Black and Blue

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Martin Lawrence says out loud the things most people are too shy to write even on bathroom walls, and young America loves him for it. The 28-year-old comic has a naughty new comedy album titled Talkin' Shthat's on Billboard magazine's best-seller chart. He's the host of HBO's stand-up-comic showcase Def Comedy Jam, a program that has become the proving ground for a new generation of Richard Pryor wannabes. He is also the star of Fox-TV's Martin, a black-themed slapstick sitcom that is one of the top-rated shows among teenagers, and, as Lawrence points out, his voice rising with excitement, "If Fox was broadcast everywhere, you never know, we might be Num-BER 1."

Martin, now in its second season, centers on a Detroit radio talk-show host (Lawrence) and his no-nonsense girlfriend (Tisha Campbell). Lawrence is such an animated performer, he is nearly a cartoon -- sunny, outgoing, impossible to dislike no matter how nasty he is being. During a typical show, he'll also play any number of wild supporting characters, as broadly drawn as a third-grader's art-class project. An auto mechanic who won't stop singing soul songs. A runny-nosed child with an MIA mother. An extension-wearing, finger-snapping round-the-way girl from across the hall. Martin is a post- Cosby Show farce, a show for the I-am-not-a-role-model Age of Charles Barkley, a comic romp that puts the "id" back in video. Says Lawrence: "If I can get away with it, and it's something that happens in life, I go with it."

In a speech last year, comedy great Bill Cosby was critical of the "vulgarity" of shows such as Martin. After all, the Cosby Show was able to be hugely funny with material that didn't make you squirm if your grandmother entered the room. "I don't think Martin is a show that's projecting us forward," says Dr. Alvin Poussaint, professor of psychiatry at Harvard University Medical School and a former consultant to the Cosby Show. "Cosby was concerned about the limited range of roles blacks were playing on TV. Most sitcoms show a street-smart buffoonish image, but there are so many other images in the black community. Shucking and jivving is not representative of black America."

Lawrence shrugs off criticism. "Cosby's gonna do his thing, and I'm gonna do mine," he says. "Whichever one makes you laugh, you take it and enjoy , it." Lawrence's just-say-ha attitude is the result of an upbringing that wasn't a lot of laughs. His father, a sergeant in the Air Force, divorced his mother when he was eight. The family moved around a lot, with stops in Brooklyn, New York, and Landover, Maryland. "Sometimes you gotta laugh to keep from crying," says Lawrence's sister (and personal assistant) Rae Proctor. "We were poor. Mother raised us, six of us, when she was working as a cashier." Lawrence made his family laugh, then he made people on his street laugh. Then, realizing that he could earn a living at this, he headed off to the comedy-club circuit. Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons was impressed with Lawrence's "natural charm and presence" and hired him as host of Def Comedy Jam. Lawrence also landed scene-stealing minor roles in movies like Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. "To attain universal appeal, the conventional wisdom is that you should dilute, homogenize black comedy," says filmmaker Warrington Hudlin, who cast Lawrence in House Party and Boomerang. "His approach is just the opposite." In January Lawrence will release a comedy concert film.

Broad humor and racial issues are hard to balance -- just ask Ted Danson and his ex-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg. But Lawrence is a sort of Afrocentric clown, and he has an insightful edginess that, when he chooses to display it, can raise his sitcom work above the level of stereotype. In one Martin episode Lawrence is in a shoe store when a white customer mistakes him for a store employee. "I don't work here," he says, with the disgust that many professional blacks have felt when they are mistaken for the help. When Lawrence invites friends over to watch boxing, he sports a FREE MIKE TYSON T shirt. All this material is part of the reason Martin won an N.A.A.C.P. Image Award.

The show also features something that's not seen often enough on TV: a black man and a black woman in a long-term romance. Recently there's been talk that Lawrence is settling down. "There is someone special in my life," he confides, suddenly as gooey as a Gummi Bear. Then he recovers and in a flash works up the good-natured energy he displays on his sitcom. "But I still love the ladies. Martin loves the ladies!" He's too busy to be too serious. He's a comic on the laugh track to stardom.