Daddy Dearest : Who Gets the Last Laugh When Father-Son Comics Bob and Chris Elliott Team Up on Off-the-Wall Tell-All Book?

Hugh Downs actually slapped his knee he was so amused by what was happening on the monitor in the “Tonight Show’s” green room. His daughter, watching the same monitor, rolled her eyes and grimaced.

Jay Leno’s guests, Bob and Chris Elliott, father and son, were making a shameless pre-Father’s Day pitch for Chris’ book “Daddy’s Boy,” a “Shocking Account of Life with a Famous Father.”

As usual, they waltzed a dangerous line between droll and dumb, and as Chris described his sixth birthday party--at which columnist Art Buchwald allegedly rode around on the Elliott family’s giant trained pig--people watching from behind the scenes seemed evenly divided as to which side of the line the two comedians were on.

A partner in the comedy team Bob and Ray, Bob Elliott has spent four decades building a reputation as a sort of anti-celebrity. Which may have had some viewers wondering how his son Chris could write an offspring expose, portraying his father as an “insane, megalomaniacal superstar,” driven to bizarre and sadistic behavior by an insatiable lust for fame.

The viewers who wonder about the book’s veracity would be those who usually fall asleep after “Tonight.” Those who stay awake for “Late Night with David Letterman” know that Chris, like his father, has made a career of absurdist satire, portraying characters with no comedic raison d’etre, including “the guy under the seats,” “the fugitive guy” and “the panicky guy,” a supposed audience member who is thrown into wild anxiety by Letterman’s every innocuous comment.

“Daddy’s Boy,” written by Chris with alternating “rebuttal” chapters by his father, seems to be part of the younger Elliott’s self-designed rite of passage into the entertainment mainstream.

‘An Acquired Taste’

It’s unclear to most observers whether his father ever made that passage. In his standard deadpan, Bob Elliott said that the humor he and Ray Goulding made famous in 40 years of commercials, radio shows, television shows, and appearances on Carson, Letterman, and “Saturday Night Live,” is “an acquired taste.”

If comedians were cheese, though, Bob Elliott would be Velveeta and his son would be a Limburger whipped up by midget entrepreneurs in the humid gift shop of a Texas roadside attraction.

Consequently, not everyone’s sure that the world is ready for Chris. Even David Letterman, the person responsible for first subjecting viewers to Elliott fils, hedges his bet on the book. As he writes in his foreword: “I couldn’t be more certain that it won’t do well.”

Asked in a phone interview whether he thought Elliott’s television appearances were going well, Letterman snarled: “I haven’t seen any. I have better things to do than chart his career.”

“Have you read the book?” a young producer of “L.A. In the Morning” asked a visitor to the set, while the father and son settled in before a fake skyline for an interview with Stephanie Edwards. “It’s very strange,” he said with a nervous grin. “I don’t know what to make of it.”

More important, what would a morning audience make of a book that asserts, among many other things, that Bob Elliott and his son escaped the sinking of the Andrea Doria ocean liner aboard a two-seat Hammacher Schlemmer submarine, arriving in Manhattan with Tony Orlando coincidentally swimming alongside?

Edwards introduced the book as a son’s “pathetic search for love,” an expose that “makes the ‘Mommy Dearest’ relationship pale in comparison.” She was quick to point out, of course, that the book can be taken seriously for “about 20 seconds.”

But as Chris gave Edwards his big smarmy grin, and reminisced about life in the family’s palatial New York home, which would later become the Metropolitan Museum of Art, some viewers may have been left unsure of where this alleged joke and reality intersect.

Typical of the abused celebrity offspring on the talk-show circuit, the Elliotts helped plug their “excellent Father’s Day gift” with photos from the book: A young Chris wearing a Latex bald wig to accommodate a father who demanded they look alike; the adolescent boy, grotesquely obese, lying in bed with his eventual savior, Dick Gregory, kneeling beside him.

“What was I, Dad, about 875 pounds?” Chris asked with casual sincerity.

“That’s what you say,” his father replied, looking bewildered and embarrassed, as if his son’s psychiatrist had suggested that it might be therapeutic to humor Chris with this book tour but that he himself had serious doubts.

