Mondo Weirdo

why, suddenly, are films, tv, even government being overrun by out-and-out wackos? start by thanking mr. normal

Guy lives with his mom 50 years; same little row house till the day she drops.... V Guy lands himself a job. His first day, he has himself shipped to work, hoisted onto a boat in a jumbo crate stamped Gift. He hops out wearing a phony admiral's suit.

Months go by ... and moments before an otherwise sterling on-the-job presentation, our guy dons a pair of nutty bugman glasses and keeps them on while eager paparazzi snap away—thereby garnering valuable Kook Points round the globe.

No big deal, really. Unless, of course, the presentation in question is the annual Maryland state of the state—and the wag who had himself snapped and gift-wrapped turns out to be William Donald Schaefer, chuckly bachelor gov of the Orioles' home state.

Oh, in another era, perhaps, a governor who bleats routinely that reporters make him want to "throw up," who addresses male reporters he does not like as "girls," who insists, in a sort of Norman Bates-gets-elected mode, on staying right there in his dead mommy's house—despite a constitutional canon that he occupy the governor's mansion—in another era, all this might have made our man seem a tad, I don't know ... extreme. But not today. No, sirree, Bob. Today, the governor's just another upstanding weirdo doing what he does best. Gov. Don, in short, is a man in step with his epoch.

It's true. That's why swells who make stuff up for a living are in trouble. "I've seen it before," a guy who must've been 104 told me on a Writers Guild picket line, "when the side show takes over the big top...."

Amid such a twisto Zeitgeist, Schaefer's behavior hardly merits a flared nostril. The strange has become routine. Not just in politics but everywhere. Weirdness has emerged as America's premiere end-of-the-century growth industry. Entry-level positions are opening all over.

Gag yourself on Morton Downey, Jr., snicker along with Letterman's stupid pet tricks, and what's clear is that the side show has taken over all three rings. The lame-os we once may have dismissed as mere household mutants have re-emerged as our leaders, our stars, our heroes. The people—squirm—we all look up to.

And remember, much of this was long B.M.—before Meese. Before the White House became a den of bizarredom and magic. Before the President's wife was exposed as a sort of high-society sorceress' apprentice, the Chief of State a willing hostage to Uranus, Pluto and the rest of the celestial bods.

Of late, Americans crave peculiar boobs in high places. We say we don't, but we do. All America loves an oddball in office, if only for the collective, self-righteous rush of discovering how deeply weird one human can be, while we hound him out of public life into writing smooch-and-tellers that help stave off our blahs.

Diehard Nixon devotees will tell you that it was their guy who inspired this unsavory craving. Once vanquished, they say, a presence so monumentally weird left an enormous void. A weirdness gap. A generation after Nixon's "My mother was a saint" speech before taking the First Chopper into exile, life as we know it has gone Beyond Weird, into some nether world of White House rectal polyps—remember those lively Nightline colon cutaways?—and rampant saliva panic.

Maybe Devo was right: The world is de-evolving! (continued on page 166)Mondo Weirdo(continued from page 122) The Reagan era, which began as a celebration of Norman Rockwell Normals and Normalities, ends up this limping parade of skeeks and lawbreakers. The secret crime of the Double-R Regime? Grotesquerie has been devalued as much as the dollar. Only the extreme gets heat.

Forget bread and circuses. Weirdnesswise, in its ultimate incarnation, Team Reagan supplied a diet of pure icing. Now nothing is shocking; no notion's tasty enough. Bill Casey's stuffed and mounted in the Camp David rec room? So what? George Bush runs crack for "Spuds" Noriega on Air Force Two? Big deal.

The return of the Hipness Schism—people who get it versus people who don't—conjures up the mythic Sixties with the force of Timothy Leary glomming on 1500 mics. To understand the Hippie Decade, you have to absorb what went before. Buttondownia. In the Fifties, dullness was next to godliness. And what was psychedelia if not the opposite of dull? The Antidull.

