COMEDY : America’s Most Weaselly : Today’s kids have their own bands, their own cable network and now, their own comedian--Pauly Shore, part MTV veejay, part comic, part spokesman for his generation. Is this buff dude a New Kid on the Block of comedy, or, as he puts it, the future of America?

His stand-up comedy routine is not so much jokes as it is a guided tour of modern American youth delivered as a free-form monologue in surf-rap slang. His style is boyish and hip, his persona a 21-year-old half-brained kid in single-minded pursuit of parties, girls and gnarly guitar solos.

“Stoney,” he tells his fans. “You’re chillin’ major with the Weasel.”

Ten years ago, Pauly Shore’s act would have had nowhere to go. Adult audiences in comedy clubs can barely decipher what he’s saying, let alone appreciate it.

But today there is a sizable younger audience of college and high-school students and even smaller kids--the “crusty little dudes” as he calls them--who have embraced Shore and “their” comedian. He has reached this market through the cultural medium of their generation--MTV.

Watching “Totally Pauly,” a two-hour daily show, is like seeing your little brother play with Dad’s video camera. Instead of simply acting as a veejay, Shore, who calls himself “the Weasel,” acts out impromptu story lines that air in short segments between videos.

He might be cruising Sunset Strip in search of fresh nugs or sitting at a sushi bar chowing some major grindage. He might be freakin’ at a Texas dude ranch or just chillin’ solo in his bedroom. The action is unscripted and entirely unrehearsed.

According to the ratings, his faithful watch these escapades religiously. Those same fans have bought 65,000 copies of Shore’s first album, “The Future of America,” surprisingly successful for a previously unknown comic’s debut record. On a recent national tour of mostly college campuses, Shore sold out all 34 performances.

“Pauly’s the New Kids on the Block of comedy,” says fellow comedian Paul Rodriguez. “He has all these 14-year-olds who are crazy about him.”

To some degree, this success should not be surprising. Shore’s father, Sammy Shore, started doing stand-up comedy back when the only jobs were in cocktail lounges and strip joints. Mitzi, his mother, has spent the last two decades making the Comedy Store in Hollywood one of the country’s premier clubs. Shore grew up with Richard Pryor and Robin Williams hanging around the house.

Yet any comedic technique he may have absorbed plays a small part in his routine. The Shore you see on screen isn’t that different from the one who sits by the pool at his mother’s Hollywood Hills house, where he still lives.

His hair splays wildly from his head. In his colored scarves and tattered jeans and rings on his fingers, he’s like some haywire Gypsy.

He talks about his show as if it were a major party he weas’d into. “I always wanted to be on MTV,” he says. “Do you think CBS is cooler? Do you think I want people coming up to me, ‘Aren’t you that guy on “Alf”?’ ”

The decision to become a comic seemed simple enough. It was either that or go to college.

“I was cruising on the high-school highway and I ate it,” Shore, 21, recalls. “Those SAT things were coming up and I knew I wasn’t going that route. I thought, ‘If you start comedy at the beginning of 12th grade, in a year you’ll be pretty good.’ I got my little comedy note pad and a tape recorder and started writing.”

His parents divorced when he was young and, after that, Mitzi took ownership of the Comedy Store and spent long hours running the club. Comedians who regularly performed there were pressed into service as Pauly’s baby-sitters.

“I remember him trying to cut up a room with Robin Williams and Billy Crystal and Richard Pryor and myself,” Rodriguez says. “He was this little guy doing shtick for us.”

The Shore house was a favored hangout for comics to drop by after working the club. “Pauly used to sit on the steps and watch. He could mimic all of them,” Mitzi says. “There will never be another kid who learned the profession like he did.”

As a youngster, though, he was more concerned with skateboarding and break-dancing. Then, when he was 14 and working as a short-order cook at the club’s Westwood branch, his mother noticed him watching the stage. “He may not have known it,” she says, “but in his gut he was studying comedy.”

