CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

BOB GOLDTHWAIT May Be Hazardous To Your Health

by

Steve Peters

I’m not exactly sure what happened, but the guy who stands to greet me as I enter the publicist’s office can’t be Bob Goldthwait.

I mean, he kinda looks like Bob (“Bobcat” to his friends, fans and pets), but the long, straight mane of hair he sported on a couple of cable specials and a recent spoof of Bono in Rolling Stone has been mercilessly cropped, and the calm voice and friendly handshake could hardly belong to the manic comedian whose tense onstage delivery is punctuated with the trembling, high-strung whines of someone whose psychological roller coaster is about to jump the tracks. You mean to tell me this is the guy who once climbed a ladder and dropped a case of Tab on a rat to verify that diet sodas can be detrimental to the health of lab animals? The same man to whom I am forever indebted for turning me on to the fact that Scott Baio is the Antichrist?

He assures me that he is indeed Bob as he slips a cassette into the publicist’s tape deck, and the goofy grin that spreads across his cherubic face as the tape starts playing confirms it. We’re supposed to be listening to his updated rendition of the Village People’s homage to manhood, “Y.M.C.A.” But as the opening notes fill the room, what / hear is an outtake from U2’s Joshua Tree LP that is far removed from the original machodisco ’70s anthem, right down to the noteperfect Edge riffs and vocal inflections (courtesy of Goldthwait) that sound suspiciously like those on “With Or Without You.” I can almost picture Bono hanging out at an all-male bathhouse in West Hollywood. It’s really funny. I laugh.

“I’m sure people are going to get mad at me, thinking I’m making fun of U2,” Goldthwait, a huge U2 fan himself, says later. “What I’m making fun of was the lamest period of music, and that was the late ’70s.”

So how does he explain the Stone photo in which he looks more like Bono than the Chosen One himself?

“Well, I’m promoting my record, so shit... I’m a whore,” he chuckles. “I like being in the magazine because I made fun of it and they still put me in. But I’ve always had an axe to grind with them. I think they’re a joke... it used to be rebellion. Now it’s like Huey Lewis and wine coolers.”

So says the 26-year-old New Yorker who’s displayed quite a rebellious side himself since he first appeared on the stand-up comedy circuit at age 15. Initially encouraged when his older brother told him he was funny (“When you’re a younger brother, that’s a step up from being a toad”), Goldthwait has made a career of telling it like it is. And though he’s fast becoming a hot property in films as well (Police Academy 2, 3 & 4, Burglar, Hot To Trot and a Scrooge send-up costarring Bill Murray due this Christmas), he’s just released his debut comedy album, a live-in-concert yukfest titled simply Meat Bob. With such success as a burgeoning movie star, why release an LP now?

“I don’t really see myself as being an actor,” comes the modest reply. “I just see myself as a comic, and I try to be funny the best way I know how. In Scrooge, it’s a lot different, ’cause I start off being real quiet and kinda sweet, and toward the end I really turn into a lunatic. But I really don’t have the desire to be an actor that plays a billion different roles. The thing I’m proud of are those moments I make people squirm when I’m onstage, when I raise the hairs on somebody’s neck in the audience. If that happens, then I’m flattered.”

It happens a few times on Meat Bob as Goldthwait delivers a rapid-fire pastiche of some of his favorite topics, including pop culture, politics and religion. The end of the album even features a backwards message urging readers to brush their teeth, go to school and give money to Jerry Falwell.

“I find Falwell very dangerous,” Goldthwait says. “Swaggart I always found to be evil, but guys like Swaggart and Bakker don’t bother me, because if anybody still gives them more money then they deserve to be robbed. I mean, Swaggart says ‘I’ve sinned.’ You know, what you did was a good time. You were doing stuff that you should have gotten out of your system when you were 15. A naked Chinese fire drill is not sinning. Sinning is when you steal millions in the name of Jesus Christ. That’s a sin.”

With such strong convictions, part of the challenge Goldthwait faces as a comic is getting his point across without sounding heavy-handed. “The problem I have is that there’s a thin line between comedy and dictatorship,” he says, sipping a Tab from the first of an estimated three or four six-packs he’ll drink that day. “If I’m telling you something you don’t want to hear, I better have a joke in it. So I’ve always got to wrestle with that, and I’ve always got to make sure what I’m saying is funny. If it happens to hit something, that’s cool too, but I don’t want to become a preacher.

“My show is always changing,” he continues. “It’s different because each crowd is different. If I was just doing it to make people cheer, I would have gotten into metal or something. I would be in Danskin singing about Satan.”

Despite his hectic schedule, Goldthwait has been working on a documentary spoof based on his own script (“It’s The Making Of Bikini School 3,” he says bemusedly) and spends as much time as he can with his wife Anne, two-year old daughter Tanya and six-year-old stepson Taylor.

“Taylor asked me what a dirty word was, ’cause some kid was giving him a hard time about my language,” Goldthwait says. “I said ‘Nigger is a dirty word, or fag is a dirty word.’ Words that hurt other people. But I can’t tell him ‘Don’t say fuck.’ You know, ‘Only say fuck if you’re getting paid a lot of money from HBO.’ ”

After rubbing elbows with people like Bill Murray and Whoopi Goldberg and performing in 3,000 to 5,000-seat venues across the country this summer, you’d think Goldthwait would feel secure with his celebrity status. But he insists that he feels more like your average Joe than a star.

"There are a lot of bands I identify with,” he says, summing up his current situation in rock ’n’ roll terms. “Like the Replacements: ‘Oh what a mess on the ladder of success when you take the first step and miss the whole first rung.’ I really don’t care about being famous.. .it’s much more important for me that people hear my ideas.”

On side one of his album, the young comic demonstrates this when he drags out a tried-and-true, if not thoroughly exhausted, gutbuster.

“My wife is so fat,” he begins, waiting for an audience member to take the bait. “How fat is she?” someone finally shouts. “She’s real fat,” Goldthwait barks back amid gales of laughter. “I don’t have a joke for everything, you know.”