Leary, 34, does his thing in 60-second outbursts on MTV, often managing to insult the network, its stars and its audience in the course of a single plug. Call the spots editorials for people who don’t read, or just water balloons of multicultural outrage from a big, blond white guy. They’re very funny. Even on MTV, Leary’s sputterings cut through the clutter. Topical but twisted, like Lenny Bruce in the way-fast lane, they’re politically impaling, if not always correct. “People are just taking themselves too seriously,” he says. “Guys in bands take themselves more seriously than the pope.” In one spot, he fingers Oliver Stone’s gassy “The Doors” as an example of rock pomposity: “I could sum it up for you in five seconds: ‘I’m drunk, I’m nobody. I’m drunk, I’m famous. I’m drunk, I’m dead . . . ’ Big fat dead guy in a bathtub. There’s your title.” Many of the bits come from Leary’s poison oneman show, “No Cure for Cancer,” which he performed last year at New York’s Actors’ Playhouse, and is reviving later in October to tape for a Showtime special. The text of the show is due out in book form in November. During last year’s run, a member of the audience approached Leary after a performance to complain about a bit that compared Jesus to Elvis. He felt it was unfair to Elvis. “It really summed up the way people think in this country,” says Leary. “If you talk about Jesus, people are like ‘Yeah, right. King of the Jews and he died.’ But Elvis . . . "
In person, Leary is a milder version of his on-screen character. He doesn’t thrust his face into yours while he rants, but he does smoke and think Sting is a pretentious jerk. “This thing is really just an exaggeration of what I think and how I say it,” he says. “The anger is real.” Selling this anger for sneakers, MTV promos or voter-registration public-service announcements, Leary makes the perfect post-“Simpsons” pitchman: jaded, assaultive and instantly captivating. His next spot for Nike, due for the Christmas season, features Leary and Sanders talking about why Santa can’t be a strapping black man instead of “a big, fat, white alcoholic.” The ad agency, he says, is very afraid. But there are two better words for Denis Leary: very funny.
