Of Course, Comics Are Weighing In

President Clinton was so excited about the Denver Broncos’ winning touchdown in the Super Bowl that he jumped up and almost knocked the intern off his lap.

So goes one of the myriad jokes “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno was contemplating for his monologue Monday, a monologue that Leno doesn’t normally have this much fun working on. But then the scandal implicating President Clinton in an alleged affair with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky descended like a gift from the gods onto the comedy world, which has pumped out joke after joke about a political story that, told straight, seems absurd enough.

“It’s perfect for a monologue because it’s about sex, power, and nobody got killed,” Leno said. “This is not TWA Flight 800, it’s not about Bosnia, it’s about something everyone likes to talk about.”

As in sex. As in such questions as: Is oral sex a sin according to the Bible? What about the dried semen reportedly on a Lewinsky dress? If these sound like setups before punch lines, they’re not; they’re what sober-faced newscasters are discussing related to “Mastur-gate,” as comic Darren Carter termed the scandal at the Improv in West Hollywood on Sunday night.

“Do you realize,” Leno asked, repeating one of his favorite jokes of late, “that if we’d elected Bob Dole, the big story right now would be low interest rates?” Leno devoted 22 of the 25 jokes in his monologue last Friday to the story, and he doesn’t anticipate any end to the frivolity soon.

Indeed, all he has to do is watch the mainstream media’s reporting of the story, which comes ready-made with satire. One news organization, Leno said, reported that Lewinsky attended Beverly Hills High School, “ ‘the alma mater of the Menendez brothers.’ As if there’s a connection there,” Leno deadpanned.

Pity the folks at NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” (they’re on hiatus until Feb. 7) and at CBS’ “The Late Show With David Letterman” (they were off last week, when the scandal broke).

Conan O’Brien, however, of NBC’s “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” was working and added this to the cacophony: “Several news organizations have been pointing out the comparisons between President Clinton’s sex scandal and Watergate. However, the main difference is this time, we know the identity of Deep Throat.”

No late-night show is more ideally suited to the Clinton-Lewinsky fodder than ABC’s “Politically Incorrect,” which was created to deal with breaking news in a seriocomic way, combining as it does host Bill Maher’s politically savvy sense of humor and a discussion of the issues with an eclectic blend of guests from the worlds of politics and celebrity.

Although the show managed to touch on the pope’s historic visit to Cuba last week, “the main thrust of this show has always been to talk about the same things people are talking about at a cocktail party, and certainly, everyone’s talking about this,” said the show’s executive producer, Scott Carter.

“PI’s” guests this week include “Beverly Hills, 90210” alum Luke Perry and performance artist Karen Finley, and Carter anticipates Clinton-Lewinsky being topic No. 1.

“Our challenge is to try to figure out different angles” on this story, he said, and then perhaps alighted on one: “I never thought I’d hear . . . ‘dried presidential semen’ on the air,” he said.

Ironically, anyone feeling the need to get away from the Clinton-Lewinsky story might try the comedy clubs, where--at least judging by a random survey of stages around town over the last week--the scandal hasn’t caused much of a comedic ripple. If comics like Dick Gregory and Lenny Bruce would have had a field day with the story in another era, today’s stand-up comic doesn’t seem nearly as politically inclined.

But Dana Gould, for one, a comic and cast member on the NBC sitcom “Working,” did work some Clinton-Lewinsky material into his set Sunday night.

Getting ready to take the stage at the weekly UnCabaret comedy show at LunaPark in West Hollywood, Gould, who also performed the night the Gulf War broke out, called it his comedic duty to address the scandal.

“It’s like a dead elephant in the street: You gotta get it out of the way,” he said. “A person who approaches their act with a certain professionalism, you owe it to the audience to acknowledge that there’s something like this going on. . . . I mean, a lot of the stuff I remember about Watergate I know from listening to a Robert Klein album.”

Among Gould’s onstage takes on the Clinton scandal: “FDR was married to, what, like his fifth cousin, and he got us through the Depression and World War II. [President] Bush only slept with Barbara, and because of that, we illegally invaded Panama.”

Cruder material came from morning radio’s Howard Stern, who never met a sexual innuendo he didn’t like. Monday morning, Stern was having less trouble accepting a Clinton affair with Lewinsky than with Paula Jones. “Would you have sex with Paula Jones?” Stern incredulously asked guest Dick Clark, before commenting on Jones’ appearance.

By contrast, satirist Harry Shearer used his Sunday morning “Le Show” on KCRW to parody the by-now-oft-repeated joke that Vice President Al Gore is “one orgasm away from the presidency.” Shearer did an extended bit in which Gore readied the speech he would make in taking over the country, agonizing over whether to call the moment “historic.”