Provocative humor is her preference
By Nick A. Zaino III, Globe Correspondent

There are countless ways to make someone laugh, and Betsy Salkind knows most of them. Want sarcastic wit? Political humor? Or maybe just a good animal mime? Salkind, who on Sunday headlines the Women in Comedy show at Jimmy Tingle's Off Broadway, can pull all that off and more.

Salkind especially relishes uncomfortable laughter, the kind elicited by her one-woman satire, ''Anne Frank Superstar," about a network sitcom pitch based on Frank's life, or her silent sketch piece about Andrea Yates, the Texas woman who drowned her five children in a bathtub in 2001.

The more difficult the subject, the better.

Salkind is also noted for silly, physical comedy. She once landed a job writing for Roseanne Barr, on the last season of her sitcom, because Barr had heard of about one of Salkind's signature bits, of a squirrel eating a cracker, and asked her to perform it at a party in LA.

"It's sort of riding that edge between talking about that darkest, most serious stuff and just being a goofball," she says. "It's always an interesting ride for my audience."

Salkind views herself as the anti-Seinfeld, given his tendency to stick to mundane topics. ''I don't do that," she says. ''There are a lot of people who say, 'Just do the squirrel and don't do anything else,' because they're happy with that, just funny and not at all provocative."

Pleasing the audience is the first job of the comedian, and Salkind doesn't exempt herself from that. She tests the limits of each crowd and adjusts her act accordingly, rather than trying to shock people up front with something like the Yates piece. She has also changed her stage image somewhat to soften the blows.

"Now I come onstage looking like a '50s housewife and have a very sweet, quiet demeanor, so I'm not threatening in any way," she says, ''except these things that are coming out of my mouth."

Salkind began brewing her mix of improv, sketch, and stand-up comedy in Boston in the late '80s studying business at MIT. She had thought she might be a serious actress, but says, "everything I did kind of came out slapstick."

Salkind was eventually drawn away from a career as a Federal Reserve Bank examiner after classes at ImprovBoston and a stand-up career that evolved from making fellow activists laugh at protests and rallies.

After leaving Boston for New York in 1993, Salkind landed in Los Angeles, where she continues her comedy and activism. Club and theater work leaves her days open to lobby the California Senate on behalf of groups trying to prevent child abuse. Having faced hecklers in dark clubs, Salkind isn't shy about facing down a politician or two.

"I can walk into anybody's office and talk about anything, and it doesn't hurt to bring a little humor into it, too," she says. "It is a performance in a way."

In fact, Salkind is working on a one-woman show based on her lobbying experiences for abused children. ''Of course," she says, "it's a comedy." She also hopes to bring Ethel, the hero of ''Anne Frank Superstar," to television in an animated series, and has staged workshop performances of a play where drug manufacturer Eli Lilly and a personified Depression battle for the custody of a woman.

List these projects on her resume along with writing for Roseanne and writing talk-show fodder for self-help guru Anthony Robbins, and even Salkind has trouble describing her career. "I kind of have to do what I do," she says. "I definitely see myself as an artist first, and I've never tried to create what the industry wanted to see."

May 27, 2005

---