MEET THE COMEDIAN FROM ANOTHER PLANET

You never know just who Don Victor will turn up as. It could be Dr. Orville Platt, the feline psychologist who believes that to understand a cat you have to get down and walk like one. Or Jean-Bob, the chef who lies to food, telling lettuce he is going to dress it up and take it to dinner--just before he tears it to pieces for salad.

Last Saturday at the Bowery Theatre, Victor wore the red helmet, yellow goggles and paper towel scarf of Commander Ray, archbishop of the universe. Ray is a former appliance salesman who woke one morning convinced that he could not be from Earth because it was impossible for him to come from the same world as Jerry Lewis.

Ray is someone Victor identifies with.

“When I was really small I was convinced I wasn’t from this planet. I was convinced that my parents just didn’t know how to tell me.”

Did he ever ask them?

“Yeah. They said I was from this planet. But I didn’t believe them.

“I never felt I fit in.”

“On my report cards, teacher wrote the same things all the time: ‘Very bright child, but need to stop playing games and come back to reality.’ ”

He tried reality. When he moved to San Diego in 1977, he worked as a counselor. But he preferred doing comedy at home, lapsing into characters like Chef Jean-Bob while he cooked dinner for friends.

More and more of his friends started coming over to see him perform. Then he started inviting people from the corner Safeway. Finally he got to the point where he couldn’t accommodate any more people in his apartment.

He left his job as a counselor and in 1978, he opened at a club in Pacific Beach. It was a hard decision committing to comedy, but he kept at it, eventually playing at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles:

“I just couldn’t believe that there would be more than five crazy people who would pay to listen to this.”

It helped when he got himself a good comedy partner. He met Whoopi Goldberg in 1979 and from 1980 to 1983 they performed together at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Diego Repertory Theatre and the Gaslamp Quarter Theater. Then Goldberg left the act for San Francisco. Two years later, she found fame and fortune in “The Color Purple.”

Victor attributes part of Goldberg’s success to her persistence in promoting herself. That end of the business has always been difficult for him.

“I’m real shy when I can’t be a character and I have to be me,” he said.

Now he is trying harder to move ahead on his career. He just made an audition tape for “Saturday Night Live.” He is performing at the Bowery with fellow improvisation comics Rochelle Robinson, Gary Welling and Lee Conavay through Aug. 9. He plans to open a second show at the Bowery three weeks later.

And because two evening performances a week do not a living make, he teaches improvisation and makes and sells Hedz.

Hedz?

Little clay pins, magnets, terrariums and clocks in a variety of faces and shapes that he calls “representations of my world.”

These include jogger-eating dragons and the ultimate low maintenance pet: a toothy, grinning clay fish suspended in a fishbowl. If these are representations of his world, the world to which he and they belong is, evidently, a little different.

Does he still wonder if he comes from another planet?

“Sometimes.”