TOPICAL STORM : Watch Out! Hurricane Lenny Changes Course Without Warning

“I’m like a jazz comic,” Lenny Clarke says. “I don’t do the same act twice. I just get up there and wail.”

In fact, the high-energy Boston native says, if he’s doing two shows in one night, the second show will be different from the first. “I stay pretty topical. My act is always changing: Somalia. Clinton. Just whatever’s happening in the news.”

Although he does a lot of political humor, Clarke doesn’t consider himself a political comedian.

“The guys who consider themselves political satirists, I almost feel like they’re pushing it down your throat,” Clarke says. “I’m just making fun of things. . . . As long as they’re laughing, that means I’m doing my job.”

And, he concedes, “I’m a little off-center. It’s probably all the lead paint I ate as a baby.”

President-elect Bill Clinton, naturally, is one of Clarke’s primary targets of late:

“Clinton smoked dope, but he didn’t inhale,” Clarke says. “I’m thinking, ‘Hey, great! That just means we’ve elected a President who’s so stupid he doesn’t even know how to smoke a joint. . . .’ I can’t wait to see Clinton’s inaugural ball. It’s going to be like ‘Deliverance Revisited.’ Banjos and guitars on the front of the White House lawn. . . . I don’t think a lot of women would have wanted to have sex with Bill Clinton since we’ve seen Chelsea.”

On the Marines’ landing in Somalia, Clarke says: “It’s amazing! There was more media than Marines. They were saying, ‘Go back! Go back! We didn’t get that shot. Do it again!’ ”

The comic, who’s headlining this week at Bruce Baum’s Comedy Crib in Fullerton, says it’s easy for him to turn out a continuous stream of new material. He simply reads the papers and watches TV news.

Clarke was speaking by phone from a hotel in Memphis, Tenn., last week, where he was interrupted by several phone calls--the first from his agent in Los Angeles, the second from his travel agent, prompting him to declare, “I’ve got more agents than the FBI. But I still can’t get on (with Jay) Leno. How do you figure?”

Clarke may be best known as the host of Fox’s “The Sunday Comics” and for his starring role in the CBS sitcom “Lenny,” which premiered in the fall of 1990. Both shows were canceled this year.

“Two of them canceled!” Clarke says. “That’s why I’m in Memphis . . . I want to go home!”

For those who didn’t catch the Boston-set “Lenny,” Clarke played what he calls a “Ralph Kramden of the ‘90s,” a character who worked for the Gas Company by day and moonlighted as a doorman at the Ritz-Carlton.

Seventeen episodes were produced and 14 aired, Clarke says, “so there are three lost ‘Lenny’ tapes. . . . I was the biggest casualty of the Gulf War.”

Clarke says growing up in an Irish-Catholic family with eight children--and one bathroom--helped develop his sense of humor.

“Everyone in my family was funnier than me,” he says. “I was the only one foolish enough to get up on stage. I talk about my family a little in my act. But I try to leave them out. They’re innocent.”

The political portion of his act comes naturally to Clarke, who majored in political science at the University of Massachusetts and ran for two political offices. He ran for mayor of Cambridge while working as a City Hall janitor, and, later, while working as a lead paint inspector, he entered the Cambridge City Council race against Joseph Kennedy. “I spent 80 bucks; he spent $2 million,” Clarke says of the council race. “But I got some good bumper stickers.”

In the mid-’70s, Clarke abandoned his political ambitions: “I went into a club, saw a comic and said, ‘Wow! I want to do that.’ ”