COMEDY : Madness Is Their Cure : The comedy trio Chicano Secret Service zeroes in on political and cultural targets--’we’re not apologizing for who we are’

Ex-President George Bush steps forward to the microphone to greet a “Hispanic” crowd on Cinco de Mayo. Toribio Bush--one of Bush’s half-Latino grandchildren--sits down nearby, on the edge of the stage. Toribio is there to translate. After a harumph or two, Bush begins speaking. “I’m so thrilled to see so many Mexicans in one room,” he says.

Toribio translates: “ Tiene miedo .” (He’s scared.)

Blackout.

Midway through the evening broadcast at CNN--the Chicano News Network--anchors Huitzilipotzli Garcia and Cuahtemoc Bernstein cut to a commercial. “Angel Baby” plays in the background as a Cholo begins his pitch. “Homegirls! Are you lonely?” he asks. “Don’t spend another night of lusty latex love alone. Just call 976-RRRRRAZA! RRRRucos can meet RRRRucas! Just dial your way to barrio love.”

Blackout.

The familiar theme music of a C&R; Clothiers commercial plays as an announcer croons “What a difference your race makes . . . twenty-four little hours.” Model Tom throws off his outsized sombrero and serape, revealing the “after” look, thanks to C&R;’s Express Race Tailoring. “Before I went to C&R;, I couldn’t get jobs . . . I thought I was ugly!” he confesses. “Now, when I go to the Montebello Mall . . . I take a look at myself and say, ‘God darn it, Tommy, you got it going on. Somebody slap myself!’ ”

Blackout.

Bienvenidos to the tilted world of Chicano Secret Service. A tortured Frida Kahlua in a white sunflower headdress, “angry yet sensitive” poet Edgar Allen Pozole, Linda (“Falsa Mexicana”) Ronstadt and Rapper M.C. Chorizo are just a few of the other folks you might meet here.

A cross between the radical theories of Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire and the high jinks of Monty Python, Chicano Secret Service’s comedy theater is edgy, topical, political and silly--keyed to the beat of today’s Los Angeles.

With a devoted local following and several recent national gigs to their credit, the Chicano Secret Service trio is opening a new show on Friday, for a late-night run at the Odyssey Theater.

It’s their first run on the Westside, let alone at such a prestigious L.A. theater. “We’re trying out a relationship, and if it works, they will become regulars at the Odyssey,” says Odyssey artistic director Ron Sossi of the co-production. It’s also the sign of a career shifting into high gear.

More important, though, Chicano Secret Service’s emergence represents the increasing voice and clout of a new generation of Chicano / Latino artists. MTV-age friendly but with a political agenda, they’re reinventing the activism of the ‘60s for the ‘90s, embracing the term Chicano as they stake their claim to a place in the national consciousness.

“Their work is multilayered culturally, politically and aesthetically,” says cultural commentator and L.A. Weekly news editor Ruben Martinez, author of the book “The Other Side / El Otro Lado: Fault Lines, Guerrilla Saints, and the True Heart of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” “It’s urban, it’s hip-hop, it’s media-oriented and it’s postmodern.”

“‘What attracted me to their work is that they are part of this younger generation of militant, neo-nationalist Chicanos. Although it professes hard-core nationalism, it’s actually informed by a much broader world view--a kind of international nationalism.”

Theirs is a world view with a debt to the radicalism of past decades. “Thank God for what happened in the ‘60s, because we’re taking it one step further,” says Chicano Secret Service’s Tomas Carrasco.

“We’re not apologizing for who we are and we’re aggressive about what we believe. The system came up with the generic term Hispanic , which is a mind-trip whitening of the term, a Europeanizing. It’s empowering to call yourself Chicano, but it’s threatening to a lot of people.

“Chicano-Mexicano culture is dominant in L.A. on the street level,” Carrasco continues. “But Chicano culture--the way we walk and talk, faces like ours--doesn’t exist on TV or in magazines.”

Adds Chicano Secret Service’s Lalo Lopez: “It’s a victory when we just put some cultural thing that’s been unacknowledged up there onstage.”

Oxnard born-and-raised Carrasco, 30, is the group’s senior member. He met native San Diegan Lopez, 28, when both were attending San Diego State University. Carrasco and Lopez went on to graduate from school in the Bay Area--the former in ethnic studies and film at San Francisco State and the latter in architecture at Berkeley--where they hooked up with L.A.-born Elias Serna, 23, then a Berkeley undergrad.

“We were working-class Chicanos in this elitist university,” recalls Serna. “We were politically active, always saying confrontational stuff. We found that we could get our message across through humor.

“There’s a tendency when you’re in an elitist university to say, ‘We are the cream of the crop and we deserve to be IBM,’ ” Serna continues. “But we were of the activist mentality, coming from Chicano movement ideology. We believe we have to take our education back to the community to help our people.”

“You get all these Chicanos who are lawyers, but they do corporate law,” says Carrasco. “Or you become a ‘Hispanic’ and just go to work every day. Either that, or you try and change things.”

