Word: goldthwaite
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Stepping in front of a live audience all alone is a pressure-packed moment for any stand-up comedian, but no one seems to handle it worse than Bob Goldthwait. Wavering between what appears to be incapacitating stage fright and drug-induced hysteria, Goldthwait delivers his lines in a choked, trembling voice that regularly erupts into shrieks of agony. "Thank you very . . . thank you very . . . thaaaarrrrgggghhhh!" were the first words from his mouth in a recent HBO special taped at Manhattan's Bottom Line. Two or three more half-finished sentences followed, then an angry shout of defiance: "I never...
...Crazy time" is what Johnny Carson calls it when the comedy gets a bit weird on the Tonight show. But the real crazies rarely make it to Carson's stage. Goldthwait did have one Tonight appearance a year ago, when Joan Rivers was guest host, and some of his offbeat contemporaries can occasionally be seen in such hipper network venues as Late Night with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live. But increasingly, the showcase for innovative comic talent is cable, the Off-Broadway of TV comedy...
Monotony is a danger, too, with Goldthwait. But his zoned-out stage character wears better than Philips', both because it has more psychological resonance and because it functions organically as part of his comedy. Goldthwait, 24, who has appeared in the Police Academy films and in Burglar with Whoopi Goldberg, packs a whole analyst's couchful of anxiety, fear, anger and guilt into one sweating, simmering package: the comedian as psychotic. "I can legally kill anybody I want," he announces at one point. "I really don't think there's a court in the world that wouldn...
...that Goldthwait's material is totally subliterate raving. In his latest HBO concert, Share the Warmth, he offered pungent comments on everything from Iranscam to Lucille Ball ("A 75-year-old woman performing slapstick comedy -- is that funny to you?"), along with hapless autobiographical asides. "I lost my job," he whimpers. "No, wait. I didn't really lose my job. I mean, I know where my job is still. It's just when I go there, there's this new guy doing it." Underneath the shrieks and stammers, a shrewd comic mind is percolating...
...Kinison, another exponent of the new school of "maniacal comedy," could be Goldthwait's evil twin. Like Goldthwait, Kinison depends on high decibels for laughs; his routines build into angry punch lines delivered as piercing screams. But where Goldthwait is a demented child, Kinison, who drapes his pudgy frame in the seedy overcoat of a Times Square flasher, is a depraved adult, fuming over the indignities visited on him in the Reaganite, feminist '80s. A former Pentecostal minister who grew up in Peoria, Ill., Kinison, 33, specializes in foulmouthed tirades on sex and religion. Several of his lines...