A Kind Word for Rodney’s

Before the Diceman, there was the Dissed-Man.

In lieu of ever-elusive respect, Rodney Dangerfield may have to settle for veneration: At the Wednesday night opening of his new comedy club, Rodney’s Place in Century City, the veteran comic and entrepreneurial talent scout was coming in for the only kind words of the evening, from his stable of very grateful proteges.

“It’s great to come open Rodney’s club. Rodney is one of the only people who’s big who still helps people,” says comic Dom Irrera toward the end of his set. He’s interrupted his routine to be seven-eighths serious for a moment, and when he gets around to slagging those other comedians who didn’t remember the little people after getting on top, he’s still not kidding around.

“Not Roseanne. Roseanne Barr wouldn’t (expletive) help her baby, she’s so selfish. And I don’t know what happened to Arsenio. Arsenio was my friend. . . . If Sammy Davis Jr. and Merv Griffin collided at the speed of light, up out of the rubber would come Arsenio.”

Dangerfield has been known to haunt clubs for the purpose of finding younger guys to stick in his HBO stand-up specials and to book in Dangerfield’s, his New York club of 23 years standing. Now those who find themselves under his wing have a local venue.

“Comedy is a funny thing,” says Dangerfield, no pun apparently intended, sitting at a table at the back of the 181-seat room at the Twenty/20 nightclub. “It’s rare when you find someone who’s great, and it’s a kick to spot ‘em.”

But, on the subject of opening a local club, he sounds less altruistic and waxes typically disingenuous.

“It’s better than doing nothin’ at night,” says Dangerfield, who promises to pop in and perform some evenings. “I’ll have a place to go to, meet people, have friends and have a few laughs. And what the heck’s life all about? Movies are great, and I just finished one”--(brief plug here for his latest project, “Ladybugs,” which Paramount is “very excited” about)--”but you don’t get that immediate response, ‘cause I was brought up in nightclubs so I guess I’m partial to ‘em.”

But when Dangerfield is up on stage to do his closing 15-minute set, the audience doesn’t expect or get quite the same niceties.

“What the (expletive) did I open this (expletive)-house for?” he rhetorically bellows. “Am I (expletive) lonely ?”

Only someone who wants no respect would nab a ringside table at a comedy club. Tonight, there are plenty of not-unwilling targets, like the woman with a shiny dress and well-proportioned bosom at stage right, seated next to an older gentleman who looks like he may know where the bodies are buried. “Your breasts are wrapped in aluminum foil to keep them fresh for Big Daddy, right?” asks Irrera.

At stage left is a large, balding fellow who comes in for even more abuse from Irrera. “I am not gay, but if I was in prison, I would like to be in the same cell with you! Is that so wrong?”

Up next, boundlessly energetic Harry Basil is doing riff after riff on the movies, most of them five to 10 years old. He’s Superman, now he’s Jennifer Beals, now he’s Stallone--and now he’s Al Pacino as Scarface, shooting the audience with a water-pistol machine gun. “Since I can’t get you people in the back of the room, I’ll bounce it off this bald guy’s head!”

The guy in question is a comedy aficionado named Lenny Rosenbaum, who, it turns out, was also at the opening of Dangerfield’s New York club 23 years ago. He’s pleased by the lineup: “At other clubs you have to sit through a lot of weak stuff, but everybody here is top-notch.” And persecution doesn’t faze Rosenbaum: “You always take a risk getting a front table but it’s worth it. It’s so much more personal than being at the Universal Amphitheatre. You feel they’re talking to you.”

He cheerfully predicts the club will do well. Not everyone is so sure. Notes another satisfied comedy buff, Dan St. Ledger, “Rodney’s got some of the best guys in town. And they were all really on tonight. But I give the club three months, tops.” Because? “People aren’t gonna come out at night to Century City without top-name talent,” he says--giving the words Century City the same out-of-the-way implications a show-biz type might assign to West Covina or Pacoima.

After an hour and a half of host Frazer Smith and three other comics, Dangerfield is finally on. Clearly, he’s not using this venue as a place to try out new material: Virtually every self-deprecating line in his 15 minutes is familiar to true fans--albeit delivered with the trademark kind of palpable, spitfire bitterness that somehow makes every disgusted-by-living gag as fresh as today’s obituaries.

His sex life, of course, is “like shooting pool with a rope.” Old age stinks. “When you go to the bathroom five times a night, that’s the golden years!” There’s less to look forward to, he explains: “At this point, if I take very good care of myself, I’ll get sick and die!”

Dangerfield isn’t quite as big on audience participation as the other comics--”I’ll do the jokes. What the hell are you, a director? Everybody’s a director in this town”--though he’s not above bumming cigarettes off ringside ladies. (“Born to serve man,” he murmurs conspiratorially, getting lit.)

But finally, like everyone else, he gets around to a requisite bald gag, looking to stage left to explain a pause in his performance:

“I had him shinin’ right in my (expletive) eye.”

Having been dissed by the master, Rosenbaum is in seventh heaven.