HOW SICK CAN WE GET? Very.

In Paris, on December 11, 1896, William Butler Yeats attended the opening night of a play. Years later, he wrote about the event in his autobiography.

"I go to the first performance of Jarry's Ubu Roi [King Ubu], at the Theatre de l' Oeuvre...The audience shake their fists at one another...The players are supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they are all hopping like wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the chief personage, who is some kind of king, carries for a scepter a brush of the kind that we use to clean a closet. Feeling bound to support the most spirited party, we have shouted for the play, but that night...I am very sad, for comedy, objectivity, has displayed its growing power once more...After S. Mallarme, after Verlaine...after our own verse, after the faint mixed tints of Condor [sic], what more is possible? After us, the Savage God."

Despite his limited knowledge of French, Yeats well understood that he was seeing no ordinary comedy but something raw and unleashed, something that tore aside artfully arranged veils and wiped away the "faint mixed tints" not only of a painter like Charles Conder but of everything impressionistic, including the Celtic twilight of his own early verse. King Ubu, based on the playwright Alfred Jarry's own physics teacher at his lycee, is a grotesque exaggeration of the classic tragic tyrant, a Macbeth transformed into a screaming puppet. He wields a toilet brush as scepter, carries his conscience about in a suitcase, and the very first word he utters on stage is a deliberate misspelling of the French for excrement.

There is satire in the play, but satire--mockery of evil and stupidity in defense of virtue and competence--is never its main objective. Ubu serving excrement at his royal feast, with his wife responding "chacun a son gout" to a guest's mild objection; the tyrant taking oaths "by my green candle," meaning his own gonorrheic sex organ; he and his wife squabbling in the language of two kids slanging each other in a schoolyard; the king slaughtering his entire bureaucracy by dropping each official through a trap-door into a dungeon where they will be "debrained"--all this serves a comedy that strips mankind of all striving for dignity, conscience, sentiment. This is the peculiar savagery of the Savage God.

As Roger Shattuck wrote in The Banquet Years (1977), "The schoolboy imagination had succeeded in throwing dung in the public eye. Some laughed and some were incensed, but no one could deny that it had been cunningly thrown...One must be careful not to look for the psychological veracity of satire in his [Jarry's] writing. He did not proceed like Moliere or Aristophanes or Mark Twain, in whose works we find an intensification of familiar human characteristics. Jarry's humor may rather be regarded as a psychological refusal to repress distasteful images. He laughed and invited us to laugh at Ubu's most monstrous behavior...because it is a means of domesticating fear and pain."

In 1906, Jarry's writings established the farthest outposts of the literary avant-garde. But now, a century later, the Savage God has a townhouse in Manhattan and a ranch house in the suburbs. He's no longer a ragtag bohemian but a middle-class swell. The avant-garde of yesterday is today's pop culture, and much of that pop culture is notably in debt to the style of King Ubu.

Consider his progeny:

* The "shock jocks" of radio with their bathroom humor and insulting phone calls.

* Many "Saturday Night Live" skits, such as the one that pretends to be an advertisement for a device that transforms flatulence into human speech, thus allowing the victims of public gastric attacks to pretend to be making offhand comments.

* The "South Park" TV series and movie.

* A large portion of the monologues of late-night TV hosts, especially Jay Leno.

* Many currently popular comedies, with There's Something about Mary leading the pack.

* National Lampoon magazine, which has always fastened, with a child's horrified fascination, on death, disease, and decay for much of its humor. Since many of Lampoon's alumni went to work on TV shows such as "SNL" and "Mad TV," and the former's movie spinoffs, Ubuesque humor was dispersed throughout the culture.

* Since Ubu and his descendants drew upon a childish outlook while perpetrating their humor, it should come as no surprise that several of today's children's films now channel childish toilet jokes right back to the kids. Kiddie moviemaking, once squeaky-clean, is now pretty raunchy. Shrek and The Emperor's New Groove are a long way from Bambi, both in their hipness and in their grossness.

