Perfect fools.

I've always wanted to write a short story with the title "Inside Room 101 ." Remember Orwell's 1984, when Big Brother's guys have caught Winston Smith and they're about to sear his brain by taking him into Room 101, and Winston asks what's in Room 101, and they tell him, everybody knows what' s in Room 10l, what' s in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world? Well, I know what's in Room 101. It's doingstandup comedy.

I want to urge upon you the raw terror of doing standup, among other reasons so that you'll never again, if you catch a bad comic or even a good comic on an off-night, have anything but the most profound and painful empathy for him/her. Look. A dancer can fall on his butt. A musician can screw up the chord changes and get hopelessly lost. An actress can blow her line. And you think, fervently, "Jesus, take me now!" But the dance goes on; the band keeps playing; somebody will keep up the dialogue: there's somewhere, for God's sake, to go.

Not with standup. There's you, and that's all there is. You are the gig, and the pacing and the subject and the delivery are all yours to play out, and--here comes the bad part if you don't get the spontaneous blessing of laughter from The House at least every two minutes, then, old sport, You. Have. Failed. And you start to sweat, because you've got to finish your ten or twenty minutes, and you know The House can see you sweating. So you reach back into memory for the dirty stuff, but even your queer jokes don't get enough of a rise (omigod, are some of these guys gay?). So you get grosser: something's got to work, you don't care how vile you are, they have to laugh, damn them. Politics. Christ, that has to work. "And how about Dan Quayle?" you ask. Not even a giggle, waiting for the payoff. They're not The House anymore, they're The Beast, they're what's in Room 101, and they're feasting on the carcass of your ego, and you hope they all die in horrible pain. And you finish, drenched and impotent, but still smiling, and tell them what a great audience they've been and strut off, thinking about the bottle you're going to buy.

Why do you think they call it "dying on stage?"

Or, maybe more to the point, why would anybody subject himself to this level of risk? (You could, already, just walk onto the freeway.) The simple answer is that it isn't always like the nightmare I've described, and when it isn't, when everything is working, when you've got them and they're laughing with you, wanting you to be even funnier--and laughter is a blessing, a shared holy thing--the updraft, the grace, okay, the rush, is like nothing else you will ever know. Nothing. The more complicated answer is--more complicated. Standup as we know it is actually a young art--no older than jazz. It was in the 1910s, when New York impresarios (i.e., machers) got the idea of importing the European model of the "cabaret"--a dining and drinking place with a small and intimate stage or no stage at all--that the half-improvised comic monologue with frequent audience interplay became possible. (The great genius of the Marx Brothers, in fact, was to take the lunatic, near anarchic spontaneity of the "club act" and translate it back into the older, stodgier world of the Broadway play.) But, from Bert Lahr and Ed Wynn through Bob Hope and Jack Benny to Robin Williams and Bob "The Bobcat" Goldthwaite, the art has a secret, hierophantic lineage.

It is the lineage of the Court Fool. And as anyone who has read Enid Wellsford's great book of sixty years ago, The Fool, will understand, that is a rank of officially sanctioned chaos. As the shaman, the holy madman of archaic religion, as the slave who whispered in the ear of Roman generals in their triumphs, "Remember: you too will die," or as the mocking and reaffirming truth-tellers of Shakespearean comedy and of the unapproachable King Lear, the Fool's sacred function has always been to be a carrier of chaos: the incarnation of the disorderly---hence the fool's motley, Robin Williams's baggy pants, Richard Pryor's crimson suit that reminds us on what a razor's edge our civilized order is balanced. The classic Fool still survives as the Joker in every deck of cards; and in the older games, he was the universal trump, overturning, in any suit, the hierarchy of Ace (God), King, Queen, and Jack (Prince): a laughing Grendel, the sublime gatecrasher: Groucho.

And we need that. We need a member of the tribe to take the risk, for which we will reward him richly, not just of describing the void inside us--that is mere satire--but of being that void, acting it out so that we can't help but watch and see it in ourselves. (The Prophets Jonah and Jeremiah hold union cards here, too.)

Of course, it's also showbiz: not all standups bum with the shamanic flame, by a long chalk. And, as with jazz performance, a lot less is really spontaneous than you want to think. Jazz players have "fake books": collections of phrases and whole choruses that can fit into any solo when inspiration fails. And comics have "schtick": verbal fakes, routines, and business to fill the holes in a not-going-well set. That's okay. It's the illusion--cancel that, the myth---of improv, of the un-preprogrammed, that sustains us. (Levi-Strauss, in Structural Anthropology, tells about the tribal skeptic who learned all the tricks of psychic healing from the shaman in order to debunk him and then, because he saw that the tricks worked to help people, became a shaman himself: that's standup.)

But the two arts tug in opposite--primordially opposite-- directions. A jazz solo begins in "chaos"---departure from the standard theme--and moves, in its own self-consistency, toward areestablished and better order. A standup act begins with the "normal"--"Hey, I was in K-Mart this morning"--and coasts as dangerously close as it can come to the complete inversion of the norm, flirting with the very entropic abyss the music keeps exorcising.

"Any Niggers here tonight?" That's .the beginning of one of the most famous routines of Lenny Bruce--who is to standup what the charismatic Charlie Parker is to standup's Apollonian twin, jazz. The point of Lenny's bit was to take all the names we hurt one another with--nigger, spick, kike, wop, mick, etc.--and weave them into the dark fugue of cruelty that is the hidden theme song of at least half our kinder, gentler nation. And it was scary when he did it in 1965 and it's scary now. Not many comics since him--maybe, sometimes, George Carlin or Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy--have gone as far or as selfdestructively as Lenny Bruce did toward making themselves into the Perfect Fool--that's the Fool who just might not be able to come back from his incarnation of disorder. But, after decades of the elegantly irrelevant Benny and the contemptibly chauvinistic Hope, Lenny left his mark. No standup comic-- and, I'd argue seriously, no American novelist--since his prime in the sixties has been able fully to step out from under his angry, hilarious, manic shadow. He was, and remains, everything that spotlights the full malice of the Pat Buchanans of our republic.

Thanks to the cable revolution, you can now catch standup comedy in the comfort of your home virtually any night of the week. A&E's "Evening at the Improv," especially, features, every time out, four or five young comics, ranging all the way from the brilliant to the dire. And there are the HBO comedy specials, and there's the Comedy Network, and like that.

And it's great. As the America of George Bush and his paymasters grows more and more repressive, puritanical, and odoriferously "value-oriented," these kids (and most of them are kids) take the stage night after night to keep the shaman's cleansing flame alight. Okay, they don't think of it that way: what they want is a gig on Arsenio or Letterman or a speaking part in the next Police Academy; and mainly they want not to die on stage.

But they're in the tradition. "Only by laughter," said Rabelais, "will the world be saved."