COVER STORY : She Doesn’t Make It Easy : Diane Ford’s sly, earthy humor and outspoken style make the boys’ club of stand-up comedy a bit uncomfortable

What’s true of the art world in general is also true of the world of comedy: Each of its leading practitioners is radically unlike anyone else. It’s at the second and third level of any form that you have your stylistic acolytes, your slavish popularizers who echo in various ways Picasso’s line, “You do something and someone else comes along and does it pretty.”

On that basis alone, you have to appreciate Diane Ford: There’s simply no one like her. Although she’s been working in the club scene for more than 10 years (at 35, she’s now a headliner) and has been featured in two HBO specials, “Women of the Night” and “One Night Stand” (HBO has a penchant for reconceiving women comics as hookers), Ford is not well-known outside of the clubs--she’s more of a comedian’s comedienne. Two elements that distinguish her act consist of the subtle expressiveness with which she can rescue a lot of so-so material, and an even more elusive quality, rare among women--a talent for healthy bawdiness as opposed to marginally embarrassing vulgarity.

This is a tough call to make about female comics who, on the surface of things, should be just as free to fling expletives and excreta around as men. But many female comics haven’t solved the problem of how to be both rough-and-tumble and feminine, or, to put it another way, how to universalize their intimate concerns in a way that isn’t grating, peculiar or petty. And many others who talk dirty sound cheap--as do a lot of men who don’t seem to realize that the overuse of expletives and their surrounding field of references fouls their medium of exchange, which is language. How often can you sit and listen to plaints over PMS?

Another obstacle women comedians face is the broad net of standards thrown out over the comedy culture by Johnny Carson, whose “Tonight Show” had been the sine qua non of comedy hopefuls for decades before cable came along and the clubs began to flourish. Even still, a six-minute spot on Carson can jump up a comic’s status and asking price overnight. Carson, a Midwesterner, has gone on record saying that he’s uncomfortable around women who tell jokes for a living. Diane Ford has never appeared on his show. When someone suggested that he might be afraid of her, she quipped, “Hell, tell him to wear a cup!”

That impromptu line is vintage Ford, who looks like a conventionally stylish and attractive business or professional woman but carries the earthy good humor of a bordello queen, someone who greets you with a hearty slap on the back and orders a shot of whiskey at the bar. That continuous shift between genteel appearance and deadpan sotto voce reality is one of the things that has always informed her act, from the moment she first came out onstage to tell us in her no-nonsense manner that she’s from Minnesota and that her Scandinavian forebears fought through dark weather, icy seas and vast, hostile distances, “Only to wind up in a place just as goddamned miserable as the one they left. “

Ford’s material has been changing from the earlier days when she talked about her family background, her first marriage and some of the jobs she’s had (in one, as a sales rep for a wholesale beef firm, she told us her company car brandished the motto “You Can’t Beat Our Meat”). Of late, she’s been talking of smaller, more day-to-day experiences, like the strange feeling of wearing a bikini that rides up on purpose when “I’ve spent my whole life trying to keep my underwear out of there.”

The benign discord between men and women remains her general and favorite topic, and while she’s always been able to punch up a line with a dramatic break between winsome sparkle and the appalled look of someone who’s just witnessed an unbelievable gaffe, she’s added even more physical subtlety, awakening to a punch line, for example, like Stan Laurel, dimly grasping at its implications with a pop of her eyes.

In this she’s become one of our most facially expressive women comedians. This line about George and Barbara Bush may stand on its own: “Any man who can age a woman like that can’t be good for us.” A lot of others don’t carry as well; it’s her conspiratorial voice and manner that save them. In comedy, the next best thing to being a great writer is being a great rescuer of ordinary material. No one is a better rescuer than Ford.

“I’ve heard people do jokes like mine and couldn’t sell ‘em,” she says. “I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I believe ‘em, and the audience lets me get away with it. Some people they won’t let go a minute. But me, they give me all the time in the world.”

Although Ford insists that in her act, “I really try to talk to women,” it’s her common bond with a certain element of male baseness that puts her across to men, a style of address learned from dealing with her brothers, “behemoths,” as she characterizes them, “ex-footballers. Not liberal free-thinking people.”

