Both of these releases feature men standing up and talking to rooms full of eager laughers. Both men use the English language. The similarities pretty much end there.

Andy Griffith was younger than Henry Rollins is now when his first recording, "What It Was, Was Football", was released in 1953. This comic accounting of a hillbilly watching his first football game eventually sold a million copies and was the beginning of a series of albums which continued into his successful years on television in the '60s. This compilation is culled from his five Capitol albums, and one of the first in its "American Originals" series, and while his storytelling voice has the soothing assuredness of Huckleberry Hound, his singing has the overbearing timbres of a guffawing, back-slapping uncle at a family cookout. As Griffith himself claimed, "I'm not the best, but I expect I'm the loudest." It's not the songs that earn him the 'American Originals' moniker; it's the comic stories and the fact that his voice is so tied to the memory of Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry, USA.

Rollin's two-disc set collects recordings from appearances at varied venues. It is billed as a spoken-word collection, but it needs to be considered in the context of a comedy album. It adheres to the tradition of recording live in front of a club full of people edged, pushed, prodded, or stampeded to a river of laughter. And, as he himself says, "I'd rather be funny than happy." Rollins is funniest when his observations either draw from his own experience (life on the road, school, bad jobs) or comment freshly on familiar subjects (airports, depression, films). But when it's used to cut connection to his audience (easy targets such as Wayne Newton and Las Vegas or waving tired and simplistic slogans such as "I hate all copes"), it's weak. Preaching to the converted, he makes the audience appear to collude in something I'm not a part of. At those moments, it's like eavesdropping on a roomful of unsupervised undergraduates.

Put Griffith and Rollins in your multidisc changer, hit the random-play button, and let them duke it out.