Wesley Morris, August 2, 2002
 

Strange thing about the stand-up concert movie of late: It’s become the unofficial 13th step in a comedian’s career rehab. And judging by the genre’s scant recent output, the only acts messed up enough to really need it are Martin Lawrence and Margaret Cho, both of whom have had the curious fortune to have their concert movies open here on the same day. “Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat” and “Notorious C.H.O.” follow up their last concert films - respectively, 1994’s filthy “You So Crazy” and 2000’s filthier “I’m the One That I Want.” Both traffic in the basic elements of the format - sex, self, and more sex. But Cho is in fantastically better artistic shape than Lawrence, who is using “Runteldat” to explain where his head’s been and where it’s at. The comedian has seemingly been in a psychological tailspin since his self-titled sitcom went off the air five years ago - lawsuits, bizarre public meltdowns, “What’s the Worst That Can Happen?” But now he’s back, and he appears to have been body-snatched by a comic who never really made it out of 1996. The title is a slang command: Run, tell somebody that Martin Lawrence is still alive! Yes, but his stand-up has gone limp. Lawrence’s comedy used to be broad and lascivious. He had a boldly dirty mouth. What was always disarming about Lawrence was that he was a runt. With his bat ears and malleable face, he seemed like the critter of the black stand-up litter. In the last five years, he’s flirted with death enough to give the Reaper a complex. His new material embraces survival. And so “Runteldat” is a wildly inconsistent emotional experience. Lawrence veers between standard raunch, keen racial observation, and mood-altering evangelism. An uproarious bit on white people on the TV show “Cops” is followed by a sermon on the PBS civil-rights documentary “Eyes on the Prize.” He doesn’t just kill a good buzz. He bludgeons it. Most of the time he runs around the stage as if he were avoiding being put back in his pen. But his mea culpa about his notorious 2000 collapse on the streets of LA is a scandalous bit of storytelling worthy of Richard Pryor. Otherwise, he’s preaching to the choir. I’m sure no one in the congregation expected to be touched by an angel. “Notorious C.H.O.,” by comparison, is an outrageous den of iniquity - teeming with leather, clamps, and a dominatrix who did most of her purging in her last movie. Like “Runteldat,” “C.H.O.” opens with an endless preamble of self-congratulation. (Yeah, yeah, we love Margaret Cho. Where’s the show?) And like Lawrence, she begins her act with some thoughts on Sept. 11. Only hers turn, in a nanosecond, to sex. Cho, born and raised in San Francisco, claims to have cribbed her catalog of sexual bravado from gay men, her most vociferous audience members. Her face is as much a part of her comedic form as her observations are. It’s an amazing slapstick instrument, creating a scrapbook of living mug shots.