“There’s a strength in her material that’s not offensive,” says Chris Albrecht, senior programming vice president at HBO. “There’s a center in her, a likability, and she’s strong enough to accept adult standards. She has a maturity that comes out without being angry. An intelligence surrounds her humor, and she discusses things everyone can relate to, material relevant to herself, not something out of left field.”

“She’s not a shy wallflower type,” observes Budd Friedman, owner of the Improv. “She’s outspoken and gets away with it. She just shows those dimples and the audience loves it. She uses language for effect, not shock. As tough as she comes across, she has this soft inner quality. She’s one of the most attractive women comedians around.”

It’s taken a long time for Ford to locate the “likable center” Albrecht referred to--in fact, most of her life. In several interviews--one at the San Diego Improv, another in a West L.A. Italian restaurant, and then at her Santa Monica apartment the day before she was scheduled to fly to a gig in Seattle (she’s on the road 35 weeks out of the year)--she discussed her troubled background and her career.

“I think a lot of people who become comedians have known tragedy in their lives,” she said. “I don’t mean the lighter ones, the white-bread boys like Jerry Seinfeld, who I respect even though he doesn’t dig very deep. That’s part of his skill, to be completely entertaining on one level. I think a lot of comedians are dealing out of pain from early in their lives.”

Ford was born Diane Waldron on a farm in Waseca, Minn., a town of about 3,000. (She’s kept the surname Ford from her first marriage.) The youngest of five children (she has two brothers and two sisters, though she never mentions her sisters in her act), she was 13 years old when her parents were killed in a car accident.

“I wanted to be a doctor when I was a kid, and probably would be practicing medicine today in that little town if it hadn’t been for the accident,” she said. “Even today, I think the main purpose of comedy is to heal. But because I was so young, I fell into a set of circumstances that made me a child of the universe. Since my parents left no will, there could be no decision about who was going to take care of me. I got passed around a lot from relative to relative and ended up in a foster home. Nobody could handle me. I’d drink wine in the driveway before going to school. I shoplifted. I was crying out. Somebody should’ve understood. I think what made it worse is that I’d been a bright and treasured little girl. I could do math and third grade reading in kindergarten. I’d had the best of it. Then it was all taken away.”

During a rough six-year period, Ford also landed in a detention center and a small Catholic girls’ boarding school (the student body numbered 34) that was the equivalent of a nunnery. “I understand the need for kids who wanna run so far away because they don’t know what it is they wanna run to ,” she says. At one point she had gone to live with her aunt, who discovered a letter by Ford that described her unflatteringly (“I said she was a bitch”). Ford came home to find her bags packed and deposited in the kitchen, with a note advising her to go live with her brother. (When she moved in with him, his wife moved out in protest.)

“I felt unworthy,” she recalled. “I felt if I could please people, they wouldn’t turn me away. I killed myself trying to be absolutely perfect all the time. But that’s unrealistic. I wasn’t capable of handling my fear, of handling any of it. I’d always been interested in comedy, even as a child, when I could do impressions from watching the Ed Sullivan show. But comedy was also a way to get into self-examination. When I’m up there, I’m more naked than a stripper.”

Through all her emotional turmoil, Ford managed to keep up her grades, which, paradoxically, worked against her at home. (“They’d say, ‘Well, there can’t be very much wrong with her.’ ”) She remembers 1970 as a year in which the counterculture turmoil of America at large mirrored her inner state. “Everybody in the country was into their feelings. Tune in, drop out.” She made a stab at college, lasting a single quarter at the University of Minnesota before she quit to go to work as a sales rep for a food brokerage firm, covering 30 states on the East Coast.

This was the first of a couple of similar jobs in which she began to find her metier: jokes. When she went to work for Regal Chicken breasts, a company based in Skokie, Ill., she says, “I’d go in and tell guys, ‘I got the best breasts.’ I made people laugh and laugh and laugh. It was never about business. Then I’d say, ‘You wanna buy this junk?’ They’d say, ‘OK, just to see you again.’ I didn’t care for the product, but it was $30,000 a year and a car.”