The video clips Edwards showed offered no more insight into where Elliott sanity begins or ends. The first was old black-and-white footage in which Bob and Ray engage in a seemingly pointless discussion of a stuffed deer’s head.

The second clip showed Chris doing his impression of Marlon Brando. The idea behind the running skit is that the hefty Brando, uninvited, has started hanging out at the Letterman show. On this particular segment, Brando persuades Paul Shaffer’s band to play “Alley Cat,” while he dances around in a jazzy shuffle, ending each musical stanza with a goofy grin and the exclamation “Bananas!”

The brief clip had most of the “Morning” camera operators and stage crew sputtering with laughter. But a few observers watched with puzzled frowns.

That’s to be expected, say those who appreciate the Dadaesque, meta-entertainment Elliott pursues.

“I think if someone tuned in (to Late Night) for the first time and saw one of Chris’ pieces, they’d be baffled,” said Adam Resnick, Chris’ writing partner on the show. “The joke of Chris’ character is that he’s this guy who just wants to get on television, and when he does get on it’s pretty lame. But he doesn’t know it’s lame.”

The result is that Elliott’s humor is “funny-lame,” Resnick said. That, as opposed to something like “Police Academy,” which is “just stupid.”

Not that all stupidity has bad connotations with the “Late Night” staff. In fact, Resnick sounds as if he’s giving the ultimate accolade in calling what Elliott does “silly stupid-- almost surreal stupid.”

Like Resnick, most admirers are sent into theoretical tailspins trying to define the younger Elliott’s brand of humor, which most contend is related in some vague but significant way to his father’s deadpan wit.

“It has so many layers of irony in it, based on all this absorbed information and emotion from the theater and movies and TV and so on, that you can’t really describe it,” said Steve O’Donnell), the Letterman show’s head writer. “It’s not just ironic . . . I’d put it somewhere between complicated parody and buffoonish slapstick.”

“I’d say it’s along the line of Salman Rushdie’s sense of humor,” said sportscaster Marv Albert, a “ ‘Late Night’ regular” and Elliott fan, even though he is the occasional butt of the comic’s on-air lampoons.

Not everyone is so kind in their assessment of the comedian.

He ‘Takes Chances’

“Chris takes chances,” O’Donnell said. “He walks out there doing something quite odd, and some people say, ‘I do not like that.’ ”

O’Donnell said that he was just reading a letter from a woman in Illinois, who “went on and on about how she didn’t really like Letterman but could tolerate him, couldn’t stand Paul Shaffer, and was sure she could never like Chris, because he was so ego-maniacal, self-centered, piggish . . . “

O’Donnell calls Elliott “extremely brave” for playing the characters he does. “To the average TV viewer, he seems to be this reptilian self-promoter,” he said. ‘He’s not shy about making himself look horrible and reprehensible.”

But unlike Andy Kaufman, the late comedian-performance artist to whom he is often compared, Chris Elliott has no interest in staying in character to the point that the edges of the real man get fuzzy.

Once they’ve stepped out of character on their quasi-pseudo-parody of a publicity tour, the father and son are so normal that it takes a moment to realize they aren’t playing the sort of low-key characters that Elliott Sr. made famous--newsman Wally Ballou, for instance, or Harlow P. Whitcomb, president of the Slow Talkers of America.

Family Men

And as the bald and balding look-alikes talk, laugh and drape their arms over each other’s shoulders, it’s obvious that the book’s bitter premise is nonsense. “We’re both really family men,” said Chris, who is now the doting father of a 2-year-old daughter, Abigail.

To research “Daddy’s Boy,” Chris read several celebrity-offspring autobiographies including “Mommy Dearest,” he said. But in writing his parody of the form, he did draw from his life.

“He’s remembered so many little details,” Bob said, as he and his son sat by the swimming pool at the Beverly Hilton, eating club sandwiches and behaving very un-celebrity-like.