* Eminem has less in common with other rappers than with Quentin Tarantino, Lenny Bruce (at his most extreme), the Robert Smigel cartoons featured on "Saturday Night Live," the horror comics of the 1950s, and the early films of Sam Raimi (for example, The Evil Dead). Good or bad, Mr. Marshall Mathers (AKA Eminem) has found his form: not the rap song but the aural skit, very close to radio drama. In fact, listening to an Eminem number such as "Bonnie and Clyde 97" is like hearing one of the old radio melodramas, "Lights Out" or "Climax," rewritten by a psycho.

How and why did it happen? How did America, the most culturally puritanical nation in the Western world, become the most ribald and assaultive of entertainment purveyors? And why did it happen so fast, in only the last thirty-five years or so?

First: How? To be sure, American writers and entertainers didn't all suddenly begin reading Alfred Jarry and decide to become his epigones. Many of the entertainers I've mentioned may never have heard of Ubu, much less read it. But Jarry's writings influenced those of Apollinaire, Andre Breton, and Roger Vitrac, and eventually, at the end of a long chain of surrealists, those of Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. Their plays crossed the Atlantic and were extensively performed in the 1950s and '60s in New York venues and by university and repertory theaters throughout the country during a short but intense period which gave rise to the label, Theater of the Absurd. The texts of Jarry, Beckett, and Ionesco became the assigned reading of drama and comparative literature courses, and their influence was felt in the early plays of Edward Albee (The Sand Box), Arthur Kopit (Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad), and several others.

Simultaneously, and perhaps more important, kids of the 1950s, '60s, and early '70s were being culturally nourished (or malnourished) on the magazines Mad, Cracked, and Sick, on Steve Allen, the American version of the British TV show, "That Was the Week that Was," horror comic books, Loony Tunes cartoons, Soupy Sales, the Three Stooges, "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle," and on a host of other pop entities that suggested a view of life not far removed from Theater of the Absurd. The more intellectual kids were also listening to the records of Lenny Bruce, Shelly Berman, and Nichols and May, and maybe reading Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs, and Terry Southern. Sooner or later--and in America everything happens sooner--the angst celebrated by highbrow culture and the raucousness of pop culture had to merge, and the angst, energized by the raucousness, would begin to look more and more like a slap-happy, devil-may-care nihilism.

What we are seeing and hearing now in American pop culture are the offspring of an intellectually mixed marriage: the children of the French avant-garde and all-American nuttiness. Jarry/Ionesco/Beckett has mated with Bugs Bunny/Mad magazine/Bullwinkle the Moose, and their offspring turns out to be "South Park." Ubuesque nuttiness prevailed but with a rock 'n' roll beat.

But why did it all come together and flourish around 1970?

At the end of the sixties, a great number of young people were confronting the possibility of early death in the Vietnam War and entertaining a ferocious contempt for what they took to be the corruption of the society that launched America into that war. The civil strife of generations produced a tendency among the young to turn away from an adult world "we never made." And this revulsion prompted an elevation of certain strains of childhood culture, not the least of them the "sick humor of the fifties." The Vietnam War finally ended and the civil war of generations was abraded by the passing of years, but the sick comedy strain was here to stay, and this strain has been more than a coloration of our recent bawdy pop culture. It is very nearly its ethos.

But why did all become so nasty in the last few years, so raucous, so mephitic? Even Jarry himself might be a bit shocked by Eminem and turn up his nose at "South Park."

Look again at that quote from Roger Shattuck. He writes of Jarry's obscenity and humor being a way of domesticating fear and pain. Yes, but once you have domesticated one aspect of fear and pain, you must move on to another. You must find a new nerve to hit, a new outrage to perpetrate. You must turn up the volume, find a new blasphemy to utter, discover the certain something still unsayable that you, and you alone, dare to say. Put purple blood in the next slaughter, crack a joke about child rape, suggest that necrophilia is just a matter of taste. Now, combine this need with the recent economic hypertrophy (we can't make just millions, it must be billions, or what will we say to our stockholders?) and you have a pretty reliable forecast of the future: Louder! Meaner! Nastier!

King Ubu has been surpassed but King Ubu still rules.