Comedian George Lopez Aims High, Hits Low

That George Lopez, what a card!

Two weeks into his gig as America's first Latino late-night talk show host, and George can't shut up about it. Well, give the guy a break. He'd lost his sitcom, but he bounced back, shed pounds off his doughy frame, toned up and trimmed down, and his thick mop of hair got a makeover, a punk cut that shines with hair product.

His new show, "Lopez Tonight," on TBS, comes with trumpets blaring. "The revolution starts right now!'' Lopez proclaimed without a trace of embarrassment. He meant, of course, that he was breaking ground, leaping over ethnic barriers, cracking the racial ceiling, and setting a gold standard for minority comedians.

I've got to say I had no plans to watch the show. Never had much use for his brand of street humor, but a friend, who has more tolerance and thinks he's funny, wondered if the TBS people didn't understand Spanish because they were letting George get away with open-mike obscenities. I watched the next night.

So here he comes on stage, doing a shuffle, some sort of silly, monkey-ish dance. He's glowing in the floodlights, basking in the audience's hooting and hollering, his head swiveling right and left, nodding rhythmically to the applause ("You're the best-looking audience of late-night TV,'' he shouts at them). He's got bug eyes, and he's almost salivating, taking in all this hoo-ha, all this approval, this fame. An overhead camera shows him tiny on the stage, a dark speck amid the over-the-top glitter and garish decor that have transformed a studio into a cheesy dance hall on the Vegas Strip.

Then he starts his monologue, sprinkles it with Spanish asides, and while moving around he touches his private parts several times. He catches himself doing it and exclaims, "I just grabbed my huevos for no reason!" The audience howls.

Vulgarity has been a trait of the George Lopez oeuvre. And now he has an open field. On this night, during his monologue, he got off a string of sexist, racist and generally noxious jokes. A sampler: "Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin have a lot in common. Both had their White House dreams squashed by a black man.'' And a minute later: "If Hillary wants gamy meat, she'll just sleep with Bill Clinton.'' At one point, he calls on two members of the audience, saying, "Get your ass up here!"

It didn't get nicer, this revolution that George Lopez says he's leading. Obviously believing, if he's given it a thought, that being the first Latino on late-night TV gives him license to exploit ethnic stereotypes and make slimy sexual and sexist remarks, he gets laughs on the cheap. Now, late-night shows are not havens of good taste. Cable shows have fewer rules.

But George has taken trash talk to a lower level. With a game he calls "Bullet Wound or No Bullet Wound,'' he managed in five or ten minutes to poke fun and ridicule not one but several ethnic and racial groups: the unwed pregnant Latina high school girl, the Asian dog eaters, the black hunk who has eyes for white women. Lopez used scripted street interviews with a Latina, an Asian girl, and an athletic-looking black guy to set up the jokes on them. Unlike Jay Leno's sidewalk interviews with dunces, which are essentially harmless fun and don't target any ethnicity, race or gender, George Lopez aims low and dirty.

He's no role model for Latinos or anyone else. He's just a two-bit comedian making a buck.