Show Business Sauce, Satire and Shtick

By Stefan Kanfer

It isn't over until the fat lady sings. -- Sports proverb

Well, the fat lady sang, and it's over. When Roseanne Barr screeched an off- key version of the national anthem, scratched her groin and spit at a ball game recently, she crossed the line between comedy and crudity. For an emerging group of female laugh getters, grossing out audiences is left to the likes of Andrew Dice Clay and Sam Kinison. Coven-like hairstyles are passe; so are Elizabeth Taylor fat jokes, delivered Uzi-style a la Joan Rivers, and the kind of masochistic self-deprecation that kept Phyllis Diller in face-lifts for two decades. The freshest funnywomen have power smiles, well-toned bodies and social commentary that ticks before it detonates.

"My ancestors wandered lost in the wilderness for 40 years," says Elayne Boosler, shaking her Botticelli curls, "because even in biblical times, men would not stop to ask for directions."

Rita Rudner's wide-eyed, lighter-than-air delivery brings the news that "men with pierced ears are better prepared for marriage -- they've experienced pain and bought jewelry."

Reno, born Karen Renaud, is one of the women who pulls, pummels and stretches comedy into the field of performance art. The tornado with dark roots asks, "Remember when safe sex meant doing it when your parents were out of town?"

Carol Leifer, a blond with a flexible voice and metronomic timing, complains that her ex-husband tricked her into marrying him. "He told me I was pregnant."

"There's a real reversal going on," says Regina Barreca, an assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the author of two books on female humor. "Women's comedy used to be local and specific -- 'Oh, look at my hair, look at my legs, I'm so fat.' Now male humor seems to be taking a step back to 'Take my wife -- please,' and women comics seem to be much more subversive."

This reversal reflects some shifts in American culture, argues Nancy Walker, who teaches English at Vanderbilt University. Back in 1981, Walker recalls, writer Erma Bombeck told her that more men were coming to her talks and breaking up at columns addressed primarily to women. Bombeck's conclusion: "That means they are doing laundry. They understand that washing machines eat socks." In the '90s these changes are amplified on the nightclub circuit, where 20% of the comics are female, up from perhaps 2% a decade ago. Even that minuscule group used to give itself the short end of the shtick: "When I was born I was so ugly, the doctor slapped my mother." In comedy's Paleolithic era, notes Budd Friedman, impresario of Los Angeles' Improv comedy club, "stand-up was traditionally a white male enclave. But today there are no restrictions. Women are able to use their intelligence and their femininity and their strength to say what they want."

What Rudner wants to say is couched in whispers and stares toward the horizon -- of Mars. She describes her grandmother as "a very tough cookie. She buried three husbands. Two of them were just napping." She was afraid to ! expose herself at a topless beach: "They'd never been in the sun before. They might catch fire."

Leifer has a wide range of sauciness and satire. Her routines prove that contemporary female comics are secure enough to lampoon other women, especially fast-track yuppettes: "Hi! I just had a baby an hour ago, and I'm back at work already. And while I was delivering, I took a seminar on tax- shelter options."

In the postfeminist era, however, women's issues are not always Topic A. Today's female comics, says Leifer, also perform "material that a man could do." A case in point is Boosler on airline absurdities, doing an Alan King staple her way: "The pilot says, 'We are currently hurtling through the air at 500 m.p.h. Please feel free to move about the cabin.' Then you land. You're rolling to the gate at 1 m.p.h. and you hear: 'You must remain seated for your own safety! Sit down!' I'm wondering, could we take off again? I need my coat from the overhead."

Boosler's kind of routine, as Professor Barreca sees it, is one thing that tends to separate the girls from the boys. "Women tell stories," she says. "Men do one, two, three, bop." The new funnywomen are anything but rote jokesters: like Robin Williams or Billy Crystal,they invent routines as they go along. Paula Poundstone, whose stand-up is a sprawl across a stool, ad-libs about 30% every night. When she was too broke to redeem her outfits from the dry cleaner's, she included the angst in her monologue: "It's like, the clothes are in jail. I go in every so often and say, 'Could I just see the pants?' " Reno goes directly to the Supreme Court and for the jugular. On the abortion ruling: "Soon a cop will be at the door saying, 'So, I hear you had a miscarriage. Prove it.' "

Leifer talks "for better or worse, about my personal experiences. I have a new joke about going out to dinner. You know, you order a bottle of wine, and they give you the cork? I feel like a jerk, sitting there sniffing and going, 'Yep, that's cork.' I said that to a waiter and he laughed. I thought, Gee, maybe I should try that in my act."

Says Rudner: "If I do a whole set and I don't have anything new, I really am depressed, no matter how well it went. I would rather try a new joke and have it bomb than play it safe." Like her colleagues, she finds plenty of pratfalls in autobiography. She recalls her overprotective parents: "My tricycle had seven wheels. And a driver." She speaks about pets with fancy trims: "I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult." And she fondly remembers an apartment near New York City's Central Park. "I couldn't actually see the park, but if I concentrated I could hear the screams for help."

To some audiences -- and even to some producers -- a woman comic is an oxymoron, like a wise fool. Whenever Rudner has been considered as the potential star of her own TV show, she says, "the first thing that happens in all of my interviews is, 'We'll assign writers to you, and they will follow you around.' I say, 'But I am a writer. Can't I make a contribution?' And they say, 'Well, you're not really network approved, because you haven't written anything yet.' " No wonder that Rudner is off in Britain now, shooting a series for the BBC.

Ann Magnuson resents being hemmed in by critical preconceptions. She is supple enough to do a routine about a biker chick at the Red-Neckorama, or to perform a mock-heroic ballet to the theme of the NBC Nightly News. But versatility has not brought happiness: "PEOPLE magazine accuses me of being too hip and arty." On the other hand, recalling her 1987 special on cable TV, she says, "The Village Voice condemns me for selling out to Cinemax, as if Cinemax were run by Jesse Helms."

Of course, every watcher of Carson or Letterman has seen male clowns air the same kind of grievance; provoking mirth for a living has never been a laughing matter. The difference today is in who does the complaining. Observes Poundstone: "A comic was telling me the other day that she thought she had started too late in life. I thought, Geez, this is one of the few areas where that doesn't mean a thing anymore. This has become an ageless, genderless job." Funny she should say that. This is the year that Paula Poundstone becomes 31, and Henny Youngman turned 84.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York