“We learned a lesson by seeing our college professors so safe, secure and stagnant,” says Serna. “These people were role models, but also lessons of what not to become. These were Chicanos who were going to prison in the ‘60s, ground-breakers. Then Chicano studies became established and institutionalized. You see Chicano professors teaching classes on Mexican movies or Chicano fashion--something irrelevant--when the problems still exist.”

Chicano Secret Service decided to fend off stagnation by getting its act together, so to speak. “We used to drive down from Berkeley to L.A. in my old VW Bug, drop Elias in Santa Monica, and then go home to San Diego,” recalls Lopez. “We would have long political talks on the 5 and we just decided one day to channel all of this energy.”

For a while Lopez and Serna performed as a duo, then Carrasco joined them for performances in the Bay Area. “There was such an audience for us: so many events, rallies, social mixers and conferences that we could go to,” recalls Lopez. “But that was part of the (problematic) atmosphere too. They’d say, ‘Hey, there’re many Chicanos here (at Berkeley), so what are you complaining about?’ ”

Chicano enrollment at UC campuses increased, and Chicano studies gained a more secure foothold in the curriculum during the ‘80s. “There was a liberal chancellor and he started letting in thousands of Chicanos; the freshman classes were huge,” says Serna.

Yet it wasn’t always easy to reach the fellow travelers: “In the early days, we’d hit the nail on the head and no one would say a thing,” says Serna. “We knew people were so insecure, especially the students. Sometimes they wouldn’t laugh, but they wouldn’t object either, because they knew we were speaking the truth.”

Chicano Secret Service was officially launched on Aug. 29, 1988, the anniversary of L.A.’s 1973 Chicano moratorium in protest of the Vietnam War and Mexican-American casualties in Southeast Asia. In 1989, a fund-raiser brought Chicano Secret Service to the attention of El Teatro Campesino’s Luis Valdez, who invited the trio to San Juan Bautista to hone their act.

In 1992, the group’s “Locura Lo Cura” (Madness Is the Cure) played San Francisco’s Asian-American Theater. A collection of bilingual rapid-fire skits, the show, which has since been staged in L.A., takes swipes at political and cultural figures, trends and items from the day’s news.

“Chicano Studies 101” is a course on the finer points of Serape Technology, as taught by Prof. Buenasnalgas and his teaching assistant, Plutarco Jones. When the professor introduces his aide, the younger academic begins with an apology. “Ah, I’m not full Chicano,” Plutarco admits. “I’m half-white. I’m white on the side of my mom and I’m Chicano on the side of a friend of my dad’s.”

There’s also Chicano Studies 99--Chicano Time Management: “It meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays at around 1, 1:30, 2. If I’m not there, wait for me.”

The Asian-American Theater gig won Chicano Secret Service the plaudits of critics. The San Francisco Weekly’s Laura Jamison called the group “a talented young comedy team.”

“Is it possible that Chicano comedians have solved the contemporary comedy conundrum?” asked the San Jose Mercury News’ Judith Green. “I find most comedy acts today either unfunny or offensive or both, but Chicano Secret Service . . . found the ‘on’ switch for my personal laugh track.”

Just before the San Francisco engagement last year, Chicano Secret Service moved to L.A. “We were getting the feeling that L.A. was the place to be in terms of what was going on with Chicano art,” says Carrasco.

Since landing here, Chicano Secret Service has played at venues ranging from downtown’s Troy and LACE to Venice’s Social and Public Art Resources Center (SPARC,) as well as at colleges and in theaters across the country. Last November, they took part in the Tenaz International Festival of Teatro Latino in San Antonio.

Last July, Chicano Secret Service shared a bill at South Coast Repertory with their fellow Latino comedy groups Latins Anonymous and Culture Clash. The press has frequently compared these groups to one another, though Chicano Secret Service’s distinctive comedy can certainly be viewed through other prisms than ethnicity. Chicano Secret Service might more profitably be considered next to the sketch comedians of “The Kids in the Hall,” or the quasi-slapstick clowns of vintage U.K. acts. Theirs is a sort of British Chicano humor, equal parts bilingual wordplay and broad, physical commedia.

While the comedy team of Cheech and Chong broke through into the mainstream with their skits, records and, in 1987, with the film “Born in East L.A.,” Chicano Secret Service is part of a young vanguard of artists whose work is more overtly political and confrontational.

It is also nearly always engaged. “It’s significant that Chicano Secret Service had a show called ‘Do the Riot Thing’ up on the Fourth of July weekend (last spring),” says Troy co-founder Sean Carrillo. “Their humor is topical, like Mort Sahl’s. Their material comes from the newspapers, but it reflects the view of a sector of society that is not widely known.

“It’s much the same as when Richard Pryor foretold the Rodney King beatings 15 years ago with his jokes about police chokeholds on black men,” Carrillo continues.

“It was amazing the way Pryor anticipated that, but not to the audience that saw him. They already knew about (such brutality). And that’s the feeling I get watching the audience for Chicano Secret Service. They’ve grown up with the people that Chicano Secret Service portrays, but they’ve never seen them onstage.”

