BIZARRE AND INDESCRIBABLE !!!

IN its time, the now-disbanded U.S. Comedy Arts Festival held every March in Aspen, Colo., earned a reputation as the launching pad for offbeat comedians. Each year, the lanes of the mountaintop sky village hummed with Hollywood agents, network executives and producers buzzing up the latest discoveries from the festival's tented stages. Acts such as the Flight of the Conchords and Sarah Silverman got a running start there.

This March, the talk at Aspen was about two 20-minute midnight shows by a bizarre and indescribable musical-comedy performer from Australia, making his first appearance in the U.S. The groundswell of excitement was "the biggest for any performer that I've ever seen -- absolutely groundbreaking, instant celebrity," said J.P. Buck, who coordinated talent for USCAF and also does the Vegas-based Comedy Festival.

At the center of the hoopla, Tim Minchin tried to sort out what it all meant. Just over 30, his long blond hair ironed straight, Minchin builds his act around a set of dark, manic songs and comedy bits, delivered in a tailed Beethovian coat, eyeliner and bare feet. His haphazard, slightly crazed appearance clashes brilliantly with his songs' incisive parody of obscure rock genres and with the virtuosity of his playing. Barely a year earlier, he was scraping by with gigs at a 40-seat bar in Melbourne. Now he was fielding queries from seemingly the entire comedy-industrial complex.

And his answer to them was that he had to get back on his tour. He left Aspen and America, dealless and agentless. Minchin was not to be seen again until a week ago, when he returned to America to play a few shows (two in New York, one in Las Vegas and two in L.A.) and perhaps take the next steps into the showbiz labyrinth, the promise of stardom dangling before him. But as he knows, these are steps on a road littered with cautionary tales of quirky buzz-generating acts for whom things never quite came together.