THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 21, 1994 TAG: 9410210111
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E14 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KEITH MONROE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
ACCORDING TO the old theater story, an actor on his death bed says, ``Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.''
David Brenner doesn't agree. He never sits down to write material. He doesn't buy one-liners. Basically, he's ad-libbed his entire 25-year career. He started in 1969 and by 1971 was on ``The Tonight Show'' and into the big bucks.
``I just get up on stage and it happens. It's a genetic thing with no talent involved,'' he says. ``It's as ridiculous to pay me to be funny as to pay me for being 6 feet 2 with brown eyes.''
And maybe it really is genetic. Brenner says the funniest man he's ever known was his father, a onetime vaudevillian who taught him to appreciate the classic comics - Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Groucho and Red Skelton.
Brenner likes improvising in front of an audience. ``It's like a jazz musician who's going uptown to just sit in with other guys and wail. Only the other guys don't show up.'' But the audience does, and they provide the counterpoint.
``My audience has always been the same,'' Brenner says. ``It runs the gamut from 8-year-olds to 88-year-olds and from all walks of life. The only bubble in the graph is single women, 18 to 40. I've always attracted more of them.''
Not that he regards that as a hardship. ``Women are better laughers. They're not inhibited with their emotions. Men will cover their mouths and try not to laugh.''
The key to the breadth of Brenner's audience may be his style of humor. He's never been an outrageous satirist like Robin Williams or a surrealist like Steve Martin. While some dismiss him as a lightweight, Brenner's quips on the trivia of everyday life have worn well.
``I always thought an entertainer's job was to entertain,'' he says. ``My humor comes out of my own life. When I was coming up, they tagged me `the creator of observational comedy.' Who else can make fun of combing your hair? Who else can make fun of a button or a can of soup?
``These days, of course, the answer is obvious. If you look, a lot of comics are doing observational comedy. (Jerry) Seinfeld and (Garry) Shandling are two.''
One thing Brenner doesn't have in common with those performers is a sitcom. Not for lack of trying. In the '70s, he and Dick Clark pitched a show in which Brenner would have played himelf - a working comic. It's a formula that worked for Jack Benny and Danny Thomas and Lucy and Desi. Now it's working for Seinfeld and Shandling. Then, the network executives said no.
Instead, Brenner hosts a five-day-a-week, three-hour radio talk show that's heard nationwide (but not in Hampton Roads). He broadcasts live from a studio on Broadway, and his gift for the ad-lib is proving useful.
``My radio show is primarily entertainment-oriented,'' he says. ``We're not screaming and yelling at each other, hanging up and people calling in nasty. I don't want to do that for a living.''
Instead, he's aiming at a radio Regis and Kathie Lee. And from the beginning, he told the suits, ``I need a studio audience. But they said it would be a headache and an unnecessary expense.''
Recently, however, Brenner did the show from a broadcasting convention in Los Angeles and had an audience. ``The show took on a whole different sound because I had my audience. It gave me the juice, you know. It supercharged me.'' Management noticed, too. So he will get his audience, after all.
An exception to Brenner's habit of playing it by ear is the performance he'll give here Sunday. He'll be offering a lecture he sometimes performs called ``Humor Trumps Adversity.''
``I guess you might call it motivational,'' he says. ``I go through my life and talk about all the adversity I had and I talk about how I dealt with it using humor.''
Brenner's most publicized adversity has been a long fight for custody of his son that he won just recently. It sidetracked his career for almost three and a half years. It was draining financially and emotionally.
But he has no regrets and never worried about being forgotten.
``I didn't care, to tell you the truth,'' he says. ``First, I thought what I was doing was so valid. And second, no matter what happened, I was a hell of a lot better off than when I was living in the slums of Philadelphia.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
David Brenner's audiences include lots of single women.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY COMEDY by CNB