Sandra Bernhard is in a mood. Not furious but not great, either. And she's not somebody you'd really want to cross. Her famous visage is like a television screen that expands and contorts as emotions flicker across it and she's not happy that her publicist has failed to tell her about a scheduling problem.
But Bernhard wouldn't be Bernhard if she wasn't angry about something, and her mood is proof there's still a strong pulse within the 46-year-old comedian-actor-singer-mother. Anger has always been at the core of her deployment of irony and sarcasm; being loud and uncompromising is her manner of delivery.
A decade ago, attending a Sandra Bernhard performance was an anxiety-instilling experience. In Giving 'Til it Hurts the audience would be identified by torchlight and then publicly flayed for some shortcoming or other - often some sexual liberation issue given that Bernhard was in her friend-of-Madonna period. Nowadays - as audiences at her new stage show Hero Worship will discover this week in Dublin and next week in London - Bernhard's laser wit is less likely to be aimed directly at them: her sarcastic discontent now finds wider targets.
"It's about the world, the media and the perpetuation of stupidity," she says. "This is not a time for cynicism. It's a time for people to become more pro-active about what's important - the environment, social issues. We need to re-adjust where the energy goes as opposed to just being pissed off and feeling victimised."
Bernhard may not be as strident as she once was, but she's still as quick as a whip. Instead of being like a bullying older sister, a review in the New York Times recently pointed out, she "now frequently refers to herself as Mama, and much of the humour she hurls from the stage might be described as barbed maternal advice."
These are boom times for a comedian with a sharp tongue: the Bush administration, the war on terrorism, the dawning realisation that American capitalism is a rigged game, the unstoppable obsession with minor celebrities. "A lot has changed since Bush stole the election," says Bernhardt. "The underbelly of corruption has been exposed and we're seeing the last vestiges of the white man holding on to politics and big business. It's all coming out now. And I don't think it's a coincidence."
Not surprisingly the political animal in Bernhard has found prey in President Bush and his friends in power - whom she likens to alien lizards. "Of course I'm concerned," she says. "The infrastructure of America and the world is caving in, and George Bush is a figurehead of that. I don't think he's an informed person, or intelligent, or interesting. I think he got waylaid into the job by his family, he's in over his head, and he's kind of a dunce."
She still loves to disparage pop culture and the media. The culture of narcissism it has helped create, she says, reached new peaks after September 11 with the media's exploitation of the heroism of police, firefighters and rescue workers. In the moment of the attack, it was widely proclaimed, irony died. Bernhard is here to say that irony - never America's strongest card - is still with us, and her country's reaction to the terrorist attacks makes its application all the more urgent.
"The show is really just a proclamation that irony never went away.It's about the absurdity that we're all supposed to become jingoistic, nationalistic and jump on the patriotic bandwagon as if to justify everything that's happening." To Bernhard, the mass flag- waving that took place after September 11 and the hero worship of firefighters that followed was an absurd way for America to avoid looking at its role in the world.
"Americans are lazy," says Bernhard. "They don't want to look at the larger picture. They don't have a concept of how the world interacts with America or how the world interacts with itself. That makes it easier for them to be denigrating to the rest of the world because it makes them feel safer. It's a little scary to be in a country so detached from reality and so ready to buy into the propaganda that the enemy is out there lurking, ready to attack us again."
Bernhard first made her mark in 1983 playing a celebrity-obsessed stalker opposite Jerry Lewis and Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy; she then appeared in Madonna's documentary Truth or Dare, and for six years in the mid-90s played a bisexual waitress in the TV sitcom Roseanne.
Along the way she cemented a career as a stand-up comedian, singer, and guest show regular. Her labours have found their way into print, both as a magazine writer and author; she's appeared in numerous movies and in an episode of The Sopranos. Last summer she hosted her own talk show, The Sandra Bernhard Experience, on a US cable channel (it failed to catch on with viewers and was awarded a special Thanksgiving turkey award by an LA Times critic who accused her of "babbling neurotically about herself.")
It was an odd criticism considering much of Bernhard's best comedy is precisely that but it must also have signalled that it was time to move the act along. Her portfolio has been largely overworked or has dissolved into the mainstream, including - though she does not readily admit to it - being a gay icon.
"At the time it was important for people to go to that extremism to get back to a happy medium," she says. "For any marginalised group you have to push it to the edge to make people understand. In general, the straight population is more savvy. I don't think there's a show on TV that doesn't have a gay character, cliche or not. Once you've decided whether you're gay or straight that still doesn't mean you feel good about yourself. To me it's about taking it to a spiritual level, being present, doing things in the world that matter. It's not just about your sexuality."
So what of those pesky white men losing their grip on the reins of power? Who is going to take their place, and when? Bernhard can't say. But she is sure the answer will come. "The universe has a way of taking care of things. It has since the beginning of time. I cannot say for sure how things will change, but they will because they have to."
