No serious person can pretend to relish the behavior of Mark E. Smith, famed leader of the Fall, the influential and jangly post-punk band. On his latest tour, which came to a close on Saturday at the Brooklyn club Southpaw, Smith poured beer on his tour manager’s head and pulled a corkscrew on his bassist. Onstage in Phoenix, Justin Williams, the frontman of opening band the Talk, retaliated by throwing a banana peel at Smith’s head. Smith’s own band then quit the tour.

The Fall has gone through many personnel changes, always preserving a sarcastic, catch-as-catch-can spirit that, while not identical to Smith’s incidental rascality, certainly contextualizes it. Yet something about the band’s oeuvre is straightforward and wholesome.

At Southpaw, Smith’s new band came onstage with a tentative air. The bassist, a tall young man with a cuddlylooking beard, might have been born at around the time Smith first formed the Fall, in 1977. The guitar player sported black curls flattened against the side of his face. As one audience member later said, this was the Fall gone Williamsburg.

Smith’s loyal third wife, Elena Poulou, looked more confident. A noted beauty, Poulou has not had as strong a hand in the Fall as Smith’s first wife, Bennington grad Brix Smith. In the mid-1980s, Brix took the Fall in a more melodic direction, leading to some of the most celebrated of the band’s 24 LPs. Poulou seems content to finger the keyboard.

After a moment’s hesitation, Smith himself came onstage, wearing a trim leather jacket and a neatly tucked-in shirt. He looked like Andy Capp. Frail and almost cute, Smith gripped his microphone with both hands, nearly obscuring his small, frog-like face. Smith once famously intoned the words “All those whose mind entitle themselves, and whose main entitle is themselves, shall feel the wrath of my bombast.” Twenty years later, Smith does not seem physically capable of bombast, but his voice is strong. His signature barker’s drone,the extended voicing he gives to the last syllable of almost every word,washed over the Brooklyn audience like an air raid siren.

On “Pacifying Joint,” a song from the Fall’s latest album, “Fall Heads Roll,” Smith made the refrain “pacifying joint” sound like a conversational remark, an explanation, a baleful announcement, a shrug, an obtuse slang, and, inevitably, an arty code word. On his first record, Smith announced that the three Rs were “repetition, repetition, repetition.” He artfully elides words so that their sound and meaning change over the course of a song. In Brooklyn, that elision sounded more like a kind of lovable, arrogant laziness of the tongue. Everyone knew that Smith was saying something smart, and he knew that they knew.

Smith’s confidence took on a paternal form whenever he acknowledged the bouncy rhythms of his young bandmates.His occasional head nod seemed to have more to do with approval than with keeping time. At one point, he leaned his own microphone stand over into the drummer’s kit, as if quoting other, messier shows while also paying the drummer an almost fatherly compliment.

But there was no banter, and the band moved quickly from one song to another, almost all from “Fall Heads Roll.” The new band couldn’t reproduce the electronic dash of the recorded “I Can Hear the Grass Grow.” A cover of an old psychedelic number,”I Can Hear the Grass Grow” sounds neither nostalgic nor ironic, but simply goodnatured coming from the Fall. It recalls their earlier hit cover, also sunny, of the Kinks’s “Victoria.”

Indeed, the Fall’s long history of lineup changes and relentless production belies the cynicism of Smith’s lyrics. Crapulous but marked by hard work, Smith’s career is an essay in resourcefulness. If Saturday’s show proves the fungibility of the band’s identity, it also proves the competence of this seemingly erratic wild man.

Smith’s only sign of personal power was his interest in his bandmates’ microphones. Several times during the stage he took a second microphone, from the guitarist or from his wife’s keyboard, and held it, along with his own, in front of his small face. During the encore, performing the slow and powerful new song “Blindness,” about the blind British politician David Blunkett, he smashed down some of Poulou’s keyboard keys.

Mark E. Smith has made a career of making messes and cleaning them up. In person, he looks like the picture of a humble barfly, and his kindly but distant attitude to his bandmates, along with his calm, droning vocals, all bespeak contentment.

blytal@nysun.com