COMEDY REVIEW : Whoopi Puts Truths on the Laugh Track

No one in the ‘80s has played the vacuous celebrity game more adroitly than Whoopi Goldberg, who appeared Thursday and Friday at the Universal Amphitheatre.

As a black welfare mother she’s been able to pull at the tendrils of white liberal guilt that still reach out from the abandoned and overrun mansion of what was once known as the Great Society.

She parlayed a small roster of characters to a Tony Award from a theatrically anorexic and desperately grateful Broadway. She’s shepherded a questionable acting talent into several leading film roles. Her dread-lock image and Alfred E. Neuman smile have worked their way like a show-biz logo into the iconography of our empty decade’s ongoing star hustle. She reportedly tells people now that she’s as big as Streisand.

Such premature success and self-infatuation usually serve a kind of queen-bee function, where the delusions of a bloated ego are plumped to the max by a busy phalanx of agents and managers bent on milking an image for all it’s worth, people who know how to convert an aesthetic principle into a condo deal.

Who would have imagined, looking at this our modern classical scenario, that Whoopi Goldberg would turn out--after all--to be the fine artist she is?

It seems almost facile and casually matter-of-fact on the surface to say that the very good comedian is someone who tells the truth. But it isn’t more than five minutes or so into Goldberg’s act that you realize she’s blown away virtually all of her contemporaries and the majority of other comedians working right now, partly through her skill (she’s more of a comedic actress than a straight stand-up), but mostly through her extraordinary identification with human suffering.

It’s amazing that this odds-on favorite for canonization on Hollywood Squares should turn around and expose the trivial-mindedness of most of her show-biz confreres.

One of the manifestations of her artistry is that Goldberg’s act still contains most of her old characters, but changed now. The junkie Fontaine is now straight--it’s the world that’s become hallucinatory. Goldberg’s little girl with the blond hair has come down with AIDS. Her Jamaican lady has become the beneficiary of a $24-million endowment from the elderly man she tended, “the old raisin,” but the money has alienated her from her old friends, and she can’t follow the Internal Revenue Service’s reasoning for wanting to take so much of it.

That Goldberg’s characters have evolved is one of the signs that they live in her, as in the imagination of a novelist. They’re here to inform us as much as they’re here to please. They accompany her changes in life, and her unmistakable rage.

The longest segment of the show is given over to Fontaine’s views on the current political and social scene. She opens singing a partly obscene junkie version of the “Star-Spangled Banner” while lowered to the stage on a hydraulic construction scaffold. One need not be a superpatriot VFW legionnaire to cringe at what initially seems a desecration, until you see that Fontaine is operating out of the premise of America traduced.

You may want to remind her that it wasn’t sexual vitality that sabotaged Gary Hart’s political career, as she implies--it was his lack of judgment--but you won’t escape feeling grievously mystified that a nation whose TV channels are virtually locked on to the Baby Jessica crisis can be appallingly indifferent to the Florida family whose home is bombed and gutted because their young children have AIDS. Guess who gets the encouraging letter from the White House?

Goldberg is the only public spokesperson who, for obvious reasons, is free to go after Jesse Jackson. Whatever happened, Fontaine muses, to the Rainbow Coalition (“that included everyone except the people in Hymietown”).

Goldberg’s greatest vox populi cheer came for her blunt notes on Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign which, as she points out, doesn’t hold much water for a welfare mother whose 13-year-old son is making $13,000 a month in drug-dealing. But unlike most other comedians who would rest their case on the reference, Goldberg contrasts the First Lady with Lady Bird Johnson, whose interests in retrospect seem more philanthropic and realistic.

AIDS draws a great deal of comment from Goldberg, both ironic and direct (she points out that it wasn’t until that prototypical hunk Rock Hudson died from it that the public became alarmed, and she sets her revealing scene in the Reagans’ bedroom). No other comedian is confronting the issue head-on the way Goldberg is--she’s refreshingly free of the conventional smart-ass club attitude--and that may be because she hasn’t lost touch with the permutations of fear.

Goldberg is more overtly political than ever, but she isn’t exploiting shared conceits with her audience (though it may seem so at first). She isn’t smug. You’re doing all right, she tells us. Collectively, you smell pretty good. But have you noticed how the homeless are getting to look more and more like the rest of us? Just mentioning. Don’t mean nothin’ by it.

At bottom, the artistic function is that of making sense. Whether it’s a poem or a laugh, it leads us to recognize what we’ve felt but have never quite acknowledged before. There’s lots in Goldberg’s act that’s crude and transparent, and you easily detect a leftward lean that could one day become doctrinaire. But there’s grace and pleasure in it too, and a palpable concern for what’s happening in this country as well as an unsentimental sympathy for the luckless and afflicted. How many other entertainers send you home feeling like a human being?