SOVIET COMEDIAN PULLING LAUGHS FROM HIS PAST

If the comedian’s talent in life is for noting the improbable, Yakov Smirnoff would scarcely have to open his mouth to qualify.

Smirnoff, one of two California residents to be officially granted citizenship this weekend in the grand Governor’s Island ceremony--and surely the only comedian in the lot--emigrated from has native Soviet Union nine years ago and has this memory of his arrival:

“Other immigrants wrote back to us about seeing the Statue of Liberty and the skyscrapers. When I arrived in America, it was on a jet to Kennedy airport. The first person I met was an immigration official, a black woman who weighed 400 pounds. ‘Are you the Statue of Liberty?’ I asked. ‘No,’ she answered, ‘but I’m tired and poor.’ ”

Smirnoff’s is as classic an idealistic American success story as one can imagine. (It’s surprising that no one has thought to make a TV “Movie of the Week” to coincide with all the Liberty hoopla.)

He started out in this country with virtually nothing. Now he has a TV series called “What a Country,” which begins later this month on KTLA, he drives a Rolls-Royce and has bought an apartment building, where his parents live. He’s dined with the President of the United States (“I was scared,” Smirnoff said, as if Ronald Reagan were the ultimate club owner. “If he doesn’t like you, you’ll never work again. . . But he made me feel comfortable. He told me jokes”).

As Smirnoff tells it, in clear English still heavily flavored with a Russian accent, freedom was the ideal that led him to abandon a successful comedy career in the Soviet Union. “Believe it or not, the government has a Ministry of Jokes. They were censoring a percentage of my stuff. It was hard enough trying to be funny. If someone starts heckling you, you can’t say back, ‘Your mother wears combat boots,’ because she probably does.”

Smirnoff’s appetite to go West was first whetted when he worked cruise ships on the Black Sea. “I met a lot of Americans and Eastern Europeans on those cruises; they seemed so much happier. The Americans were unlike anything the Russian government told us about. If the government wanted to give us pictures of Americans, they showed Three Stooges films.”

He applied for a visa in 1975. It came two years later, when (according to Smirnoff) the Soviet Union loosened its emigration quotas to make the climate more favorable for purchase of U.S. wheat.

“The procedure is, they fire you from your job, investigate you, then one day tell you, ‘Get out!’ They sent my mother and father, who are retired now, with me. He was a building construction engineer; she taught Russian literature. That’s the way the government is: They don’t want to support old people whose children emigrate, so they just kick them out.”

It was, in fact, considerably harder for Smirnoff’s parents to adjust. “We were sitting on three suitcases in the middle of an empty apartment in Washington Heights. We had almost no money. My mother was crying. I said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll do something,’ but I didn’t know what. Suddenly the doorbell rang. We were scared. Nobody knew we were there. I opened the door. It was a group of other immigrants, maybe 20 of them, who had come during the war years. They brought food, china, furniture. My mother was still crying, only this time out of happiness.

“They took me around, helped me get a job. I feel now what I began to feel then, that I’m growing into a larger family.”

According to Smirnoff, his parents have never lost their native skepticism. “When ABC came by and said they wanted to shoot them, my parents got very nervous. And when they went to Disneyland, they stood in front of Space Mountain. They saw all the people going in, they heard the screams, and saw that no one was coming out. ‘We won’t go on this one,’ they said.”

Smirnoff must have had his own adjustment problems. The only ones he’ll mention concern, for example, supermarket pet food items, which depressed him with the thought that what was pictured on the can was actually in the can (“Why do Americans eat chihuahuas and Doberman pinschers?”). He can be jokingly hyperbolic when he says, “I saw the signs that read ‘Jimmy Carter, Democrat; Ronald Reagan, Republican.’ When I saw ‘Johnny Walker, Red, I got scared.’ ” He claims to have felt a real fright when driving to San Diego and hearing on his car radio, “This is WKGB. It’s 10 o’clock. We know where you are.” “I just about crashed when I heard that,” Smirnoff said.

Otherwise, he won’t acknowledge what, if any, hardships he’s had here. “It’s hard to see bad stuff when you’re in love, and I’m still in love with this country. My English teacher was of the generation that went through Vietnam and Nixon. She was explaining to me once that America is not as good as it likes to make people think it is. I still don’t believe that. But that’s what America is about too--you believe what you want. I personally feel it’s a country that will always protect me.

“I wrote this song called ‘Sweet Lady Liberty.’ I can’t play very well, so David Pack of the group Ambrosia arranged and recorded it. It’s getting airplay. The radio show host Michael Jackson played it. On July 4th I’ll be singing it for 6,000 GI’s on Governor’s Island, when I do my act. And they’ll sing with me. The other day I was driving my Rolls in Beverly Hills, listening to the song, thinking of those GIs, of all that’s happened to me in the past nine years. I started to cry.”