Staying In Shape With Road Work : Comedy: Elayne Boosler has been performing in clubs to get new material for her Showtime special. She stops in Newport Beach on Thursday.

Stand-up comic Elayne Boosler reached a point in her career about 1 1/2 years where she could give up the grind of doing clubs and focus instead on concerts, which allow her to work at a more leisurely pace.

So why has she been on the road performing in clubs almost every night since the first of February? “I have flown every day, or every other day,” she lamented by phone from a West Palm Beach hotel room last week. And there’s no end in sight until mid-June.

“I’m writing my new Showtime special,” explained the Brooklyn native, who wends her way to Newport Beach on Thursday for a one-nighter at the Laff Stop. “The only way to get an hour of (fresh) material is to do this.” The special, her fourth since 1986, will be taped in Dallas on June 14 for airing sometime in October.

(The grind apparently has been worth it: Boosler said she has come up with so much new material that “there’s almost nothing left” of her act as it existed before she hit the road.)

For someone who hadn’t gotten to her room until 4 a.m., Boosler was surprisingly up for an interview at 11 a.m. her time. Friendly and forthcoming, she giggled frequently as she talked of life on the road and the business of writing.

Boosler, who’s 38, conceded that she’s not always so upbeat in the morning. But “there’s a 24-hour gym here, and I work out after the show,” she said. “For some reason you wake up feeling incredible. You fall into the deepest sleep and wake up with not an ounce of tension in place. I have to find something like this in L.A. so I stop torturing people when I wake up.”

Her special will have an intriguing title: “Elayne From Dallas: Live Nude Girls.” Where did that come from? “It’s the most frequent sign I’ve seen in my travels,” she answered with a laugh. The accompanying routine “is about the Live Nude Girls emporiums, as I call them. . . . It goes into what the places are, who the people are and what goes on.” She said that her road manager goes to Live Nude Girls bars every night and that she went with him twice in Fort Lauderdale.

She also has written a few jokes about each city she’s performed in: “For instance, you may not know it, but there’s an incredible amount of history in Dayton, Ohio. It’s very historical. Their Sears actually says Roebuck on it.”

There’s a new crime joke, too: “They caught the first female serial killer in Florida. Eight men. But it was interesting. She didn’t actually kill them. She gained access to their homes and she hid the remote controls and they killed themselves.”

Jay Leno says Boosler is “to female comedy what Dick Gregory and Richard Pryor are to black comedy.” But Boosler says that from the start of her career 18 years ago, she decided to not be labeled a “female” comedian and has avoided doing material that caters only to women.

“I talk to men all day long,” she said. “Why would I stop at 8 o’clock at night?”

Boosler said Jimmie Walker once told her that he and a group of comics were standing around when someone asked, “Who is the best female comedian?” and Walker said, “What about Boosler?” and another guy said, “Boosler’s not a female comedian.”

When Walker told her the story, Boosler recalled, “I said, ‘Yes! Great!”’

She got her start as a singing waitress at a “hole in the wall” club in New York where the list of struggling young comics included such now-familiar names as Leno, Walker, Richard Lewis, Freddie Prinze, Richard Belzer and Andy Kaufman (her onetime boyfriend and mentor, who died seven years ago).

“Little girls in those days didn’t watch Rodney Dangerfield on ‘The Tonight Show’ and say, ‘That’s what I want to be.’ ” she said. “I showed up at this club, and here were these young, handsome guys talking about school and dating and their moms. It was like a dog’s ears went up. I thought it was incredibly wonderful.”

As a comedian who just happens to be a woman, Boosler feels she has great appeal in mid-America. “I deliver very traditionally, and people aren’t threatened. I think if I cursed or seemed wilder, I couldn’t get away with the amount of very opinionated politics I get away with.” But as it is, she said, she can even go to Utah and do pro-abortion jokes. Such as:

“Bush is incredible. He is against abortion, but for capital punishment. Spoken like a true fisherman: Throw them back; kill them when they’re bigger.”

* Elayne Boosler and Alan Bursky perform Thursday at 8 and 10 p.m. at the Laff Stop, 2122 S.E. Bristol St., Newport Beach. Tickets: $15. Information: (714) 852-8762.