Tossed cigarettes and bad Sinatra —then 'Clifton' really gets weird

Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

Here in Chicago, you can get in trouble for lighting a cigarette on a stage. On Thursday night, Tony Clifton not only ignited a fistful of cigarettes, he threw a lit butt into the audience, causing a guy to think his shirt was on fire. Until, that was, gushes of complimentary Jack Daniel's started to spray from the stage, extinguishing all worries in the first three rows.

"Tony Clifton and the Katrina-Kiss-My-Ass Orchestra," ensconced in the wildly incongruous surroundings of the Chopin Theatre and organized as a benefit for Comic Relief, is not an ordinary show. It is a bacchanalia with a horn section that lands somewhere near deep, deep parody, a live taping of a Howard Stern show (although Stern would never dare say some of things that come out of Clifton's mouth), an episode of "Hee-Haw," political satire, a New Orleans jam session led by a decent group of session musicians and an evening at Nevada's Moonlite BunnyRanch, where Clifton hangs out.

It is in heinous bad taste, beyond X-rated, replete with a glamorous dance troupe of dangerously young women and, as the performers get drunker, wildly out of control. If someone you love—and only partially trust—has tickets this weekend, be very afraid. And hide the car keys.

I don't think I've ever left a show I was reviewing. But somewhere around 2 a.m. Friday morning, it dawned on me that the whole point of this show was to keep performing until everybody had left and the performers had all collapsed. Anyway, four hours of Tony "Goldfinger" Clifton was enough. By then, there were only a couple dozen of us left. Clifton, you might recall, was a creation of the late comedian Andy Kaufman. He's a parody of the faded and wholly untalented Vegas sleazeball—a girl-groping lounge lizard with a Dean Martin repertoire, a faux-Sinatra repartee and the dirtiest jokes imaginable. He is now played by former Kaufman sidekick Bob Zmuda. Zmuda does not admit this in public.

Zmuda is, in fact, a gifted improviser, albeit a terrifying one without any semblance of aesthetic boundary. It isn't so much the profane material here that gets under your skin—although it does, it does. It's Zmuda's total assumption of character—it feels even an invasion of armed buffalo wouldn't snap him back to reality. God help him and those who play with him.