you been doing with all that knowledge?"), he makes candles. Even the first question ("Okay, Bob, for 50 keys–what is your name? You have 60 seconds") is enough to give him trouble. But that's nothing compared to picking the right Big Door ("Fifty pounds of Lebanesc blonde hash–makes your eyes red just thinking about 'em," or Officer O'Malley of the FBI).

This goes on for quite a while–a "Television Medley" with lunatic continuity a la Firesign Theater (who took their shot at game shows years ago with "Beat The Reaper") and takes up most of side two–but not everything is quite this funny. The part where the nun keeps screeching "Shut Up!" at the class she's substitute teaching isn't much, nor is that dialogue between two dogs as one of them takes an elaborate crap ("Boy, Ralph, that's beautiful! You're a regular Rembrandt, y'know?"). But all in all, it's pretty clear that Cheech and Chong have gotten a lot funnier since their first LP.

The thing Cheech and Chong are great with is voices. Each has terrific ears for dialect, anything from spare-change wino to jiveass soul, and there are at least 20 distinct personae showing up here, all of them cleverly done. The material may not always be up to the lingo, but sometimes that doesn't matter–half the characters are so far off into ozone that there's no point in worrying about straight dialogue anyway. Particularly Cheech's raving Spanish types, like Juan More-Time from Richie Valens Junior High School.

The problem they neatly avoid is that of falling off the thin middle line between true freakdom and a straighter point of view. They manage, cagily enough, to maintain a delicate tone of sympathetic parody throughout. There may be a giant slab of rolling paper in the wrapper here, but there's also dope spokesman Ashley Roachclip, President of United Heads for Hemp ("Lotta cats put down grass, man, 'cause they say things like it makes you lose your memory, y'know? Well, I just wanna say that, uh ... I forgot where I was.")

But just because they're pretty shrewd, and just because they realize that the best way to make counterculture jokes is with a viewpoint aimed from inside out, that certainly doesn't mean they've gone and blown the whole thing with a lot of yawn-making tact or good taste. After all, this is the place to find the most nauseating zit commercial on record, times so bad that a pimp d