Denis The Menace

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

These days, you don't get 15 minutes of fame, you get maybe 15 seconds. Thirty if you're good. And then -- bang! We're tired of your sorry shtick already. Bring us a younger Debbie Gibson. Fetch us a prettier Julia Roberts. Get us a funnier Denis Leary.

But not just yet for Leary. Right now, the 35-year-old comedian is an overnight sensation (the kind that takes more than a decade to happen). The catchphrases in his TV commercials for Nike and MTV ("I got two words for you . . ." and "I think you hear me knocking . . .") just may earn the dubious distinction of becoming the "You look mah-velous" of the '90s. His recent one-man off-Broadway show, No Cure for Cancer, has been turned into a paperback and a comedy-music album that are already in the stores, plus a cable special now playing on Showtime. And Leary is starting to blanket the nation's movie screens, sending up a lounge singer in National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1, playing a dad in the baseball comedy The Sandlot (due this spring) and starring as a street tough in the action drama Judgement Night (summer).

Fame's clock is ticking fast, Leary knows. "You can be the 'two words' guy for two years and make millions," he says, chain-smoking in his manager's New York City office, "and then the next thing you know you're driving around with no work. People are coming up to you like, 'Didn't you used to be Denis Leary?' "

For now, however, he's a cutup on the cutting edge, all Boston brashness and Irish-Catholic anger. In performance, he stalks the stage, spewing cigarette smoke and obscenities, ranting out comedy. He zeroes in on pretension, savaging vegetarians, nonsmokers and rock stars ("Don Henley's gonna tell me how to vote? I don't think so"). On cigarettes: "Smoking takes 10 years off your life. Well, it's the 10 worst years, isn't it, folks? It's the ones at the end!" On animal conservation: "How many whales do we really need? I figure five. One for each ocean."

"Leary's the kind of guy that's saying all the things you're afraid to talk about and think," says Ted Demme, who directed the Showtime special as well as the MTV commercials. "It makes you feel good when you hear someone say those things, especially in an angry way." Leary puts it another way: "I thought comedy had become really, really white bread. That got me started."

The son of an auto mechanic in Worcester, Massachusetts, young Denis was first an altar boy, then a Catholic-school renegade. "By the time I was 13, I knew I didn't believe the stuff they were telling us," he recalls. "That was part of the fun of it, getting caught doing stuff you weren't supposed to be doing." At Boston's Emerson College, he majored in English and helped found the Emerson Comedy Workshop. After graduating in 1979, he played local clubs while teaching classes at Emerson in comedy and acting. "Leary really inspired me," says actor and comic Anthony Clark, Emerson '86. "You'd see comics doing all the safe stuff -- stewardesses, Gilligan's Island, socks in the drawer -- that's all garbage! Leary was always up front, on the edge, even when the club managers wanted to limit his time 'cause he was so raw."

^ Emerson alumni have provided Leary with a formidable network: Norman Lear, '44; Spalding Gray, '65; Henry Winkler, '67; Jay Leno, '73; Steven Wright, '78; and, not least, Doug Herzog, '81 (senior vice president for programming at MTV). "I don't specifically look for Emerson people," says Herzog, "but they tend to be a little edgier. They rise to the top, so they're easier to find." Still, admiration has its limits. Herzog says MTV will play Leary's new comedy video Ahole only after midnight: "We think it's a funny video, but clearly people might be put off by the language."

As yet, Leary lacks the oratorical grace of Gray (Swimming to Cambodia) or the comic wisdom of monologist Eric Bogosian (Talk Radio), but he's learning. "When Leary first started doing stand-up, like all of us -- he sucked," says comic Eddie Brill, Emerson '80, a friend. That began to change after Leary's father died of a heart attack in 1985. In response to such an event, says Brill, "you can either go into a fetal position or do what Leary did -- just lash out. He became really deep and really funny."

Leary, with his wife Ann and their three-year-old son and one-year-old daughter, is now based in New York City ("This is the most exciting place in the world to live. There are so many ways to die here"). His comic take on MTV Unplugged airs March 13. He's also working on a more personal off-Broadway show: Birth, School, Work, Death. His career seems set to last longer than 15 minutes. Where will he be in 15 years? Directing? Bloated in a Paris hotel room? He considers this and says, "Bloated in a Paris hotel room while simultaneously directing motion pictures." He laughs, then sucks on his cigarette until you can hear it crackle.