He was also making friends. Sam Kinison was a struggling comedian who also worked as the doorman and Pauly fed him burgers. Kinison returned the favor by hiring Shore as his opening act last year.

At the beginning of Shore’s standup career he worked clubs around town with an act that included a Jewish break-dance. “The first he played the comedy store, he called and said ‘Dad, I bombed in front of Mom,’ ” his father recalls. “I said, ‘what’s the big deal? I always bombed in front of her too.’ ”

Growing up around so many comedians, Shore could have become an amalgam of all those acts.

“When you watch the true geniuses, they play themselves,” Mitzi says. “That’s what he picked up.”

So Shore honed “the Weasel,” drawing bits from his own life of hanging around with friends. The Dude-shtick isn’t entirely new. It started with Moon Zappa’s “Valley Girl” song and the Jeff Spicoli character in the 1982 film “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” not to mention “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” But those were mere fictional characters.

The MTV folks ran into Shore in November, 1989, when they hired him to be the warm-up act for a comedy special at Pepperdine University. They put him on the air seven months later.

“He was given an audience that is so much bigger than any other comedian gets and he has connected with that audience,” said Mark Shipper, a Los Angeles comedy writer and reviewer. “He’s bound to look good among all those serious MTV guys, the little Walter Cronkites talking about Sting’s latest album. When he comes on, it’s refreshing.”

Other MTV veejays are confined to the studio during their shows. Network executives quickly realized Shore didn’t fit that mold.

“If you try to script something for him, it just doesn’t work,” said Greg Johnston, his producer. “With Pauly, it’s just turn on the camera and go.”

Shore makes up each show as he goes along, directing the cameraman--”Dude, start over here”--and coaching everyone on the lines he’s just conjured for them.

At the Miss USA Pageant, Shore donned a maid’s dress and pretended he was sneaking into the contestants’ rooms. At a Minnesota pig farm, he tried to wrangle a date with the farmer’s daughter. Failing that, he taught her mother to say “stoney” and asked to spend the night: “So is it cool if I just chill and kinda sponge off you guys for a little?”

“He might be driving from one location to another and he’ll see something and literally get out of the car and shoot a segment,” says MTV Vice President Joel Gallen.

Week after week the camera follows along, hopping and jerking, closing in on the host’s slightly pointy face, which lends him a decidedly rodent appearance when he grimaces for effect. The show’s best moments come when Shore draws innocent bystanders into this frenetic circus.

“We were in this little Eskimo village in Alaska. It was about 7:30 in the morning and there was some old guy walking on the street,” recalls Alexis Hunter, a network publicist. “Pauly ran up to him and said, ‘Will you be on my television show?’ ”

The man, identified only as Terry, co-hosted the show that week.

Even the segments that come off cheesy serve a purpose. They cement Shore’s reputation as the guy next-door who somehow got shoved in front of a camera. He knows that’s the spark to his show, the thing that sets him apart.

“It’s like hanging around with my friends,” he says. “I know how to translate that to the screen.”

“I’m just like the guys at home,” he says. “That’s what I’d be doing if I didn’t have this show.”

Language is the final ingredient. “That’s the key to this guy,” Shipper says. “Kids can imitate that. It’s an identity they can adopt.” Only those who understand Dude-speak can belong to the secret club, which doesn’t include parents or MTV censors who miss his coded, frankly sexual remarks.

Some of the lingo is culled from friends and rappers, other words Shore plucked out of thin air. A sample line: “Lookit you crusty dudes chillin’. You’re burned and I’m edged, so if you don’t cruise upstairs pronto, I’m gonna snap into my own ‘Nam and I’m gonna tweak your melons.”

A rough translation: “Stop being so lazy and get upstairs before I get angry and whack you in the head.”

Shore’s delivery is sotto voce in comic opera, the tone rising and falling with roller-coaster velocity. The rhythm of this melody is punctuated by abrupt pauses, words that are shattered into fragments like “ma-- ay-- jor” and “che--e--ck out this vi--deo.”

It’s poetry, Shore insists.