Around this time she met her first husband, a psychology major who was working on his master’s degree in hospital administration. “I met him in a bar in Minnesota and went home with him the first night,” she said. Then she gave a quizzical pause. “Maybe I shouldn’t say that. Maybe I should say I met him in church, but I don’t go.”

One of Ford’s idiosyncracies is a surprising unguardedness. She says virtually anything that comes to mind without censoring herself, an unusual quality in a medium in which most people measure interviews in terms of publicity rather than self-revelation, and therefore tend to be timid.

Ford quit her job at her husband’s insistence (“He didn’t like me traveling so much”) and found herself at loose ends. “I was so depressed that I’d be in my bathrobe until 3 o’clock in the afternoon.”

They moved west so that he could continue his studies at UCLA. Ford enrolled in Ron Carver’s comedy writing class (also at UCLA), and later took Bob Dwan’s stand-up comedy course, which was conducted under the aegis of USC at the Variety Arts Center (the site where “Saturday Night Live’s” Victoria Jackson got her start by reciting poetry while standing on her head).

Ford went back to work as a sales rep for a beef company (at one point an entire portion of her act was based on the allusive richness of this job) and starting showing up at open-mike nights at the local clubs.

“The first time I went on was at the Comedy Store on Sunset. I did three minutes on my mother-in-law. Jim was furious. He’d say, ‘You know, you’re not really very funny.’ I was bad. I had bad material. But I was hooked. I found out from other comics where to sign up. There was the Rose Cafe, Osco’s, the Comedy Cafe. I wrote sketches on anything that interested me. I went on cable access as this talk show host, Martha Mellow, wearing an Indian dress. I played an old lady from an organization called KDDL--Kids Don’t Deserve Life.”

The comedy club scene was beginning to develop around this time (the mid-to-late ‘70s), and Ford began to branch out. Her first booking was at a place called Laffs Unlimited in Sacramento. “I mustn’t have been very good. They never asked me back.”

She began traveling to venues as far as Ohio and Florida. At a place called the Comedy Works in Denver, according to Ford, an overweight housewife sat in back of the club taking notes on both her and another comic, Judy Tenuta. The woman’s name was Roseanne Barr, whom Ford later invited to Los Angeles.

“She trashed my house,” Ford recalls. “I love Roseanne. She still makes me laugh and we had some of the best conversations I’ve ever had with a woman. And at that time, she had a touching vulnerability. But she’s mean as hell, a real snake. When she’s in her black mood, you don’t wanna be around.”

Ford’s marriage had begun to unravel. “Jim wanted to start a family. I was reluctant. I was still kinda nuts. Antsy. I was not happy about the marriage. I was gaining confidence from comedy. I was able to face my parents’ death through jokes. It takes a long time for a marriage to blow apart, but it finally happened. But he’s all right. He just wanted someone submissive. I think submissive people are manipulative, but he got what he wanted”--here her voice lowers conspiratorially--”a 19-year-old bimbette who who walks 7 feet behind him. I’m not bitter. Ha, ha, ha,” she laughed, with mock Camille-like hollowness.

The couple divorced, and for a while, although she worked steadily, her personal life was still precarious. Some of the time, she was nearly destitute. “I was hungry a lot,” she recalls. “I dated for dinner. Even though I’d been a divisional sales director in my day job, after my divorce I couldn’t get a credit card.” (This, and the disparity between men’s and women’s salaries on the club scene, particularly when she was starting out, is one of the many things that has fed her unabating feminist fever. Another is misogynistic jokes: “When violence against women is at an all-time high, you just can’t provoke that kind of thinking.”)

She began finding her comedy voice, “A difficult thing to describe. You have this voice inside that screams to be funny about all your experiences, but the trick is finding the right words to make it clear to everyone else. I started out with very talented people who never were able to find the words to express the voice inside them and saw their careers stop. You have to be able to get people to see your point of view.”

Why has Ford yet to enjoy major commercial exposure? “She’s a very suspicious woman,” says one industry insider, who contends that Ford looks too hard for ulterior motives in other people. “It is a Machiavellian business, but she’s quick to pick a fight, and people begin to wonder if it’d be worthwhile spending a lot of time and money on her.”

