheless stunned when the city’s levees failed, unleashing the flooding that turned a vast segment of the population into refugees and swung the spotlight on the federal government’s lack of preparedness for a large-scale disaster.

As he had during the run-up to the war in Iraq, he found himself once again “uniquely positioned because I have a microphone.” As a broadcaster and blogger, he saw himself as immune from what he characterizes as the herd mentality afflicting the news media in New York and Washington. “No one wants to be seen as flaky,” he said. “But comedians don’t worry about being flaky.”

These days, there isn’t much Shearer has to worry about, besides the things he chooses to obsess over. If overheard phone conversations are any indication, his 13-year marriage to singer Judith Owen remains sweetly supportive. Whenever he wants, he can switch to musician mode and perform live. He’s thinking about writing another novel.

“The way I’ve beaten the odds is that I’ve done very little I’m ashamed of,” he said. “I didn’t want to be someone who enjoyed fleeting fame in my 20s. I wanted to be a lifer.”