LIKE, SHORE

If you're over the age of 20 and want a good scare in the early hours of the morning, be sure to check out totally pauly (MTV, weeknights, midnight-2 a.m.). What you'll witness is the sight and sound of Young America 1991, the spectacle of a ragged-haired, slit-eyed beach bum announcing, ''You're chillin' maaaaa-jor wit' tha Weasel!'' Chances are, you won't know what the heck is going on: instant generation gap. Tons o' teens are tuning in to Pauly Shore, who, in the guise of a roving VJ, interrupts MTV's ceaseless flow of Skid Row and Van Halen videos to stroll through malls and converse in a modified San Fernando Valley-speak. In Shore's laconic lexicon, anything ''buff'' is good, money is ''fundage,'' and attractive women are ''fresh nugs.'' One gets the feeling he decided to refer to himself as the Weasel before others started calling him the Pig. Unlike MTV's other VJs, who are little more than telegenic announcers, Shore is a blue-blood comedian: His father is veteran nightclub comic Sammy Shore, and his mother, Mitzi, is the owner of L.A.'s Comedy Store. True to his roots, Pauly is a performer who recently released a comedy record, The Future of America (WTG/Epic). In Shore's comedy, punch lines are irrelevant-what counts is his cool-dude atty-tude and his in-crowd lingo. His blithe refusal to offer punch lines is at once his stylistic triumph and his one-way ticket to palookaville. The Future of America is a veritable aural dictionary of dude- speak (''In 30, 40, 50 years you'll probably be able to take your driving test in English, Spanish, or Dude,'' quoth Shore). It is also one unamusing little disc. ''I don't have a lot of funny jokes,'' he freely admitted to the Los Angeles Times. Right now, however, that doesn't matter much, because Shore has become a pop phenomenon over the past year, boosting MTV's ratings with his after- school edition of Totally Pauly. MTV shipped Shore to midnight for the summer, reasoning with charming quaintness that his adolescent fans would be staying up late during summer vacation (somehow, I don't think hard-core Pauly fans were in their Dr. Dentons and snoring by 9 p.m. during the school year). But the network also wants to expose its prize freak to a wider audience-bored viewers zapping channels to avoid Letterman reruns and Arsenio's endless monologues. At this time of night, Shore's only real competition in the scary- personality department is Jonathon Brandmeier, a popular Chicago disc jockey whose Johnny B On the Loose (syndicated; check local listings) could not be more ironically titled: This half hour has been settling into rigor mortis from the moment it debuted in June and will soon be interred-a victim of poor ratings, Johnny B will leave the air in mid-September. You can still tune in to see what went wrong, though. Like lots of radio crazies hamstrung by FCC regulations, Brandmeier arrived on television freshly self-censored. His idea of something really wild, really nuts, really over- the-edge is to hide a camera in a Chicago wedding-dress store and impersonate a fitter who says to nervous young brides-to-be, ''That dress looks terrible!'' Another time, Brandmeier sent one of his stooges out to the beach to-get this -shave the backs of hairy men. Oooh, that's wild, Johnny B, just nuts, man. Pauly Shore understands in a way that Brandmeier never will that the more you try to seem wacky and loose on television, the more desperate and sweaty you actually appear. A tanned iceberg in a cool medium, Shore rarely drops his slack-jawed, deadpan stare. His favorite gimmick is to force himself on unsuspecting older Americans. Recently, for example, Shore bebopped his way into a Salt Lake City cable company. With a cameraman trotting along behind him, our hero convinced the company to give him a crash course in home cable installation. Shore shuffled along behind a nonplussed cable repairman, moaned about being tired, and muttered, ''Can I use the bathroom? I got a weird itch,'' and all of a sudden, it struck me why he is at once so successful and yet so tedious: Pauly is just a Maynard G. Krebs for the '90s, a cute, updated beatnik brat, always on the lookout for fresh nugs and a pad to crash in (or, as he puts it, ''a place to sponge''). Pauly Shore makes some of us proud to have been Dobie Gillises when we were growing up. Totally Pauly: C+ Johnny B On the Loose: D-

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