Confessions of a leftwing comic.

Jimmy Tingle is against the death penalty, supports gay rights, backs a higher minimum wage, and believes in gun control. Tingle's not a politician; he makes fun of politicians.

He's a nationally known comic who has made leftwing political humor the centerpiece of his act for the past ten years - rare in an industry that shuns liberal politics as unmarketable.

Tingle's style of humor mixes sharp political satire with personal confession.

In his latest show, "Uncommon Sense," which ran for most of 1995 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Tingle talks about his own political and personal transformation from a drunk bigot to a socially conscious political humorist. Along the way, he skewers Newt Gingrich, George Bush, Ross Perot, and corporate ownership of the media.

Tingle paces the stage with manic energy. His arms fly out, punctuating jokes. He's short, with light red hair and a square, reddish face. Critics perpetually liken his appearance to that of Barney Rubble. He asks, "What does it take to get the United States government involved in true humanitarian missions abroad?" It seems we'll only help out if our economic interests are threatened, he concludes. Torture, genocide, the senseless killing of innocent people don't seem to motivate American corporations to put pressure on the United States government to intervene and stop the killing.

"Apparently these words mean nothing to these people. We have to start talking in a language they understand: customers."

Tingle switches into his news-anchor voice, high-pitched and frantic. "Millions of potential customers are being denied access to the cash register." Then, lower, the voice of the corporations: "Where is this? Bosnia? Let's go! Operation Credit Card, come on. This is important!"

Like many on the left, Tingle sees humor as a powerful, seldom-used political tool. "I think it has great potential. I think more of the message gets out there. The average person doesn't know who George Will is. Rush Limbaugh is powerful and funny. He's reaching people that George Will doesn't reach."

When he began as a comedian in 1980, Tingle did not do political humor. As he ells in his show, he began like almost every other white, male comic. "The only jokes I heard growing up were pretty rude. Let's face it: they were either racist, sexist, homophobic, or making fun of somebody else, usually fat people. I figured, when in doubt, combine them."

In the mid-1980s, Tingle began working more and more social commentary into his humor. His transformation came when he stopped drinking. Before, he drank daily, "just to feel OK. It was very medicinal."

In 1987 he quit the bottle. He says prayer - along with detox, rehab, and therapy - put him on the road to recovery.

"Then I started reading, not because I'm a great intellectual - I couldn't sleep," Tingle says in his show. In 1988, he moved to New York City. He subscribed to leftwing journals, like The Nation and The Progressive. He read Noam Chomsky and Martin Luther King Jr.

One of the books that influenced Tingle the most, Martin Luther King's The Strength to Love, was bought in a very Tinglesque manner. "One night I almost killed a guy right in the South End [of Boston] over a parking space. I just had to get to a bookstore, I was so stressed out. I said, `I've got to chill out.' I went into this store and got this book."

Tingle's transformation led him to new material, which he has now refined. On stage, he talks about the 1994 election, where it seemed every candidate for national office backed the death penalty.

"Which got me thinking," he says in his act. "If Jesus Christ were here, and running for office, would the Christian Coalition vote for him?"

Tingle conjures up a press conference with Christ. Ralph Reed, head of the Christian Coalition, steps forward.

"Mr. Christ, we in the Coalition would like to know your views on the death penalty."

The stage lights go out, except for one spotlight on Tingle, who puts his arms up, his head down - the image of Christ on the cross.

Tingle, who was raised Catholic, has rediscovered his religion since recovering from alcoholism. And he believes that the Christian right can be fought with its own professed beliefs.

"I think the strongest way to combat the Christian right is with Christianity. I think the love and tolerance and acceptance of the message of Christ - I think that would take precedence over the narrowness of the conservative Christian right."

Tingle stops his pacing, and points at the audience. He's talking about the increasingly harsh sentences that are being meted out to criminals: "How about love in sentencing? That's it, love in sentencing, as if it were you or your friends and relatives or me and my friends and relatives in jail."

The power of social movements based in theology inspires Tingle: the abolitionist movement, the civil-rights movement. He acknowledges the contradictions within the Catholic Church on many of the issues he believes in, such as gay rights, but he underscores the social-justice message of liberation theology.

For Tingle, the personal is political. And he is brutally honest about his own social and political awakening. He grew up in an Italian-American family in a predominantly Catholic, working-class section of Cambridge. His father was a cab driver. His family was heavily involved in the local political scene: one uncle was a city councilor and a judge, another uncle was the superintendent of schools.

He tells stories about fights he got in with black kids in rival basketball teams in Cambridge; about spraying racist graffiti on a playground wall; about his fears attending a basketball game in an all-black section of town; about taunting war protesters in Harvard Square; about his fear of gays.

"I'm just a person who talks about his own prejudices growing up. Look, I don't know what racism is, but I've been trying to figure it out. This is what happened to me. I'm trying to come from a place of honesty and truthfulness about myself first, and the inconsistencies in myself, and then in the rest of society, I suppose."

When he moved back to Cambridge, Tingle found the political enlightenment he achieved while in New York connecting with the people he knew and grew up with.

"When I was in New York, my politics were coming from The Nation, The Progressive, what these people were writing about. All of a sudden, I'm back where I grew up. I know the cops; the cops aren't somebody I'm reading about. I go to see some of the homeless - I drank with some of the homeless that are now living on the streets. I know the people who went to prison. There's a connection, there's a human connection that I get by moving back to Cambridge that I never had. It gives me much more of a sense of who I am. And when you have a reference point of who you are, it makes your work more real, and more honest."

So when Tingle talks about prison reform, and love in sentencing, he's talking about what happened to friends he grew up with. One friend was just released after spending eighteen years in jail. He's an alcoholic, and was not treated in prison. "Here's a guy who developed his adult life in jail. Now he's out. He's bumming money on the street." Health care is one of Tingle's concerns. "I was working in Kentucky last summer, and I said, you know, I'm kind of leaning towards the Canadian-style, single-payer health-care system myself.

"And a guy yells out, `Communist.'

"I couldn't believe it. One communist country left in the world, and apparently it's Canada. For forty years, we had nuclear warheads pointed at Moscow, when we should have had them pointed at Montreal, the great white threat to the north!"

Perhaps the unique aspect of Tingle's comedy is his optimism. On stage, he is indignant and incredulous, but there is no bitterness, no sense of despair about the causes he advocates.

He attributes that to his recovery from alcoholism. "I see miracles all around me all the time. I drank every day for years, and I couldn't stop drinking. When I started asking for help and from a power greater than myself, I started to be able to stop drinking."

Tingle performs a variation on an old chestnut: Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King, and Thomas Jefferson are all welcomed into heaven by God. But then Newt Gingrich shows up and lists his accomplishments: cutting welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, and fuel assistance for the poor; increasing the defense budget; and making it easier to buy assault weapons. "Newt, I'm sorry, this is heaven, you're on the wrong floor. I'm going to have to send you back to earth as a pregnant, teen-aged girl. Pick yourself up by your bootstraps, and find a job!"

Tingle believes he's making a difference. "Whatever I'm doing, people connect into it. People are laughing, people are thinking." Not bad for a leftwing comic. Hell, there's even a bit of a market for it.