Prize Puts Comedy Writer on Laugh Track : Fellowship: After winning a competition sponsored by TV writer Leslie Stevens, Robin Riordan has an agent and a job. But don’t ask her to do stand-up.

At the age of 9, Robin Riordan was writing for television and now, 16 years later, the Van Nuys woman has won her first award.

It’s not an Emmy, so she doesn’t get to make an acceptance speech before her adoring peers.

But as the recipient of the first Leslie Stevens Fellowship for Television Writing, the USC film school graduate is $2,500 richer. And her prospects for success in the comedy scripting business are now nothing to laugh at.

The award is writer-producer Leslie Stevens’ way of thanking an industry that has been good to him, he said, and it’s also meant to encourage new talent.

He placed an ad announcing the fellowship in the entertainment trade publications in December and received about 1,000 submissions from all over the country.

Stevens, who began his career as an unpaid assistant to Orson Welles, personally chose Riordan as the first recipient and paid the stipend out of his own pocket.

Those pockets are fairly deep these days, thanks to Stevens’ having a hand in more than 1,000 hours of prime-time programming for such shows as “It Takes a Thief,” “The Outer Limits” and “McCloud.”

He said he plans to award as many as four $2,500 fellowships a year.

The work submitted by his first winner was a knockout, he said. “Robin’s writing displays a rare blend of intelligence, skill and outrageous humor,” he said. “She’s an extraordinary talent.”

Riordan said her winning script is an update, with a twist, on the old Katharine Hepburn classic, “The Philadelphia Story.”

“My main character is a tabloid journalist who answers a personal advertisement in an alternative newspaper. The ad is from a gay man looking for a straight woman who will pretend to be his fiancee during a family reunion. His family is of great interest to her tabloid,” said Riordan, who added that she was inspired by seeing such an ad in the L.A. Reader.

“I had written 29 pages of the script when I saw the ad for the fellowship, which asked for 30 pages of a work in progress,” she said.

That was in December.

“That was fate,” she said.

“I was working in development at Republic Pictures and wanting to get my writing career on track, so I was sending out my unpurchased scripts for agents and other people to see,” she said.

People seemed to like what they saw, and all of a sudden, Riordan is hot.

In the past few weeks, she has won the fellowship, gotten an agent and has been selected to work on a script for a new show produced by TV veterans Sam Simon (“The Simpsons”) and Heide Perlman (“The Tracey Ullman Show,” “Cheers”).

Riordan said she has paid off her bills and is planning a short hiatus to savor it all.

One of the things she probably won’t be doing is stand-up.

“I did stand-up once,” she said. “A friend told me, as we were driving to see the show at the Comedy Store one night, that we were the show at the Comedy Store that night,” she recalled.

She and her friend, a fellow writer, just had time to scarf some spaghetti and run their lines before they were stage center.

“I went on and I was pretty good,” Riordan said.

“Afterward I went directly to the bathroom and said goodby to my spaghetti.”

Riordan’s initial success in life came early. She wrote a poem that was recited on the old PBS kids’ program “Zoom.”

From then on, show business was her life.

“I remember getting a $25 check for that poem and thinking, ‘So, you can make money doing this sort of thing. Isn’t that interesting.’ ”