COMEDY REVIEW : JOE PISCOPO: A HIGH-SPEED LITE FLASH

There’s an old category of performer of whom it’s been said, “He’d break his own leg for a laugh.” There’s a more recent category as well, the performer whose public recognition isn’t based on some resonant cultural achievement, like a powerful movie or theater role, but on an accumulation of commercial TV bits into a montage of familiarity that’s almost purely pictorial.

Joe Piscopo, who appeared with Rich Hall Thursday at the Wiltern Theatre, encompasses both. Piscopo is referred to in his PR release as “a blue-collar comedian,” which is another way of saying that he works very, very hard in a medium that prizes the illusion of spontaneity and effortlessness. Where most good comedians’ effects are written in sand, Piscopo’s are blasted in concrete.

There’s hardly anyone in the general television-viewing public who doesn’t know Piscopo from his Miller Lite beer commercials as Python Piscopo (the wrestler), Helga the East German swimmer, Jumpin’ Joe the schoolyard basketballer or the indestructible Coach Rhino. He’s also well remembered from his “Saturday Night Live” sketches.

There isn’t anyone who doesn’t like him either for the fierce energy or the variety he’s brought to his mini-characterizations. But Piscopo’s considerable vitality has been uniquely tailored for the second-generation TV viewer whose information and perceptions are charged in full-blown 30-second production bits.

Which is another way of saying that, live on stage, Piscopo’s act resembles a fast-running highlight film on virtually everything we’ve seen in his past, but has very little to do with a living presence outside of a show of pure energy. He comes out in front of an eight-piece rock band (after we’ve been re-acquainted with his commercial creations projected on a large hanging screen) to do his Sinatra impersonation, then his contrast between black and white rap styles, then his Donahue, his Letterman and his Bruce Springsteen--with an occasional Jerry Lewis reference thrown in (his Lewis is so ferociously manic that he looks as though he could bite a piece out of your leg).

Piscopo’s devotion to body building over the past few years is undisguised, in keeping with our ‘80s-style narcissism (the lobby promo magazine shows us how “Joe and Lori (Bowen-Rice) Shape Up.” Aside from the look, however, weight lifting has served in another way--it’s given him the tension and energy to fill up his hour (and more) on stage as though it were a 15-second spot. Piscopo’s act is loud and fast, well lit and showy, and his muscled figure gives it a comical bounce, as though he were an overblown midget.

But the show is also devoid of the kind of content where a performer seeks out a visceral bond with his live audience and builds on it. In one respect, Piscopo’s act may represent the latest chapter in comedy concertizing, where a performer works exclusively out of references established by TV commercials and show-biz names without pitting them against a larger backdrop of human experience.

If the link hadn’t been established in the past; that is, if you’d just walked in off the street to catch Piscopo’s act, there’s still no way you could have come out of this show without recognizing his pact with Miller Lite. Its logo is everywhere--including the big sign that hangs over the stage as a blunt notice of corporate sponsorship.

But that’s only a more egregious example of the legitimate sponsorship that corporations have afforded the arts for decades. Piscopo tells us of his early career as a TV pitchman for Dr. Pepper, and there’s nothing in the rest of his act to disabuse us of the notion that we’ve been treated to the considerable effort of a talented shill. Piscopo can fill up a stage. If only he knew what he was selling.

Comedian Rich Hall played the first half of the evening. The imaginative creator of “Sniglets” (words for things that previously have appeared in our lives undescribed), Hall is a quiet worker who appeared to be out of his element in a raucous rock environment. A dead mike early on didn’t help, nor did an amplification system that made him sound as though he were speaking into a time warp.