In the same way that nightly body counts inured Sixties citizens to death and violence, Eighties media victims have O.D.'d on weirdness. After all, eight years of the old coot with rouge on his cheeks have anesthetized the popular psyche. To make yourself stand out in this landscape, you have to act very odd. You have to outflank reality. No mean feat, with all this competition from people who aren't even trying.

Naturally, the best way to plumb the depths of Joe Citizen's appetite for the stuff is to delve—where else?—into his most personal, private pleasures. To peep through the keyhole, in other words, when he has got the TV on. The war between Straights and Heads was engaged with a vengeance on the junior screen back in the Paisley Era.

And guess what? The same subverso skirmish is waged almost nightly today. The Tonight Slioiv is the Lawrence Welk Show. Letterman is Laugh-In. One caters to squares; one to incipient hepsters.

There's a level on which this all makes surprising sense. See, you have to realize that normal men could dine out till Armageddon on what Ed McMahon makes leasing his face to sweepstakes envelopes. Big Ed's is the face America sees when it dreams of fortune. Larry "Bud" Melman's is not.

Just imagine waking up one fine day to discover you'd been turned not into Kafka's cockroach but—even edgier—into "Bud" Melman's agent! Your boy's not exactly leading-man material. He can't tell jokes. He can't juggle chain saws. Clearly, you need something to sell. Well, sir, how about the fact that he exists? That he wasn't snuffed out at birth? A guy like him can be a star—that's what keeps this fan gaping.

Cops call this the Gawk Factor. It's the same impulse that jams the freeway when folks slow down to get a good look at a fresh four-car pile-up. Larry "Bud" personifies a peculiar truth at the heart of the best yuk hucksters. What they do amounts to what they are. At least, if you're successful, it appears that way. (Not necessarily the case among, say, tax consultants or guys who power-screw the doors on Ford Tempos.)

It's hard to picture Larry "Bud" steering his silver Jag back to the rococo pied-à-terre where his roommate is whipping up chicken cassoulet for "some close friends in publishing." Then again, maybe that's just how good Larry "Bud" is. Maybe he's such a genius, he's up there cackling over demitasse with Susan Sontag right now.

What do you think? Would it be weird to find out that "Bud's" real name was Calvert DeForest? That his uncle Lee DeForest invented the very vacuum tube that made TV and talkies and, lest we forget, Larry "Bud" himself possible? Strange, as they used to say, but true.

Apparently, David Letterman's scouts spotted the pre-"Bud" DeForest in an NYU student film. But that's the thing about weirdos. After the initial shock, if they're weird at all, you can't help but wonder where they came from. (It's not your first reaction to Charles Kuralt.) But once you've experienced, say, Sam Kinison face to face, you can't help wondering what chunk of heartland spewed him forth. Here's a neckless twist case as popular with people in trailer parks as he is with guys in limos. A real boundary breaker.

Oddly enough, the rotund comic hails from Peoria, Illinois, which may or may not explain his trademark high-volume yeech "I live in hell!"

Like any true weirdo, Sam sleeps secure in the knowledge that no other performer is going to lift his shtick. Only he sports the bloated, coked-to-the-elbows persona to back it up. He spent five years as a pentecostal preacher, two years hitching around the country with his guitar and his Bible. "I'd be standing there in the sun," he says of his days on the road, "waiting for a ride, and I'd just start talking to God."

You know what Sam looks like—would you pick him up? Even now, with those beady eyes and the porno overcoat, Sam stands out like the kind of loner folks on the road instinctively shrink from. Even in pouring rain. On vast, deserted highways....

That's the Kinison charm. Why you have to love him. Try snagging a career in chuckles when you look like the sort of guy who stuffs tattooed girls into Burger King Dumpsters. That is what makes Sam so impressive. He's so stylish yet still willing to take the heat for Ethiopia jokes. "I've figured out why you people are starving. ..." Beat. "It's because you live in a fucking desert!"

