Sitting down with this year's summer crop of comedy records is a little like having the proverbial dinner in a Chinese restaurant – one from column A and so on. Every time you think you've found a working general description, somebody passes you something you don't recognize.
Of all the dishes here, the one that's least likely to leave you hungry an hour later is the most traditional of the bunch. Emo Philips, a Midwesterner who has spent nine years becoming a star and looks like he hasn't eaten for the last five of them, couldn't owe more to the borsch belt if he'd sunk all his money in beet futures. "I'd like to get married," he'll say. "I don't know, though. You get married and
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the first thing you know, you've got a wife."
Take my wife. Please.
What distinguishes Emo from Henny Youngman is that, for starters, Emo does his entire routine in a voice that sounds like he swallowed a large handful of pills in the dark and different colors are kicking in at different times. As shticks go, it's a good one, and combined with Emo's appropriately syncopated timing, it induces large laughs even for medium-sized lines: "My brother says hello – so hurray for speech therapy" and "She reminded me of the Sphinx: her nose was shot off by French soldiers."
Emo indulges sparingly in his fondness for the macabre ("Something caught my eye ... and dragged it fifteen feet"), sensibly spending most of his time on more solid and traditional ground. "When I was ten, my parents moved to Downers Grove, Illinois," he says. "When I was twelve, I found them." Or, "My dad had very strict rules for me ... rules like, oh, I couldn't be home until a certain hour." Hello, Mr. Dangerfield?
At his best, Emo pulls bizarre creatures from familiar hats. When he was young, he says, other kids would tease him and he'd chase after them. "But lucky for them, the chain would snap my neck back and they would escape." It ain't Lenny Bruce, and it might not mean fat movie roles. But it's funny, and in comedy that should count for something.
Which brings us to Sandra Bernhard, whose I'm Your Woman already has a death grip on the 1986 Grammy for Most Puzzling Album. All divisions.
Bernhard is a funny stand-up comic ("Did you ever think you'd see lips like this on a white girl?") who does no stand-up here, just spoken introductions to eight songs, and that's where it gets puzzling. The introductions aren't funny and the songs aren't funny, and as the record wears on, a suspicion starts to form that therefore they are supposed to be serious. Like Barbra Streisand or Edith Piaf.
Now that is funny. Unfortunately, not funny enough to justify the cost of an entire album – production or purchase. Bernhard's voice is all right, and producer Barry Reynolds (writer-arranger for Marianne Faithfull and Grace Jones) has programmed the all-right band to play all-right 1980s pop music. It's even all right when many of the ly
