But what she must have realized a long time ago, as did her fans, was that she never needed to look farther than the space between her own ears to find formidable wit.

Wearing a denim jacket and black trousers, Tomlin cavorted onto the Kingsbury Hall stage Saturday night, smiling and waving her arms. She kept that energy up throughout the night, making it hard to believe she is 67.

She quickly won over the crowd with a few pointed jokes incorporating Utah, which she continued to do throughout the night. She also didn't shy away from tackling political subjects, reflecting a clear lack of patience with the current administration.

But she always made it funny. After an early joke about President Bush, for example, she said, "I don't really need to be too hard on the president. That's Rocky Anderson's job." The outspoken Salt Lake City mayor figured in a few of her jokes "He not only supports same-sex marriage, he supports same-sex polygamy."

The new material she interspersed liberally, so to speak, through her show added a touch of spice to her familiar character sketches. Even the old classics - Ernestine the nosy telephone operator, 6-year-old Edith Anne - got updates.

One of the night's best (and bravest) moments came when she had Ernestine calling Jon Huntsman Sr. and blackmailing him into a donation to the university. "Your Styrofoam cup runneth over," she said after claiming to have some intimidating taped phone conversations from his past.

Later, as an encore, she tried out a cheeky new sketch on the audience, during which Ernestine calls the U.S. president, vice president and secretaries of defense and state. "If you were really born again, Mr. President, why didn't you come back as an honest person?" Ernestine asks when she calls the president, telling him, "You have your friends in the phone company, and I have mine."

Much of the show consisted of appearances by the characters she introduced to us throughout the years, first as a regular on the TV variety show "Laugh-In" and later during her one-woman show, "The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe," bookended with non sequiturs and short anecdotes.

She used her voice and very simple gestures but no props to morph from one to the other fairly seamlessly. Her ability to change her voice, inflection and body movements is sometimes downright astonishing. Only once or twice (including what seemed to be a strange suburban war-zone interlude) did she not bring the audience right along with her.

Tomlin fussed with her hair during the show and fought a nasty cough at times, apologizing when she fixed the former or grabbed water for the latter. Those interruptions seemed to bother her more than they did the audience, but her reaction showed how much she cares about putting on a good show. "I hate it when something like this happens," Tomlin said after a sip of water. Someone in the audience yelled, "It's a dry state!" to which she replied, wryly, "I brought my own."

That kind of personal aside - evident again when she answered questions from the audience (her response to, "How can you use comedy to help people learn to respect each other?" was, "First of all, stop laughing at them") - makes her all the more human. But it's not as if she needed that. Few can address the angst all of humanity has in common the way Tomlin has for 40 years.

WHERE: Kingsbury Hall

WHEN: Saturday night

BOTTOM LINE: Tomlin had a sympathetic crowd roaring along with jokes at the expense of George W. Bush, herself and life's foibles in general.