The question of whether a human is truly peculiar—Sammy K? That new New Nixon?—or whether he's only pretending never stops haunting the full-time weirdness devotee. I mean, how can you tell? Take Bob Goldthwait, or "Bobcat," as his credit reads in those seminal Police Academys. Here's a guy who slams on stage squeezing a diet cola, whipping his long, thinning hair back and forth and screaming like some postmodern William Bendix, "I have never masturbated in my life!"

Right out of the chute, you think, here's a lug willing to write off those lucrative Shriner bookings for the chance to express himself.

Lucky for us! Seen live, one of Goldthwait's most impressive talents is his bleating, I guess you'd call it. Sort of a panicky groan gone screechy, like Curly when Moe's after him with a ball-peen hammer. Pretty much an all-round cutup, Bobcat's capable of great lines, cool concepts, that sort of stuff. Not to complain about the bleats. (Anybody willing to scream "Scott Baio is the Antichrist!" for a living is OK by me.) It's just that, even sans bleating, we're discussing a funny guy. Bobcat does a swell routine about Entertainment Tonight—"the show for people too dumb to read People."

So what is it about the world we live in that signals Bob, the dumpling, to keep the bleats and shivers? Why we need to see a guy feign breakdown two shows a night is something that must keep many an aspiring wiseacre up nights. After all, Bob has busloads of solid mainstream material—Bob Hope could tell the Entertainment Tonight joke, and it would be appropriate. It would get a laugh. But, see, material's not enough, young fella. Not these days. You can almost hear the agent hustling his new crop to some club owner in Cherry Hill. "Kid's great, Sid, great. Does a complete neurological-shutdown thing. ... Killer stuff. You'd think the lug just waddled out of electroshock. He looks kinda weird, too, with this long, stringy hair...."

Blabbity-blabbity. Until—on come the lights—Sid the booker's eyes blink to life. "You mean, like that Goldthwait fella? The psychotic shtick?"

"That's it, babe."

"Terrif! Gimme the juggler, the singer with the nay-nays ... and throw in the weirdo."

So now your basic booker, Sid, has something to sell Mel, your basic club owner. It's a highbrow business. Weirdness guarantees a decent B.O. Remember when mime was hot?

Listen to me, though, and you'd think that the whole world was full of weirdos. It's not true! There are plenty of weirdettes, too. Great ones, such as Chicago's Judy Tenuta. The grand Tenuta never fails to make me squirm, for reasons that may have more to do with my checkered past than with hers. Not that it matters. In college, I had a thing with a girl who accompanied the act with a piercing "Fill me, Daddy! Fill up my incubator of love!" Which strikes me, in retrospect, as vaguely Tenutaesque. At least something someone she knows might say. But enough about me....

The important thing is that Judy, she of the Neo-Grecian gown, bride-of-Franken-stein hair and hell-raising accordion, knows how to throw a serious squirm into an audience. It can't just be secret incubator shame, either. Other people get the squirms, too. I've seen it.

Borscht Belt comics have been tumbling over Miami Beach forever. But when Judy talks about the oldsters lounging on the art-deco porches, it's not just laughter she's after.

"What I love is, they sit out there and wait until the sun turns them into purses. And the women who are 12,000,000 years old actually attempt to put lipstick on. Tm a purse and I'm gonna try to find my lips.' " Sorry, Grandma.

Tenuta has built a career railing about "stud puppets," promising "love slaves aplenty" to true believers in "Judyism." That kind of thing. Not a whole lot of "What I hate about L.A." jokes. Instead, we get a personal cosmology.

"You know what scares me?" she asks. "When you're forced to be nice to some paranoid schizophrenic just because she lives in your body."

Sure, you say, anyone can act weird in a night club, with a lot of juiced yahoos. But what about where it counts—in the movies? Well, according to the New York Times "Arts and Leisure" section, which tracks these things, a new kind of leading man stalks the land: "A strange, distinctly Eighties hybrid of Jimmy Stewart and Dennis Hopper."