Adds the Improv’s Friedman, “I don’t know why it hasn’t happened for her yet. But it takes a long time for anyone to make it, and she’s on the road a lot. And she is a tough cookie. She knows what she wants and she stands up for her rights. She’s not afraid to speak her mind. We’ve had words, but we both get it our of our systems and go on from there. A lot of men can’t handle that.”

“I think it’s just a matter of time,” adds Jan Smith, the owner of Igby’s in West Los Angeles, and a Ford admirer. “She’s one of the few performers who can retain her femininity yet appeal to men. . . . I see her as an ideal next door neighbor type who comes in with the zingers. But it’s hard to see what casting people see. Look at Jerry Seinfeld. He hated his bit part on ‘Benson,’ and quit to go out on the road, and is back with his own show.”

However far down the road major success may be, Ford in the meantime has gained a veteran’s confidence and a steadily increasing degree of self-knowledge. “I think that I had built up a strong wall for fear of being a victim, of not being in control of my life. I never allowed anyone to see me vulnerable; I thought vulnerability and victimization were the same thing. I had to become successful enough in order to put a few things to bed. I had to put away the grief. I had to allow the child in myself more freedom, and to be vulnerable to a partner. If you’ve had a trauma like mine and you don’t get the right help, you become locked in a vicious cycle. You see it in the courts every day.”

Ford weathered another failed marriage (to a rock drummer), and the ‘80s. The marriage broke up, she claims, because he used drugs and she didn’t and no longer wanted to be party to a user’s attendant ploys and evasions. (“He tried to tell me I wasn’t sexually attractive anymore. It was a way of trying to manipulate me into wanting his approval. But, fortunately, I’d outgrown that.”)

The decade, too, saddened her. “What does it mean when life has been devalued to the point where a pair of Reeboks is worth a life? In the ‘80s, materialism took the place of value. What was valuable was what you had, not what you were. We’re looking at a society that doesn’t take care of its children. Am I the only one who remembers John F. Kennedy saying, ‘Let’s make a great future’?”

But the ‘90s have brought a new round of expectations and disappointments. Her manager, Jerry Goldstein, reports that she may become a regular on the upcoming “Candid Camera” syndicated TV show, and that he has her making the rounds to casting agents.

“Frankly, her prior manager did her a great disservice and she burned a lot of bridges,” Goldstein said. “But she’s learned to relax a lot more. I see her successful not only as a performer, but as a writer and producer as well. TV exposure is the key.” (“I’d like to write and direct like Woody Allen” Ford quipped, “and sleep with men who want to be in my movies”).

Actually, Ford is engaged to a senior vice president of Caesars Palace (“When we get married it’ll be the first time I haven’t had to support a husband”) and her reputation is growing more secure (HBO’s Albrecht, who also heads a production development company, says he’s carefully searching for a vehicle expressive of her gifts). She also thinks the club scene has outgrown the amount of talent needed to support it and that conditions for women (particularly in regard to physical safety in connection with the clubs, and in the condos where out-of-town comics are boarded) have not improved.

But Ford remains scrutably herself, eccentrically divided, as she reveals in this anecdote: At the Comedy Convention in Las Vegas two years ago, she took on Robert Morton, producer of the “Late Night With David Letterman Show,” in a debate over the second-class treatment of women in comedy and was impolitic enough to take the disagreement into a private party afterwards, whereupon, according to Ford, he angrily told her she’d never work the Letterman show for as long as he had anything to do with it. (Morton denies this. “I’ve never said that to anyone, though there’ve been many occasions when I’ve wanted to say it. You just can’t do that in this business.”)

“The room of comedians parted like the Red Sea when we started to go at it,” she said. “ ‘Wow, you told the truth!’ they said, after he left. Yeah, and I wish I hadn’t. But you don’t have much choice in this world. You have to stand up. Speak out.” (As to why Ford has never appeared on ‘Late Night,’ Morton said, “I don’t think she’s right for our show.”)

She told this story in her apartment, peering into the burgundy center of a glass of ’78 haute grionde, which she swirled pensively. “Maybe he’ll change his mind and find some humor in it, later in life,” she said.

“Maybe I just shoulda shut up.”