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Monotony is a danger, too, with Goldthwait. But his zoned-out stage character wears better than Philips', both because it has more psychological resonance and because it functions organically as part of his comedy. Goldthwait, 24, who has appeared in the Police Academy films and in Burglar with Whoopi Goldberg, packs a whole analyst's couchful of anxiety, fear, anger and guilt into one sweating, simmering package: the comedian as psychotic. "I can legally kill anybody I want," he announces at one point. "I really don't think there's a court in the world that wouldn't say I was insane at the time of the crime."
Not that Goldthwait's material is totally subliterate raving. In his latest HBO concert, Share the Warmth, he offered pungent comments on everything from Iranscam to Lucille Ball ("A 75-year-old woman performing slapstick comedy -- is that funny to you?"), along with hapless autobiographical asides. "I lost my job," he whimpers. "No, wait. I didn't really lose my job. I mean, I know where my job is still. It's just when I go there, there's this new guy doing it." Underneath the shrieks and stammers, a shrewd comic mind is percolating.
Sam Kinison, another exponent of the new school of "maniacal comedy," could be Goldthwait's evil twin. Like Goldthwait, Kinison depends on high decibels for laughs; his routines build into angry punch lines delivered as piercing screams. But where Goldthwait is a demented child, Kinison, who drapes his pudgy frame in the seedy overcoat of a Times Square flasher, is a depraved adult, fuming over the indignities visited on him in the Reaganite, feminist '80s. A former Pentecostal minister who grew up in Peoria, Ill., Kinison, 33, specializes in foulmouthed tirades on sex and religion. Several of his lines had to be blipped from a Saturday Night Live appearance last fall, and HBO was concerned enough about Kinison's raw language to reschedule the debut of his new special, airing this week, partly to avoid having it fall during Easter weekend.
Though Kinison stretches the bounds of good taste, his bombast can be furiously funny. His rantings against women, for instance, may outrage some, but they are a cathartic antidote to cool yuppie relationship-speak, brazen in their sheer excess. "I'm not worried about hell," he says, " 'cause I was ((exploding into a shout)) married for two f years! Hell would be like Club Med!" A stint at the piano for a song to his ex-girlfriend turns into a string of obscenities ending with "I want my records back!" His blasphemous accounts of the Last Supper and the Resurrection are startling reminders that even in the post-Lenny Bruce age, comedians still have the power to offend.