Comic Zany Forced to Dig Past the Fat : Stand-up: The comedian, who has gone from 350 pounds to 175, no longer gets laughs simply because of his size.

One of Bob Zany’s funniest jokes is about being pulled over by a cop, who asks Zany, “Do you know why I pulled you over?”

Replies Zany: “ ‘Cause you’re lonely and never been with a fat man?”

Zany can’t do that joke anymore.

When Zany weighed 350 pounds, the joke was funny.

At 175 pounds, it just doesn’t work anymore.

Over the past nine months--through a 900-calories-a-day diet and daily exercise--Zany has lost so much weight that he no longer looks “delightfully goofy,” as one critic called him last year.

The more svelt but still-zany comedian no longer gets laughs simply because of his size or the outlandishly loud Hawaiian shirts he usually wore on stage.

“I think a big guy who walks out on stage already has the immediate attention of the audience and kind of gets the laughs initially because the ‘big guy’ is supposed to be jolly and funny,” Zany said in a phone interview.

“Now, it’s pretty much me on my own.”

But a thinned-down Bob Zany doesn’t have to work harder for the laughs, said the Los Angeles-based comedian who is at the Laff Stop in Newport Beach Wednesday through Sunday.

“I just have to work to present it differently,” he said. “Some things just don’t fit me anymore . . . like my clothes.”

Zany said some of his friends who haven’t seen him since he lost weight don’t even recognize him. “I say my name, and they actually take a step back and gasp,” he said. “It’s a weird thing. The only good thing is I don’t have to say hi to people I don’t like.”

Zany said he really doesn’t make “much ado” about his weight loss in his act.

“I’m working on some bits about it, but it’s an important thing in my life. Maybe it’s so important I don’t want to joke about it.”

He reconsidered the remark, then laughed: “Trust me, I’ll have a bit about this you won’t believe. Just be patient.”

Zany said that, depending on his mood, he does some of his old fat jokes as a sort of retrospective: “I used to be big . . . “

“I do a salute of the old gags because they’re still good,” he said, adding that a fellow comedian told him the other night that he thought the fat jokes get bigger laughs now because the audience no longer feels sorry for Zany for being so overweight.

Said Zany: “It’s like it was funny, but it was also unfunny” when he was overweight.

Zany theorizes that if the fat jokes are getting bigger laughs now it may be because the audience is acknowledging his accomplishment.

“We can sit and analyze it forever,” he said. “I get the laughs. That’s what matters. If it works it works and you go with it.”

As for the rest of his act today, it’s no different than when he was heavy: “Nothing too relevant. I’m still just out there doing the jokes, honing my craft. I say, ‘You just have to see it to believe it.’ ”

And he is still using props in his act, digging them out of a big suitcase he calls his Orson Welles lunch pail--objects such as the wallet with a tube of money running directly to a figurine of Mickey Mouse.

He calls it “A Day at Disneyland.”