A nice guy, in other words, but weird. Just like your De Niros, your Pacinos, your Nicholsons, Rourkes and Penns, your Cages and Hurts—a whole roster of current superstars who have made coming off strange a bankable corollary to stardom. The whiff of twisthood lends complexity to the requisite two-fisted individualism.

If weirdness spices up a leading man, it also helps define the bad guys. The archetypal villain nowadays is Ray Liotta in Something Wild. Wild, of course, stands out as the ne plus ultra of cinema weirdité, those semidemented movies where normal fellows are led astray in subterranean swirls of strangeness, with women they never dreamed existed until coincidence swept them together. After Hours, another paranoiac fable, saw Griffin Dunne sucked into the vortex of downtown Manhattan, like one of those baby gators flushed down the toilet in the amphibious Fifties.

Actors, of course, don't really require personalities. When they have them, and they make a big deal out of it, it's either because they want to or because they can't help it. Off-the-map talents such as Bob De Niro—your basic bent nice guy, though who knows?—manage to stay more or less invisible between pictures. So you'd figure a relatively new up-and-comer such as, I don't know, Crispin Glover, might be able to maintain a shred of anonymity.

Not so. Seems Crispin's always getting himself in the news. He's a fixture in West Coast party columns. In fact—what is the opposite of anonymous?—the Crisper's carving out his own high-profile niche in the cultural firmament. He can't help it. He's just such an out-there guy.

Hysterical is the word tossed around most often when mention's made of Glover's best-known role, as Layne, the brain-sautéed amphetamine enthusiast in 1987's teen-disturbo classic, River's Edge. Crispin turned in one of those performances, for better or worse, that are just a little too convincing.

A peculiar story even floated around Edge at release time: The studio had the speed stuff inserted later, after the rest of the thing was shot, so there would be some kind of explanation for Layne's behavior. Back-story heaven! You can't buy that kind of publicity.

As agencies swing into action—word is, William Morris may be first out of the chute with an exclusive weirdo wing—the Glover saga remains a triumph of bent PR, the ideal toward which other strivers may only claw. "I'm so over the top, they had to give my character a drug problem...."

And if it happens to be false—so much the better! You wanna be Public Weirdo Number One, you better be packing the ammo. The mere fact that the trendigentsia take the bait so seriously suggests what a dent the boy has made. All that hard work's paying off.

Around L.A., ever friendly to itinerant actor-artistes, the mythic Crispin has come on strong with a newly issued photo-text book: Studies in the Art of Rat-Catching, by Crispin Hellion Glover. El Crispo's tome features what appears to be an authentic Dickens-era treatise on rodent roundups, liberally sprinkled with antiquey-kitsch pictures and charts. But it's the photos that pack the punch. A typically quaint tableau features your half-naked native sporting an open lesion the size of a pie plate smack dab on his belly. Debility porn.

One real shocker: Some stunned oldster hunkered naked on a chair is accompanied by the auteurs heady scribble "Sometimes I feel as though I may fade away.... Then I remember my work."

It's just so cool to be weird. It's so cool you could almost forget the talent that sets a swell such as Crispin up to be publicly bizarro in the first place. Or maybe not.

This cutting-edge predicament—the whole Weirdness Drowning Out Actual Talent issue—doesn't appear to be shortening the life spans of any notable strangeos. Au conlraire! The parade of off-key characters through recent history mirrors the dirty secret at the heart of it: More weird things are happening than ever before. Weirdness has replaced entropy as the state to which all creation sags. Check it out! Bernhard Goetz (the man, not the TV movie) steams out of a meeting with bearded Barry Slotnick, the lawyer he shares with another weirdness-era legend, Panama's Manuel "Make My Day" Noriega. Coincidence? Or law of nature taking its course?

