Sandra Bernhard at 50 — still snarling

updated 3:59 p.m. ET May 23, 2006

NEW YORK - Sandra Bernhard almost lost her mind in the back seat of a taxi.

Speeding through the city streets, her cab approached a mail truck with a bumper sticker that read: “I Support Our Troops Overseas”

Sounds reasonable. Nothing to make a fuss about, right? Maybe even downright innocuous.

Not to Bernhard.

“I wanted to scream out to the driver, ’What are you doing to support our troops overseas exactly? Are you, like, raising finances to send them special things? Are you providing them with Kevlar vests? What are you doing?”’ she says, the ire still in her voice.

“We all support them in theory. Nobody wants these kids to go over and die. But then it takes this next step: If you question the war, you’re questioning our troops. No — it’s just the opposite. I’m questioning the war because there’s no reason for those kids to be dying.”

Trust Bernhard to turn a mundane decal into a rant.

Now, 50, the gap-toothed performer with famously fleshy lips clearly hasn’t slowed down, whether it’s tooling around Manhattan or in her latest off-Broadway show, “Everything Bad & Beautiful.”

On stage, Bernhard blends an eclectic mix of music — covers of songs by Bob Dylan, Christina Aguilera and Prince — with her sneerfully ironic and hypocrisy-busting take on current events.

“Wherever there’s something hot off the presses and interesting and captivating, and I feel like I can do my spin on it, I’ll grab it and jot it down,” she says. “It’s whatever comes up in the moment. I’m a very fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants performer. That’s how all my shows have come together.”

Ironic, post-ironic, or post-post-ironic?
Her latest grab-bag of targets includes Laura Bush, Tiger Woods, Teresa Heinz Kerry and Celine Dion, just to name a few. On events in the Middle East, she says with icy sarcasm: “Remember, peace is just a breath away — Sharon Stone said it.”

Bernhard’s brand of humor can be befuddling to the uninitiated, switching seamlessly from a heartfelt story about her daughter to a savage dig at Bush’s daughters. “I walk that fine line. I’m not maudlin. I will never take anything to its maudlin conclusion because to me it’s disgusting and it’s what I hate most about our country right now — that sense of drippy, self-indulgence.”

At one point in the show, she imagines a savage dressing down of Condoleezza Rice by civil rights icon Rosa Parks. In another, she makes a costume change right there on the stage, chatting away as she slips out of a dress and into jeans as if such things were perfectly routine.

Is she being ironic or post-ironic? Or could it be post-post-ironic?

“I really don’t understand what any of that means,” she says. “I understand the nuances of my work and I know that what I do has layers of irony, but I never over-intellectualize what I’m doing. I don’t have that kind of personality.”

Perhaps, but don’t ever call her a cynic: “I have too much passion and too much love for the things that are great to be cynical. Cynical means you’ve thrown in the towel,” she says.

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