Mocking The Ethnic Beast

Preening for the camera in a white suit and Panama hat, an unctuous TV talk- show host named Agamemnon tries to prove his credentials as a Latin Lothario by reading letters from female viewers inviting him to "invade me, blockade me, dictate me." An amber-skinned transvestite named Manny the Fanny gyrates to a dance-club hit while recalling her Krazy Glue revenge on an unfaithful boyfriend. A punchy Peruvian ex-boxer, pressed to name a famous Hispanic, searches the blank canvas of his mind. "William Shakesperez," he intones. "He wrote Macho Do About Nothing and The Merchant of Venezuela."

All these cutting Hispanic stereotypes are the inventions of a writer- comedian-actor who is, perhaps surprisingly, Hispanic himself. They are characters in the play Mambo Mouth, a one-man tour de force created and performed by Colombian-born John Leguizamo, 27. Kaleidoscopic, hilarious and politically very incorrect, Mambo Mouth had a successful 35-week run off- Broadway earlier this year and won a 1991 Obie and Outer Critics Circle Award. Now a one-hour TV special based on the show will get the first of six airings on HBO this Saturday.

The seven sketches in Mambo Mouth (Leguizamo makes the transition from one to another by frenetically changing costumes behind a backlit scrim while loudspeakers pump out a salsa beat) grew from improvisations that Leguizamo based on his family and friends and on images culled from TV and films. "I drew on everything that was around me and put it together," he says. "I can only write something that touches me and amuses me, that I feel something about."

The material is a little too close to home for many Hispanics, who charge that Mambo Mouth perpetuates negative, sexist stereotypes. A female columnist in the Village Voice accused Leguizamo of promoting "refried machismo" and "woman bashing." The actor rejects the charge. "To some Latin people, we're not allowed to mock ourselves," he says. "I'm supposed to be doing the Bill Cosby-Brady Bunch syndrome." Leguizamo acknowledges, however, that his unflinching portrayals of Latin lowlifes, louts and losers can trigger a painful catharsis. "Latin culture is very subliminal. There's still a lot of self-hate. It's underneath this mat and rug hidden in the basement, and it's the beast that wants to come out and chop our heads off. I'm letting out a lot of monsters."

Leguizamo is, in fact, part of a wave of young minority comedians who use laughter to lampoon ethnic and other stereotypes, often at the risk of offending fellow minorities. Damon and Keenen Ivory Wayans have widened the parameters of black humor on their TV show In Living Color, enacting such caricatures as dogmatic homeboys, bums and effeminate book reviewers. Stand-up comedian Tamayo Otsuki revs up her act by portraying the Japanese as greedy moneybags who discipline their children by evoking memories of the atom bomb. ) Such humor, argues Leguizamo, is an "exorcism" rooted in the liberating power of self-recognition.