Shore paces, as if claustrophobic within the confines of the stage of the Comedy Store. His hands are always moving. And the ever-present scarves, wrapped around his forehead and wrist, another running through the belt loops of his pants. At times during the club act, his wiry frame twists into an odd dance that is part ballet and part kung fu.

“My whole problem is my jokes,” he says later, away from the spotlight. “I don’t have a lot of funny jokes.”

He fills the void with smiles and howls, fidgeting through a monologue that touches all the bases of youthful existence: parties and rock concerts, drugs and alcohol, and “America’s Most Wanted.”

“Cool show to watch,” he says. “But not a cool show to be on.”

He muses about appearing on “Love Connection”: “I would not want to be one of the guys in the three boxes ‘cause what girl is gonna pick me? ‘Yeah, he looks like he’s got a big future at Del Taco.’ ”

His home life: “I come from, like, a wealthy divorced family. My mom’s wealthy. My dad’s, like, divorced.”

His mother’s boyfriend: “You’re some guy that sits around my mom’s pool and sponges off her. You know, kinda like a bigger version of me.”

Amid all the clowning and conniving, amid the nonchalance with which he dismisses drugs and divorce as simple facts of life, touches of warmth emerge, the same sweetness that shows in his interactions with people on the show.

“I missed out on that buff family upbringing,” Shore says in his routine. “The Wonder bread, the gravy, the cow-tipping. Never had the nice, warm, buff, Michael Brady hugs.” He picks out an older member of the audience and steps down from the stage to collect a hug.

But just when you’re getting comfortable with this oversized kid, he’ll serve up another peek at the decline of Western civilization.

“What’s it going to be like in 30, 40, 50 years?” he asks. “Be like, ‘Sir, you can take your driving test in Spanish, English or Dude. Instead of true or false on the exam, it’ll be like totally or not even. Instead of stop signs, the signs will say ‘chill.’ ”

Shore is looking for a good script.

“I don’t want to make movies that will make you think,” he says. “I want to make a movie that’s fun.”

One screenplay casts him as a surfer exchange student in London. Another has him playing a caveman frozen alive in a block of ice, then unearthed centuries later in an Encino back yard.

“I just got off the phone with the guy for that one,” he says. “I told him I liked my part but the rest of the script sucks.”

Right now, his program is taping at night. It normally airs in the afternoons but has been switched to a midnight slot over the summer, when teens stay up later and MTV wants to try to steal some of the younger audiences from David Letterman and Arsenio Hall.

“Totally Pauly” is the type of show that will probably get washed away within a few years by the changing tides of teen fashion. “The Weasel” will probably be nothing more than a faded and, for some, irritating memory. Shore knows this.

“People say, ‘You’re the dude guy and that won’t last forever,’ ” he says. “I don’t want to do this forever. I’ll do something else.”

The executives at MTV are hoping that Shore’s comic spirit can be adapted to other roles. They are considering giving him a weekly variety show where the guests sit in bean-bag chairs.

“I could put together the hottest show ever,” Shore says. One of the regular skits, he explains, would involve two midgets standing in a large bucket. “I’ll come out and dance and play drums and I won’t take myself seriously.”

He also has signed a multi-record deal with WTG/Sony. Farther off, in the hazy distance, he sees a movie career.

For now, though, when he walks down Sunset Strip, kids scream at him from passing cars. A girl in a gas station across the street pulls open her jacket. Another young woman drives past several times, at one point becoming so distracted that she runs up onto the curb. Shore flashes a weaselly grin.

“People tell me I’ve got the best job in the world, “ he says. “I don’t have a script. I don’t have to study. I just go out and be me.”

Pauly-Glot A user’s guide to the veejay speak of Pauly Shore.

buff cool

chillin’ hanging out

edged upset

fresh nugs good-looking women

fully, not even yes, no

fundage money

grindage food

Lisa the ideal girlfriend

major good, great

melon head

sponging living off someone else’s money

Stoney all right!

tweak to hit or strike