Best Stoner

Though best remembered for his “Goatboy” and his dead-on Joe Pesci imitation during four years on Saturday Night Live, Jim Breuer arguably created his most indelible character with his “heavy metal newscaster.” Delivering stories of the day with histrionic, high-pitched squeals and guttural growlings, he at once celebrated the majesty and the mediocrity of the metal vocalist.

“I was a huge ’80s metalhead!” Breuer says, rattling off favorite bands like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Dio and Metallica. “And to me, going to a show was an event. You woke up at noon to see a concert at eight, and you got all banged up in the parking lot beforehand. Then the lights go out, there’s lasers, man! Nothing else existed for me. I even had a mullet!”

So the comic is plowing comfortable ground with Jim Breuer’s Heavy Metal Comedy Tour, a show that combines his familiar SNL characters with dope-and-drink-themed stand-up bits (“Baked at the Zoo,” “Coming Home at 4 a.m.” and the screamingly funny “Alcohol in the Stomach”). The twist here is that Breuer also fronts “The Breu Crue,” a live band backing him on everything from vocal impressions (Brian Johnson of AC/DC singing “The Hokey Pokey”) to audience requests for Britney Spears and Slayer (which, truth be told, are both tools of the devil).

“I do mock singing. I’m not trying to be serious,” he laughs. This lack of pretension serves Breuer well; the comic, for instance, doesn’t feel “trapped” by bleating out his Goatboy every night. “You’ve got to do it. It’s like if I’m going to see Aerosmith, and they don’t play ‘Walk This Way,’ I’m going to be annoyed. And I don’t care if they’ve played it a million times!”

Like most former SNL cast members, Breuer also is pursuing a movie career, which has already seen him perfectly cast as the stoniest of stoners in the cult fave Half Baked. In a freak collision of nature and genetics, he was gifted with a mug that looks, well, perpetually stoned — even when he actually isn’t.

“I didn’t start smoking pot until I was a senior in high school, and even then, I was never stoned at school,” he says. But because of his heavy-lidded, always-grinning mug, one teacher was convinced he was constantly high, and sent him to the nurse with admonishing lectures. “He kept screaming, ‘Don’t play stupid with me!’ and I thought that it was just because he was a dick. But then I realized that he really thought I was lit all the time! It didn’t help that I was the class clown.”

He hopes to release a concert tape of the tour, which in some respects mimics those Breuer attended in his wasted youth. After all, he encourages as much audience shouting-at-the-devil and horn-throwing as possible, and he usually ends each show by crowd-surfing. When told that his Houston venue is best known as a dance club, Breuer is unfazed. “I’m sure the metalheads and the potheads will show up,” he surmises. “I’ve got a huge pothead following.”