Can you believe this @#%?!.

POLITICAL HUMOR BITES BACK. A new batch of comedy albums released in the past few months take on themes of war, terrorism, patriotism, Bush, Cheney, and even tax policy. Little more than a year after 9/11 was supposed to pull down the curtain on political comedy, more acts are coming out with sharp material than at any time since the heyday of Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory, and Lenny Bruce.

At least six recent albums take on the popular wisdom of war: Paul Krassner's Irony Lives!, David Cross's Shut Up, You Fucking Baby, Marc Maron's Not Sold Out, Lewis Black's The End of the Universe, and two reissues from late underground legend Bill Hicks.

Outrage is a fixture of their acts, though each performer expresses it differently. Krassner is an absurdist. Maron uses fear's own momentum as if he were a judo master, playing out frightening conspiracies to their logical conclusion. Cross is hip, blunt, and sarcastic. Black explodes with everyman anger. But each one's topical schtick essentially comes from the same place--looking at the news, frowning, and saying, "Can you believe this shit?"

Paul Krassner's Irony Lives! is the most overtly political. Krassner has decades of gadfly mischief under his belt. Since his days as a Yippie and as one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, Krassner has been a fixture of counterculture humor. He describes himself not as a stand-up comic but as an "investigative satirist." Here's one riff: "Why did our government give $43 million of our taxpayers' money to the Taliban, and they didn't even have to show a business plan? `All right, we'll stop with the poppies, OK?' The reason the government gave $43 million to the Taliban is because they're a faith-based organization."

Maron doesn't hold back, either. "Boy, we really showed those Afghanis for what those Saudis did. But hey, you can't shit where you eat," he says. In one moment, lost in a screed, Maron pulls back to laugh at the thought of ranting about politics in a comedy club. "Hey, Mark, what happened to the funny?" he says. "It seems that you made some broadstroking anti-American weird fucking conspiratorial statements with not a lot of funny in them. And you're making us think in directions that we weren't prepared to do here, and perhaps even judge you a bit. What is it that you're about, huh?"

And if Steve Earle got in trouble for his song "John Walker's Blues," Maron's routine on the subject is sure to raise hackles: "On some level, he just took the semester abroad to a whole new place. I've never seen someone more dramatically and effectively say `fuck you' to their parents than that guy. It wasn't just a little wreck the car, rehab--it was big. It was a global `fuck you' to his dad." Cross saves much of his bile for President Bush and the war on terrorism, which he calls a joke: "Nobody's fucking paying attention to all the fucking truly evil shit he's doing and can get away with using the war on terrorism and the fucking thousands of people who died as an excuse to push through every shitty agenda--roll back civil rights, women's rights, separation of church and state. It's all being rolled back. You know. But we're all ignoring it. We're going, `Hey, good job on the bombing.'"

And Cross, like other comedians, doesn't buy Bush's simplistic rhetoric. In an interview with me only a month after the attacks, Cross bristled: "When I hear George Bush with this hyperbole about this being an attack on freedom, I'm not dumb. Don't treat me like I'm dumb. If it was an attack on freedom, the Netherlands would have been wiped out."

On his album, he ridicules the notion that Bush's handling of the "War on Terror" showed a sudden maturity after September 11. "He's the same fucking moron he was on the tenth," Cross says. "It's not like the planes hit, and he ran around the White House taking genius pills. `What happened? Oh my God! Where are the genius pills?'"

Black also finds the Bush Administration ripe for the picking. "I met him the other night. I met Dick Cheney. I've never stood that close to evil," Black says on his album. And Black takes on topics that might have been useful to Democrats in the last election. Namely, domestic policy, or the lack thereof. Black goes after the 2001 tax break that was a cornerstone of Bush's economic plan.

"See," says Black, "the Democrats and the Republicans knew that we had this whole stack of money called the surplus. Tons of it. There was so much we were just going to go crazy. And the thing was they decided to send it to us, because all of the bridges and roads were in perfect shape. Schools were really [great], huh. And airport security? Couldn't be tighter." His conclusion: "All $300 did was remind people how fucked they are. Three hundred dollars would have stimulated the economy if it was 1950-fucking-six, when you could actually buy something. We would have been better off if they had sent us Blockbuster video coupons."

One of the most amazing things about the idea that "everything has changed" is listening to two reissued albums from the vault of Bill Hicks, a comedian who has been dead for eight years, and realizing how the political issues he was addressing are still valid. Not even the names have changed.

Flying Saucer Tour: Vol. 1 was taped in a Pittsburgh club in 1991. Hicks was famous for battling with a crowd until he either won them over or they all left. This show was no different. The less responsive the crowd, the more controversial Hicks became. A routine about the Gulf War toward the middle of the set got laughs, but apparently not enough for Hicks: "The people that bugged me are the people who said, `Well, the war made us feel better about ourselves.' Who are these people with such low self-esteem that they need a war to feel better about themselves? I saw them on the news, waving their flags. Could I recommend instead of war to make you feel better about yourself, perhaps sit-ups? Maybe a fruit cup? A walk around the block at dusk?"

Not everything these comedians talk about is political. But what their albums do offer is a sharp jab at what much of the mainstream media have been touting as conventional wisdom. And people are laughing. You can hear the audiences react on the CDs. And if people are laughing, there's a good chance they're listening. That's a start.

As Krassner tells me, "The more repression there is, the more need there is for irreverence toward the authority that applies the repression."

Nick A. Zaino III is a freelance writer who covers comedy for The Boston Globe.