Pause That Refreshes : Comic Rita Rudner, Appearing at the Laff Stop, Studied How Silence Set Up Benny’s Punch Lines

Gentle. Subtle. Ethereal. Dainty. Fragile. Demure.

These and similar adjectives regularly show up in articles about comic Rita Rudner, whose understated delivery has effectively set her apart from her more frenetic counterparts on stand-up comedy stages.

But Rudner, who will perform Thursday at the Laff Stop in Newport Beach, insists her soft-spoken approach is no calculated gimmick: “I don’t try to be quiet. That’s me trying to be noisy.”

The low-key delivery may be an extension of her own personality, as she says, but it also is a reflection of her taste in comics: Jack Benny, Bob Newhart and Woody Allen are her personal heroes. Like all three, Rudner is not afraid of silence; her perfectly timed pauses give extra firepower to punch lines that tick away, like time bombs, behind her whimsical setups.

In one routine, she ponders poodle haircuts, wondering if other dogs assume poodles are “in some sort of weird religious cult.” And she refuses to buy a CD player “until I get something in writing that says that’s the last thing they’re going to invent.” Those folks who wander the streets mumbling to themselves, Rudner guesses, are the people who bought eight-tracks.

Rudner, 34, delivers her musings on life’s small absurdities with little physical movement, other than a bemused tilt of the head. The spareness of Rudner’s physical approach comes as a surprise, considering her background: She spent 10 years as a dancer in New York, including work in six Broadway shows and several ballet companies.

The dancer’s lot--an endless series of grueling performances and then, when a show closes, an endless series of grueling auditions--became too much. “I said, ‘Oh, this has to stop,’ ” Rudner says. “I thought stand-up comedy might be good. . . . I could have some control over my life. I could write my own act.”

Rudner, no former class clown, says she was always “very shy.” The choice to leave dance and go it alone on stage was mainly business--the stand-up comedy field was uncrowded at the time, about nine years ago. “A couple of years after I started,” she says, “everybody sort of got the same idea.”

She got laughs at her first gig--unintentional ones, but laughs nonetheless--and started working on her act with a discipline born of her years in dance. She says she listened to no music for three or four years, instead playing early records by Newhart and Allen over and over and frequenting New York’s comedy clubs to study the working comics.

“If you’re a dancer, you have to work at it, because nothing ever comes easily,” she says. “I think that helps me throughout everything.”

The hard work has paid off. She has been featured on two HBO comedy specials, “Women of the Night” and “One Night Stand” (the titles led her to muse that the next one might be called “Sluts Tell Jokes”), has appeared in her first film role and was a regular on the short-lived TV series “George Schlatter’s Funny People.” She also appears frequently on “Late Night With David Letterman” and “The Tonight Show.”

One reason she entered stand-up comedy, Rudner says, was the chance of meeting “funny, witty men.” It worked. She has been married for 1 1/2 years to the English comedy producer Martin Bergman, who is now her manager.

Nowadays, Rudner tours just one week out of the month, spending much of her time writing screenplays with Bergman in their Beverly Hills home. They collaborated on one feature film script before tying the knot--”That’s how I knew (marriage) would work,” she says--and are working on a second. An Australian company is negotiating to produce the first, a comedy about psychics called “Medium Rare.”

Before getting married, Rudner says, she had to ask herself: “Are you ready to give up your single material?” Still, some of the material showcased on the latest HBO special centered on the tribulations of finding the right mate:

“The old theory was: Marry an older man, they’re more mature,” Rudner says. “The new theory is: Men don’t mature. Marry a young one.”

Some of the new “married” material centered on the culture clash of marrying a man from a different country. Bergman is getting used to having his foibles explored in public, Rudner says.

Rita Rudner performs at 8 and 10 p.m. Thursday at the Laff Stop, 2122 S.E. Bristol St., Newport Beach. Tickets: $12.50. Information: (714) 852-8762.