Every field spawns its own strains of arcane behavior. Even college sports, normally the most cleansing of arenas, erupted in fits of cryptopunk posturing of particularly cheesy prominence in the wake of major linebacker Brian Bosworth. The Boz, in his one-man weirdo promo mode, dyed his hair orange, guzzled pink daiquiris and waxed rhapsodic on the joys of lobbing "loogies" in opponents' faces. No wonder, there for a while, he was America's darling. America has weird taste.

We must—otherwise politics would be boring. Reagan went internationally weird: the thoughtful Nazi wreath at Bit-burg. He went nutritionally weird: catsup as a vegetable. Weirdness conspiracy freaks will tell you that Reagan had a plan all along. Distract 'em with astrology yuks, then do a total reversal on the Evil Empire stuff and start holding hands with Gorbachev.

The history of our time is a history of weirdness. What's really outré, in the crumbling reign of Ron Rex, is how the new New Nixon seems eminently unweird, as comfy in the mantle of elder statesman as Fred MacMurray in his favorite slippers.

Compared with the late-model skeekdom of, say, Arizona's Evan Mecham, the resurrected Nixon lives on as a paragon of charm and culture. Arizona's deposed governor, a man who thinks that pickaninny is a term of endearment, actually made his living hustling Pontiacs. People did buy used cars from the man—and he ended in disgrace.

But Nixon—why, Citizen Dick is even the star of an opera! The 1987 epic Nixon in China features a surreal ballet with Kissinger and the Nixons and the Red Detachment of Women. "Never," sings Richard Nixon, "have I so enjoyed a dinner. ... A vote of thanks to one and all whose efforts made this possible...."

Buzz off, Madame Butterfly! Who could have guessed, back in the darkest Seventies, that avant-gardists such as Peter Sellars would one day be lavishing their art on the saga of Richard and Patricia?

So far, not a single visionary has hopped forth and offered to turn the saga of Ev Mecham and his replacement, Rose Mofford, into High Art. So let me be the first. For sheer political weirdness, Hairdo Division, Mofford's beehive deserves special mention as a possible alternative to S.D.I. From the looks of the woman's ceiling scraper, there's not much room for stray nukes to coast into Arizona.

For that alone, residents of the shamed desert state can hold their heads high again. While several state senators received telephone threats after voting to remove Mecham from office, the silver-haired secretary of state waited in the wings with quiet dignity, shellacking her skyhive.

Iowans, too, found themselves blessed with political role models of a high moral order in the post-Yup years. Fred Grandy, before his Congressional incarnation, portrayed the knee-socked toady Gopher through nine years of crack Love Boat episodes.

Skeptics back home in Sioux City suspected Fred of carpetbagging—making like Mr. Iowa to get himself elected and hop from Hollywood to the wilds of the Beltway. But Gopher has shown them all. In one of the most creative, contempo conspiracy theories, the retired Love Boater has found a cause all his own: the creeping tide of antimeat enthusiasts. Your No-Brisket Brigades, according to Grandy, operate behind such fronts as The Farm Animal Reform Movement.

The goal of these Red dupes? They mean to make us weak, from within ... to paint red-meat eaters with the same "threat to the planet" brush they used to taint pronukers. Grandy, in other words, has made himself the Meat Candidate. "It not only tastes good—it's good for you!" Catchy motto.

Whether or not Grandy's supporters' hearts hold out long enough to push him to the Senate—how about an all-protein ticket?—or even a Veep seat, it's clear that the former prime-time pinhead has made the grade: He's blue-ribbon, country-club Republican. Ready to go to the wall to make America safe for rump roast—a staple, one suspects, in the three squares consumed by one of the late Eighties' strangest political meat by-products, Morton Downey, Jr.

"Mort," as the throngs on hand like to chant at tapings of The Morton Downey Jr. Show over Secaucus superstation WWOR, makes his living as a right-wing bad boy. It's not a pretty job. For one thing, there's that trip to Secaucus every day. Not to mention the little matter of looking in the mirror when he shaves, knowing in his heart of hearts that he owes his job to ... Wally George.

