KFI’S NEW DREAM TEAM--LOHMAN AND . . . OWENS?

When Al Lohman learned that KLAC-AM wanted to find him a partner for his morning radio show back in 1963, his first hope was that he’d be paired with another young disc jockey he knew named Gary Owens. Instead, Owens introduced Lohman to Roger Barkley and they began their 23-year reign as Los Angeles’ most famous radio comedy duo. Owens was left to make it on his own.

“Gary’s lucky,” Lohman says, “because otherwise there would have been two announcers on ‘Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In.’ ”

Lohman might have missed out on cult television fame, but, beginning today, he won’t have to wonder any more what a radio team called Owens and Lohman would have been like.

In what may be the comedy-radio equivalent of Abbott’s Costello teaming with Bob Hope or Art Garfunkel suddenly singing with Bob Dylan, KFI-AM (640)--Lohman and Barkley’s home for nearly 18 years--will inaugurate “L.A.’s Morning Show with Gary Owens and Al Lohman,” weekdays, 6-10 a.m., in the very same studio that Lohman and Barkley used until calling it quits in May, 1986.

“This is the first time we will have been together since we were raised by apes as children in Omaha, Neb.,” Owens says. “We learned everything we do from the apes, and that’s why our radio style is what it is today.”

Owens, 51, and Lohman, 54, trace their styles back to humble but zany beginnings in Omaha some 30 years ago. Though they have never worked together before, they both use unrestrained silliness, farce and terrible puns to elicit moans, groans and more than a few chuckles from their radio fans.

In addition to Owens having been the one who first introduced Lohman to Barkley, the new duo realized as they were reminiscing the other day that Owens also introduced Lohman to Mary Ann, the woman he eventually married, when they were both Top-40 disc jockeys at a radio station in Denver back in the 1950s.

Call their coming together destiny, call it kismet--they’ll make jokes out of it just the same.

Neither has ever been a straight man. Lohman was always the guy who did the funny voices while Barkley prodded the jokes out of him, and Owens didn’t last for nearly 20 years at KMPC by giving his punch lines to someone else. The two wise-cracking funnymen insist, however, that they will have no problem sharing one mike.

“When I need straight, Gary will do straight; when he needs straight, I’ll do it, and then we have this terribly dull thing when we both do straight,” Lohman says. “Gary has taken to what I do like a duck to water. He’s picking lice out of his feathers right now. Gary listens, and I’m going to have to listen better.”

Owens, who has been KFI’s morning host since last September, says he believes the partnership will work because they both admire each other, understand radio comedy and constantly make each other laugh.

Even so, it must be at least a little strange for Lohman to return with a new partner to the studio he shared for so many years with Barkley, who now works at KJOI-FM. But Lohman consistently downplays comparisons to his former partnership by insisting that he and Owens are not trying to create the image of a team. They will retain their own individual identities both on and off the air, he says.

“When you set out as a team, you work for a composite style, a composite identity,” Lohman explains. “Everything (before) was Lohman and Barkley. If I made a dinner reservation as Al Lohman, it didn’t mean dip, but when I said Lohman and Barkley, they’d say, ‘Oh yes, of course.’ . . . But this (working with Owens) is a teaming of two separate people.”

There will be vestiges of the old team, however, as Lohman plans to resurrect many of the characters that played so well with Barkley, including the popular Roscoe Boscoe, Ted J. Baloney and W. Eva Schneider. “I thought I killed those people,” Lohman says. “Or they were off waiting for the saucer on a mountain top somewhere in Utah. But we’re going to try to bring them back and see how they work.”

The pairing of the veteran comics came about because of a survey that showed that Owens and Lohman were two of the most recognizable names in L.A. radio. When Ken Kohl, KFI’s program director, was hired to breathe new life into the station’s sagging ratings last fall, he took one look at that list and decided he had the answer.

“If I were trying to build any radio station, I would look for morning hosts who were the most popular with adults 35 to 54,” Kohl says. “And I’ve got two of them right here.”

The station’s ratings motives are clear. Owens and Lohman, however, are hard pressed to come up with a satisfactory answer to the question of why two celebrated radio personalities would want to join forces now after all their separate successes.

Lohman says he simply missed being on the radio every day. Since Barkley broke up the team last year (saying “I was getting to a point in my life where I had to make a change”), Lohman has started a book, started a production company, hired an acting agent and did some radio work at KWNK in Simi Valley. None of it was enough.

“Every morning I wake up with half-a-dozen funny or insightful things that I want to say,” Lohman says. “And I want to tell somebody. And I don’t have someone I can tell when I’m not on the radio.”

Owens, who says he has made millions of dollars in television over the years despite sometimes being pigeonholed as nothing more than a radio announcer, seems to see the new partnership as just plain fun. He seems to relish the chance to try out a new schtick with his old friend, and especially to have someone in the booth early each morning just to laugh with.

“Merv Griffin has a new television pilot, even though he’s worth $235 million,” Owens explains. “You still keep trying no matter how much you’ve accomplished. You want to improve, you want to keep expanding. We’ll look forward to coming to work.”

“And it’s my goal to make $235 million off this program,” Lohman says, finishing the sentence.

“While wearing a chicken outfit,” Owens chirps back.