THREE DOLLAR BILL
Comedy Underground, Tues 8:30
Thumpers Cabaret, Fri-Sat 11:00

Stepping into Pioneer Square's Comedy Underground is like stepping up to the comedic equivalent of the Vietnam Memorial Wall: the hallway is crammed with B&W head shots of comics who've been MIA since comedy's heyday in the '80s. Only a few of the decapitated are recognizable: Dana Carvey, Ellen DeGeneres, Shirley Hemphill (the bad-ass waitress from TV's What's Happening!!), and, sporting a fierce poodle perm, talk show hostess Jenny Jones.

But the resistance effort currently underway at the Underground proves that stand-up is far from dead. Queer as a $3 Bill, the gay-lez-bi theme night that's continued for the last 19 months, is a far cry from television's vanilla sameness. Defying all expectations, $3 Bill is refreshingly raunchy, full of scathing goodness--a world apart from the mainstreaming that killed off Saint Ellen's sitcom-cum-weekly empathy lesson.

Host Bryan Kent Cooper introduces the evening's stand-up slate; wisely, he never upstages the featured comics with his slightly sad-sack routine. Cooper is cute in a brainy way, dressed casually in jeans--gay as proscribed by The Gap--but he swerves off a mundane monologue with a sudden jab at female genitalia: "It's the smelly gash I have a problem with."

"Checking the teeth," Cooper rants further about women's masturbation. Misogynist? Maybe. But considering the two-odd hours of comics to come, everything on Planet Queer is fair game. Later, bisexual vixen Christina Black will blaze a caffeinated trail through women, men, incest, prostitution. This type of off-color humor has been bandied about by drag queens for years, but the comics at Queer as a $3 Bill bring it even closer to home. No offense to $3 Bill drag fixtures Glamazonia and Bitsy Bates, but the evening's bill is made more iconoclastic than ever by comics who look like they could work in the cubicle next-door. If drag was subversive in the '90s, khaki is the gay scandal for the new millennium.

Balding, fortysomething Chris Maltby's fermented wickedness was more hit than miss, but the younger Curtis Lee's post-twink commentary was dead-on. Lee's act includes musical impressions of the Backstreet Boys and Michael Bolton (doing the Flintstones theme), and his butt-sex jokes are funny--but it's his jabs at Barney and Grover that will earn him a head shot on the hallowed, haunted walls of the Comedy Underground.

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THE HAROLD
Market Theater
Weds through Mar. 31

Speaking of dead people, ever heard of Del Close? Until this month, Close was buried in the bedrock of Chicago's comedy scene. But the March passing of the improv comic will be remembered by many known quantities: Mike Myers, Tim Meadows, Andy Dick, and many others incubated in Close's proximity. The good eggs at Unexpected Productions, which makes its home at the Market Theater in Post Alley, commemorate the man's passing with their ongoing production of Close's signature improv piece, The Harold.

Improv relies on a bag of tricks, called "handles," to grab an audience suggestion and carry it into (hopefully) funny territory. Usually improv comes in short form, with a single skit carried in on a single handle like, say, "Gregorian Chant," or "Backwards Scene." What's unique--and far trickier--about Del Close's Harold is that it's a long-form piece based on one word.

The challenge gets trickier still when some jerk in the audience calls out a word he can't even define--like, say, "viscosity." (Thanks, asshole.) Fortunately, several of the dozen performers were up to the task. Halfway into The Harold, one woman walked onstage with a dictionary to keep things on track ("viscosity: the degree to which a fluid resists flow under an applied force"), but by that time the strange, gifted Michael White was already all over viscosity. While others meandered through go-nowhere riffs on the theme, White saved dead skits with a recurring amoeba dance and a weird Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan chant that made no sense (other than that it was vaguely viscous). It's the nature of improv that anything can happen; that's supposed to be the fun of it. But even with the benefit of White's talents, The Harold seems largely an acting exercise.

The lingering question is: Should you pay a few bucks and make the midweek descent past drunks and tourists to catch The Harold at the Pike Place Market? We tried to reach Del Close for comment via Ouija board. "Rdflkjw rgegrvl 24fcvue," said Close. "Sdf87 xvf cafachj." What a cut-up! Same to you, pal!