The group is also giving new meaning to the term crossover. Despite their Spanglish patois, they attract fans of all ages, ethnicities and linguistic capabilities. “I was laughing my head off and I was probably getting only 60% of the jokes,” says LACE performance / video coordinator Tom Dennison. “Later I got the lowdown (on the Spanish) and I was laughing again.”

Nor is Chicano Secret Service’s appeal limited to the black-clad hipsters of their own generation. “Whole families would come and bring their babies and children to see work that’s political, but also really funny,” recalls Dennison. “That was refreshing.”

Yet the message doesn’t stop when the curtain comes down. “A lot of artists do post-performance discussions, but it works with Chicano Secret Service because they’re so personable,” says Dennison. “They talk about Chicano issues and militant political perspectives in such a down-home way that even a right-wing redneck would go along.”

Lopez also has other outlets. Under the name Lalo Alcaraz, he draws a cartoon for the L.A. Weekly called ‘L.A. Cucaracha.’ Together with Esteban Zul of the San Francisco-based rap group Aztlan Nation, he also co-produces Pocho, an irreverent humor magazine that savages mainstream culture even as it takes potshots at Latino icons. (The latest issue features an ad for the “Olmos Plastic Surgery Group--for the new ‘American You.’ ”)

“When I do the magazine, I try not to go for the lowest common denominator,” says Lopez. “I trust that I can write this crazy satire and that people will get it--just because it’s the truth and it’s all there.”

Still, some find Carrasco, Lopez and Serna either not political enough, or too didactic. The S.F. Weekly’s Jamison wrote, “Although their political stance is always clear, it would be fun to see them push their humor more in that direction and give the scat jokes a rest.”

Chicano Secret Service considers itself part of a burgeoning new Chicano / Latino movement spearheaded by women and men in their 20s and 30s. “The younger generation honors their roots, but I don’t think they feel trapped into being overly reverential toward the Chicano movement of the ‘60s,” says the Weekly’s Martinez. “There’s an element of ‘60s romanticism and idealism that survives, but at the same time there’s cynicism and a willingness that wasn’t apparent in the old days to do a self-critical evaluation of the culture. It’s much more honest.”

What exactly defines Chicano , however, remains under discussion. A term that has had its ups and downs in the popular currency, Chicano, as Carrasco points out, isn’t universally adopted by the Mexican-American community. It isn’t, in the group’s view, simply a statement of genetic pedigree. “It conceptualizes a culture that is not American and not Mexican, but influenced by both,” says Carrasco. “The term Chicano speaks to the Mexican experience in this country, but with a politicized, socially aware tilt,” adds Serna. “There’s a common misunderstanding that it’s exclusionary of other Latino groups. It isn’t.”

Whatever Chicano may be, it is not limited to the doctrines of nearly 30 years ago. “We’re talking about Chicano ideology, which was created in academia and still exists: self-determination and all those buzz words,” says Carrasco. “And we’re talking about Chicano culture. It’s definitely Mexican-based culture, but in a white supremacist society.”

As inspired as Chicano Secret Service has been by the Chicano movement, they’ve also taken their artistic cues from a variety of other sources. For Carrasco, it was home life in Oxnard. “One of the sayings in my family is that ‘you have to laugh to keep from crying,’ ” he says. “Exaggeration was a self-defense mechanism. Everything was always larger than life.”

Serna remembers watching the early episodes of “Saturday Night Live” when he was in junior high school. Lopez cites Monty Python, Dick Van Dyke and his Sinaloa-born mother’s witty comebacks.

But do they want someday to be on TV? Maybe, although they’re not actively chasing that carrot. “I learned a lot worshiping the careers of Woody Allen, Carl Reiner and people like that,” says Lopez. “They could write (for TV), then come out 10-15 years later and perform. Obviously, you can reach many more people with mass media. But I wish it was easy to navigate through that.”

For the moment, Chicano Secret Service is doing what it does best: putting up a new show whose subjects are no older than yesterdays’ newsprint. “There’s so much happening with the nanny stuff, the (Rodney G. King and Reginald O. Denny beating) trials, the riot anniversary, gays in the military . . . ,” says Serna.

“Our problem isn’t coming up with material,” adds Carrasco. “The atmosphere for intelligent political humor is becoming more ripe--hopefully.”

Besides the Odyssey engagement, Chicano Secret Service will perform at an Orange County benefit for Southwest Voter Registration on March 20, as well as on several campuses in the near future. There’s also a possibility that they’ll return to the Odyssey in June, as part of the regular season. The group will be in San Francisco in September, and back for another L.A. run after that.

And as they hone their material, they’ll continue to define, refine and contribute to a wave of popular and artistic politicization. “To say that one particular thing is Chicano is incorrect because it’s still evolving,” says Carrasco. “We’ve had 10 years of massive immigration from Central America, which has influenced Chicano culture. As hard as the system tries not to deal with it, there is a powerful, vibrant culture that has something overwhelming to say.”