For instance, the father does wear Gold-Toe socks, as the book asserts. But he was not obsessed with them. He never “sketched lovely, life-like renderings of Gold-Toed socks.” Nor did Chris fly into a rage during the family’s allegedly televised Christmas interview, shouting: “No more Gold-Toe socks! Get yourself some help, man!”

Similarly, the father never filled a room with an alphabetically arranged collection of several thousand Jim Beam bottles, although he did have a few.

“Now I’ve been collecting these little things,” Bob said, lifting a small bottle of Grey Poupon mustard from the pool-side table. “I pick them up at the hotels.”

He’s not kidding, Chris says. And he’s not kidding.

Travel Game

“And the part about PXG-297 is for real,” Chris added, referring to a travel game his father invented, based on his license number, and which, for no apparent reason, he explains in three pages of excruciating detail in one of his rebuttals.

“He calls it a game, it’s not really a game,” Chris said.

“What is it?” Bob asked defensively.

Chris paused, looking for a gentle way to say it. “It’s an annoyance,” he said.

“That game never gets a good reaction,” Bob said.

But the family of seven--three daughters, two sons--did play it on their frequent vacations to Maine, Chris’ mother, Lee, recalled in a phone conversation.

Those trips in the family station wagon, Chris said, “were too hellish to remember.” Mother Lee recalls them fondly.

“We’d take a dog and two birds and a gold fish. They had to go along. The dog threw up, and very often he’d throw up on the bird cage. We had one daughter who got car-sick. Everyone let her have her favorite seat.”

Chris’ wife, Paula, a former Letterman casting coordinator--with the dubious distinction of having given crackpot comic Emo Philips his break--met Elliott on the set and was bowled over by his charm: “He drew these horrible caricatures of me with a corncob pipe in my mouth and put them on my door.”

When she married into the Elliott clan, it first “reminded me of the family in ‘Franny and Zooey’--you know, this old, established New York family with a lot of quirks,” she said. She’s since found out that while they “all have an appreciation for the absurd . . . they’re pretty normal.”

In their “Late Night” skits, Letterman acts as if Elliott is something unseemly he’s managed to get on the bottom of his shoe and is trying discreetly to scrape off. The impression is that Letterman would rather he had never been talked into hiring this loosest in the battery of loose cannons that guard “Late Night” against assault by the forces of traditional television values.

That condescension is a thoroughly scripted part of the act, Resnick said.

“I find him very amusing,” Letterman conceded. “He has a really interesting view. He’s doing a kind of comedy that you don’t see much of anywhere. And I guess there’s a good reason for that. It makes people sick.”

In this kinder, gentler mood, the talk show host even had a kind word for the book: “To be sure it’s peculiar. (But) parts of it made me laugh out loud.”

Viewers might be amazed at the respect the creator of the show’s least respectable characters gets from his other colleagues.

‘Evil Wicked Mimic’

“He’s an evil wicked mimic and in the Middle Ages would have been burned at the stake,” O’Donnell said.

Laurie Lennard was sufficiently impressed with Elliott that she eventually quit her job as talent coordinator at “Late Night” to manage him.

“I was blown away by him. I just knew in my gut he was special,” she said. She compares Elliott to John Belushi and Bill Murray in their early “Saturday Night Live” days, sounding like too obvious a show-biz hypester for Elliott to parody: “He’s a major talent. He’s going to be a superstar.”

Admittedly, Elliott has four Emmy Awards to his credit and has played fairly mainstream roles in several prime-time shows lately. He had a small part in the Francis Ford Coppola segment of “New York Stories,” and a bigger role in a film to be released this summer called “The Abyss.” And the book, Lennard said, is doing swell.

Somehow, though, it’s hard to imagine that the mild-mannered Chris Elliott will ever exceed the level of celebrity that his father has achieved.

That fame was reflected in the “L.A. in the Morning” studio, when host Edwards scanned the hallways before the interview and asked, “Are Ray and his son here yet?”

Asked whether he thought Chris might ever exceed his father’s fame, Letterman laughed the cruel laugh with which viewers are so familiar. “Oh, no, clearly not,” he chuckled. “That’s quite a long shot. No I would think not. Of course not. He doesn’t have a chance in hell.”