"Karen's Supernatural Junkyard," The Found Theatre

You hear “supernatural” and you think Stephen King (or, if you’re a little more pop with your cultural references, you think Art Bell, Wes Craven, maybe Alice Cooper, maybe Elvira, or else the flying Monkeys in The Wizard of Oz). Creepy, haunted, spine-tingling. Implausible but not impossible, edgy, to say the least.

You hear “junkyard” and you think Redd Foxx’s Fred Sanford, hands down. Raw, urban, gritty, and off the wall. Funny, period.

When you hear one modifying the other, as it does with “Karen’s Supernatural Junkyard: A Trick and Treat of Comedy Fun,” conceived by Karen Rontowski and produced ny Lamont Ferguson of Sproket Entertainment and debuting at the Found Theatre, you utter a Homeric “Doh, why didn’t I think of that?” and sit back and enjoy the laughs.

Following the Found’s fine tradition of multi-extravaganza spectacles, not to mention its keen penchant to intermingle genres, this innovative Halloween season Rhapsody in Boo combines skits, comic stand-up and film clips.

The show’s got the quirkiness, the edge, the cleverness, and the timing to not just blunt the campiness and commercialization of an excuse to gorge on sweets and dress up and act like something out of Monty Python but become an instant holiday classic as well.

The Junkyard hostess/proprietress (and I do mean slash) is Karen, Barbara Billingsley-ied out in a 50s housewife blue dress and high heels. Think Marilyn on The Munsters. We learn of her keen interest in things beyond our mortal ken in a video that shows her as a young girl opting to sell something a little more precocious than lemonade.

It’s clever and intelligent; it gets us to look at things spooky as funny and not things spooky as ironic. It’s creepy, all right, and hilarious, to boot.

One sketch, featuring dutiful daughter Carol (Julia Lillis) introducing her new boyfriend (Eric Edwards) to her Mom (Mark – yes, Mark – Fernandez) and Dad (Willie Bingo), riffs with great success on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Another, which runs, with outrageous results, with the character of the occultist Houdini, is based on either a typographical error or else a case of mistaken identity.

The show features special, spectral guest appearances by Fred Sanford (who else?), Joan of Arc, and TV doctor, House, punctuated with stand up performances (they vary each night) that include Sam Fidelle and Jackie Kashian.

The show’s significance? Besides its off-kilter and filled to the rim with candy pillowcase of entertainment, it nicely reiterates Karl Marx’s description of the cyclical nature of history. Echoing a surreal world in which matters geopolitical, economic, and military have run amuck, it should read “first as tragedy, then as farce, then as comedy.”

Performances are 8 PM, Fri. & Sat. The show runs through Oct. 25. Tickets are $10. The Theatre is located at 599 Long Beach Blvd. For more info call 433-3363 or visit www.foundtheatre.org. For information on its Halloween Hollywood run at the Lounge Theatre, visit http://www.supernaturaljunkyard.com.