A Million Yuks--Far Fewer Bucks : Thousand Oaks: KMDY radio is for laughs. But advertising has been harder to come by than listeners, and funny records aren’t free.

Gloria Arenson was stuck in a traffic jam on the Ventura Freeway, fed up with the “doom and gloom” on the morning news.

So she flipped the radio dial, and between the nonstop talk shows she found vintage Bill Cosby on KMDY (850 AM) radio in Thousand Oaks.

Instant jokes. Arenson laughed. And the drivers in the other cars stared at her.

“Sometimes we just need to take our minds off the ‘ain’t it awful’ parts of our lives,” she said.

But the comedy radio station--the only one of its kind on the West Coast--has been faced with problems that are far from funny, station officials say.

“Everyone loves comedy,” said Jeff Elkins, program director of the station. “It is the most widely accepted format. But it hasn’t been all that good for business.”

Station managers wanted to scrap the laughs for a more profitable news-talk format last spring, but the station was flooded with hundreds of letters and phone calls from listeners. A devoted following that spans from North Hollywood to Santa Barbara persuaded management to keep the all-comedy format.

“There is very little in our lives that is pleasant in today’s world,” said Gene Schklair, 60, a Thousand Oaks artist and avid KMDY listener. “But comedy is important. It gets us through trying times. Laughter is healing.”

Ira Barmak, a Beverly Hills entertainment executive whose projects have included a remake of a classic war film and a horror movie about an ax-wielding Santa Claus, bought KMDY with nine other investors for about $750,000 in 1984, when its call letters were KGOE-AM.

Barmak cut the station’s syndicated talk-show format and started programming comedy bits, chiefly from the stand-up comics of the 1960s. Vintage Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart, Woody Allen, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin and others have been intermingled with classic comics, such as Jack Benny and Fibber McGee and Molly.

Between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., and from 8 to 10 p.m. on weekdays, the station plays the classics. On Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings, they air interview shows with various comedians. The rest of the time they play comedians randomly from their repertoire of 1,000 records.

According to evening disc jockey Brian Rumbaugh, the most requested artist is Bill Cosby. “He’s like our Led Zeppelin.”

When the station started airing only comedy, it was one of three such stations in the country. But the other stations soon went under, and, until recently, KMDY was the only comedy radio station operating in the United States. About a month ago, another comedy station started in Boston.

A major obstacle KMDY faced in the beginning was identifying its audience for its advertisers, said Peter J. Turpel, KMDY general manager. The station could not afford an elaborate market study of listeners, so it was virtually impossible to determine who was listening.

But all that changed when Turpel threatened in March to change the format of the station. From the 1,000 phone calls and letters KMDY received urging the station to stay on the air, officials were finally able to put together the listener profile.

The ages of the listeners who wrote in vary from 16 to 65--a far broader range than most stations. Many of the listeners are professionals who spend hours on the road each day.

Some of the responses were clever. One listener cut out the station’s logo of a laughing mouth and wrote: “Don’t muffle the mouth.” A youngster wrote on pink paper, “Keep us laughing.”

Several people, mostly from the Thousand Oaks area, circulated petitions in their neighborhoods to keep the station on the air.

One listener said he rarely finds humor in some of the cuts the station plays but sent a letter in support of the station anyway.

“It gets so boring sometimes,” Dave McGhee, owner of the Camarillo Heating and Air Conditioning Co., said in an interview. “I don’t know why I wrote that letter. They’re so amateurish. Sometimes there’s just dead air on the station. They make fools of themselves.”

He paused, then added: “But they make my day. Every so often when I’m in the doldrums, I switch to comedy radio.”

To the surprise of station officials, some psychologists and psychiatrists who were listening were actually suggesting the station as therapy for their patients.

In a letter to the station, several Thousand Oaks psychotherapists wrote: “We know and value the effects of humor in the healing process. Keep comedy radio alive.”

Donald Slutzky, a Santa Barbara psychiatrist, scrawled a message on a prescription slip and sent it to the station. It said: “Comedy 24 hrs/day . . . Keep it playing.”

“Every time I’m in my car, I listen to the station,” Slutzky said. “I even tell my patients jokes I hear. It’s great to laugh.”

As a result of the listeners’ letter-writing campaign, advertising has increased by 20%. “Things are picking up,” Elkins said. “But we’re not millionaires. This is not big business.”

And there are other problems. Although the radio station can be heard from the San Fernando Valley to Santa Barbara during the day, it is barely audible outside the Thousand Oaks area at night.

Elkins said the station has applied to the Federal Communications Commission for a power boost, but it could be another year before a decision is made on the matter.

Also, the average listener tunes in to the station for about 20 minutes at a time. “There is a major problem with the listening span,” Elkins said. “You ask people on the street and they’ll say, ‘I listen all the time.’ But they don’t really.’ ”

Some listeners say they would tune in longer if the station played more present-day comedians, but that is easier said than done.

“Our biggest problem is getting clean material,” Elkins said. “I spend a lot of time splicing words out of Eddie Murphy bits. Most of Arsenio Hall is not broadcastable.”

And although a station slogan says, “If the records weren’t free, we would be all news,” the records are downright expensive--and many are hard to find, Elkins said.

“There are hardly any comedy records anymore,” he said. “We have to beg and borrow wherever we can.”

Complicating the matter, some modern comedians have asked the station not to include them in the format. “Some think it will hurt them,” Elkins said. He would not name names. “They think others will steal their jokes.”