Overland Park native wants
to find your comfort zone
and then hit it hard.

By: TIMOTHY FINN Pop Music Writer
Date: 11/29/96

His show is not for the faint of psyche. Comedian Emery Emery aims to affront: ``I'm the funniest comic you'll ever be offended by. ''

Emery, a native of Overland Park, has been doing stand-up comedy for 13 years. After slogging through a few years as a low-grade gag comic (like Howie Mandel and Gallagher), Emery saw Bill Hicks, a Texan whose irreverence and socio-political broadsides influenced Sam Kinison. The Hicks performance was epiphanic.

``When I started doing comedy I had no concept of art,'' he said recently. ``I was a young kid, 20 years old. My material wasn't thought-out ... It was bad. ''

Then he saw Hicks and decided, ``that's what I want to do. I didn't realize I could say things that meant anything until I saw Hicks. I never made the connection, that I could use material to get killer laughs and deliver some hard-line point of views. ... (Hicks, who died in 1994 at age 32) was the Lenny Bruce of the 1990s. ''

Emery immediately began to write new material and jettison the old. The transition, however, was rugged. ``Once I had this revelation, it was painful to perform the old stuff,'' he said. ``I was on the college circuit, doing pure Howie Mandel stuff that you had to do out there for this show called the 'We Can Make You Laugh Comedy Show. ' It was a comedy show plus game show. ... It was painful to do the second year of that tour because I couldn't do any of the material I really wanted to do. They made us work clean and safe without offending anyone. ''

And the need to offend, to agitate and disturb, became a hunger for Emery. His target: call it the tyranny of inertia - our culture's affinity for comfort, for what is safe and familiar.

``A lot of people don't experience the whole world,'' he said. ``There are people who have never been out of Norborne, Mo. I know: I've been there ... The xenophobia in this world is baffling. ''

Xenophobia is just one of many dysfunctions on Emery's long hit list. Censorship, veiled as political correctness, is No. 1.

``It all trickles down from the government,'' he said. ``The government, by allowing the intermingling of church and state, has created this feeling that people don't want to hear dirty words. But you hear cuss words every where you go because most people cuss. ''

Emery suspects that some people don't truly object to the ribald material, they just don't want to be seen laughing at it.

``I know people who have never gone to church who won't laugh at religious material,'' he said. ``They are afraid their laughter might offend someone who might be offended by the humor.''

His material, naturally, has led Emery into lots of skirmishes, with hecklers and club owners. One bit in particular - a joke about racism that was misunderstood as a racist joke - got him fired from a comedy club in Seattle a few years ago. The controversy, of course, only aroused publicity and embellished his reputation as a provocateur.

But the purpose of his material, Emery said, is never to polish his reputation: ``It's not about anything but me being me on stage. I'm not waging some battle for profanity. It's about me being who I am.''

Anyone who wants a glaring glimpse of the real Emery Emery need only drop by Stanford and Sons in Westport on Sunday. His only guarantee: You'll remember his show.

``I don't care what my jokes do in terms of 'changing society. ' I just hope they get laughs. I want people to enjoy my show,'' he said. ``This sounds so hack to say, but it's true. An artist will tell you this every time: If a couple of people walk out of my show having figured out a few things they hadn't yet, then good.

``But I don't have any grandiose belief that will happen in any wide-scale way.''