Grim but true. Like lovable Wally, Mort's peculiar genius is in finding ways to lure Wrestle-mania fans away from the mat to the no-contact talk show. There just wouldn't be a Mort without a Wally. But unlike Señor George, who plays at being a bully, Mort seems weirdly serious. About the weirdest thing you can say about Wally is that he's half the reason Rebecca DeMornay exists. Even that's not weird, necessarily; just unexpected. Like finding out that Wallace Shawn is Arnold Schwarzenegger's dad.

If Mort—he's the son of an Irish tenor famed in the Forties—seems more vehement, he comes off prime numbers ahead of the competition in the I.Q. department. A smart man. Just ask some of the Jersey tireheads who've braved the Downey "loudmouth" podium to voice their opinion, only to have Herr Host snap, "Zip it up, buddy!"

Mort is one witty guy. Close your eyes, turn back the clock, and you can almost imagine him at the Algonquin, swapping bons mots with Dorothy Parker and the rest of the gang. On the other hand, if someone doesn't get the butt end of his patented epithet, "Pablum puker," the folks on hand are bound to feel disappointed. It's not like anybody came to hear a Commie from Planned Parenthood. It's that weirdness fix they're after. The bully rush.

In the end, if any one man embodies the Weirdness Era, it's Geraldo Rivera. Geraldo looks normal, all right. And he is. If it weren't for him, we would not know that famed party clown John Wayne Gacy called his girlfriend "pieface."

Talk about enthralling. Gacy also cemented 30-odd boys under his basement after having sex with them. But we knew that. It's Geraldo's pieface stuff that normal people want to hear. America has a wholesome yen to meet his sweetheart. America must. Geraldo's sponsors wouldn't put up the dough for a show on women who love "lifers" if Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch weren't interested in a major way.

Yes, sir! Here we are. Out of the Me Decade ... into the Weirdo Years.

Indeed. Cast even the mistiest glance over recent history—Jim Jones and rampant liposuction, Elvis dead in a diaper and Disco Anonymous—and it's hard to believe we ever left.

But maybe that's normal, too.

Twisted Times

Presenting a revue of national weird-do-wells. duck and cover

Weird Names

Emo, Whoopi, Pee-wee, Dweezil, Moon Unit, Bobcat, Mookie, Chynna, Demi, Mr. T, Hulk, Jacko, Tama, Satchel.

You Know the times are weird when...

• Bellowing gargoyle Anne Ramsey is nominated for an Oscar for her weird performance in Throw Momma from the Train.

• Sadistic carol Grandma Got Run Over by s Reminder surpasses White Christmas in radio requests.

• Feckless ski jumper Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards finishes last in two Olympic events, becomes a folk hero and lands a condomendorsement deal.

• Laughable bimbette Pia Zadora wins critical acclaim for her concerts.

• Onetime second banana Geraldine Ferraro shills for Diet Pepsi on national TV.

• The wife of Secretary of State George Shultz admits he has a Princeton tiger tattooed on one buttock.

• Spooky Watergate felon G. Gordon Liddy embarks on a new career as a character actor.

• Californians flee state, fearing earthquake predicted by 16th Century prognosticator Nostradamus.

• Beer company is sued for using comic/hunk Joe Piscopo as rap fatso in its ads.

• Gary Larson's surreal cartoon strip, The Far Side, is slated as a movie starring real people.

• The sexiest new cinema siren is a Toon.

Why do you think they call it mad avenue?

Forget hard-sell. Weird-sell is in. By the time that octogenarian foghorn Clara Peller finished bellowing for the beef, sales of Wendy's hamburgers were up $500,000,000. Express-mail motor mouth John Moschitta, also from Joe Sedelmaier's eccentric studio, talked too fast to be understood. So who cared? Australian hammer puss Jacko hawks batteries—"Oy, oy, oy"—and pathological liar Joe Isuzu brags that he has unloaded a compact on the queen of England. Oy. Jim Varney, better known as spokesgeek Ernest ("Hey, Vern") and star of a bizarre feature film, makes chickenmeister Frank Perdue seem almost normal.

Pioneers of the weird frontier

Dennis Hopper, Chuck Berry, Timothy Leary, Don King, David Byrne, Roy Orbison, Marlon Brando, Orville Redenbacher, Tiny Tim, Weird Al Yankovic, Ernie Kovacs, David Bowie, Christo, Jerry Lewis, Hunter S. Thompson, Frank Zappa, Tom Waits.

Weird Movies

Blue, Velvet, Beetlejuice, Something Wild, The King of Comedy, Raising Arizona, After Hours, Liquid Sky, True Stories, Insignificance, Diva, Vibes, River's Edge, anything from John Waters or Alan Rudolph.

Hall of Fame

Third Runner-up—Sawed-off sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer—or "Dr. Wooth," as she says—nearly took the fun out of sex. The shock doc turned up on Hoollywood Squares and her book, recalled because of the error, informed teenagers that sex was safe during ovulation.

Second Runner-up—Grim anchor mogul Dan Rather botched an on-air ambush of George Bush, claimed that a Chicage cabby had hijacked him for a joy ride, stalked off the set of The CBS Evening News and let the screen go blank and alleged he was accosted by a mugger demanding, "Kenneth, what is the frequency?"

Firs Runner-Up—Paul Reubens invented Pee-wee Herman by squeezing into a juvenilewear suit, slicking back his hair and developing a chuckle reminiscent of Woody Wood Pecker's. Matchbox shipped out a pull-string Pee-wee doll that says, "I know you are, but what am I?" Answer: Very nerdy, very rich.

Grand-Prize Winner—Michael Jackson, whose rehabbed mug has more plastic than a fleet of Yugos, bid $1,000,000 for Pachyderm Man. Sleeps in a hyperbaric chamber. While filming a soft-drink ad, he set his mane aflame; shares living quarters with Bubbles the Chimp.

Time Warp: the milestones

• January 7, 1980—Pope John Paul II named to America's Best Dressed List; Ayatollah Khomeini named Time's Man of the Year.

• March 3, 1980—First telecast of freak show That's Incredible!; series includes a daredevil catching a bullet with his teeth.

• February 1, 1982—Debut of Late Night with David Letterman.

• June 1, 1983—Spacy high kicker Shirley MacLaine publishes Out on a Limb. Discloses previous life as the foster child of a bull elephant.

• April 30, 1984—That's Incredible! Is canceled; press earlier cited show for fraud and sadism.

• May 16, 1984—Weird comic Andy Kaufman dies; fans think it's a gag.

• May 21, 1984—Frizzy diva Cyndi Lauper mends rift with wrestling guru Captain Lou Albano by having surrogate lady grapplers battle in Madison Square Garden.

• April 16, 1985—Dallas Times Herald publishes front-page apology for running drive-in-movie critic Joe Bob Briggs's song parody We Are the Weird. Columnist resigns and becomes cult treasure.

• April 14, 1986—Sweaty hug guru Leo Buscaglia follows his volumes love and The Fall of Freddie the Leaf with best seller, Bus Nine to Paradise.

• May 25, 1986—Hands Across America fund raiser.

• June 17,1986—New York Post reports that daffy despot Muammarel-Qaddafi met with visiting African diplomats dressed as a woman, complete with make-up and high heels.

• May 30, 1987—The New York Times features front-page story that Mr. T chain-sawed all trees on property of his verdant Illinois estate.

• August 15, 1987—Harmonic Convergence: Astronomically gullible New Agers gather to hum.

• April 12, 1988—Sonny Bono elected Palm Springs mayor.

• May 21, 1988—ABC announces return of the weird TV show That's Incredible!

"No notion's tasty enough. Bill Casey's stuffed and mounted in the Camp David rec room? So what?"