O.C. COMEDY REVIEW : Burns’ Jokes Show His Age, and Audience Loves It

George Burns got a standing ovation Tuesday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center just for coming out on stage. At his age, he deserved it. “Nice to be here,” said Burns, who will be 96 in January. “It’s nice to be anywhere.”

The crowd, which had paid between $50 and $1,000 per person to attend the benefit performance for the Children’s Hospital of Orange County, clearly idolized him, as most crowds do. The comedian’s status has gone beyond cultural icon to human artifact.

Burns acknowledged as much throughout his hourlong monologue with more or less nonstop wisecracks about his age. He sounded like a prodigy in reverse and looked like a kindly gnome wreathed in cigar smoke. But with all due respect, it was hard to tell at times which was older: Burns or his clever punch lines.

Nevertheless, he is probably the only comedian on the planet--Bob Hope and Milton Berle notwithstanding--who not only can be believed when he says he introduced a song in 1916 but can get a laugh with a musical setup like this: “I predicted it was going to be a hit. And I’m going to keep singing it until it is.”

Songs, or rather a talking version of them backed on piano by Burns’ longtime associate Morty Jacobs and by the Ron Rubin band, provided some of the evening’s most charming material.

“I’m going to sing eight songs,” Burns warned early on. “If you like them, I’ll sing nine. If you don’t like them, I’ll sing 38. All ballads.”

More often, though, his material was mildly risque.

“I got it down,” he said, lowering himself into a white chair at stage center and adjusting the microphone to his level. “I hope I’ll be able to get it up.” In case anybody mistook him, he reminded the crowd with characteristically deadpan guile that he was talking about the microphone.

Not that he didn’t tackle the subject of sex head-on. “As my sister Goldie said,” Burns quipped at one point, “sex can’t hurt you if you don’t inhale.” When the remark got a delayed reaction from the crowd, which seemed to be making mental computations for that one, he added: “You want me to repeat that line, too?”

And so it went, one roguish joke after another while Burns puffed on his ever-present cigar with the quiet gusto of a man who has enjoyed many pleasures in life but none perhaps as much as the aroma of cheap tobacco. (“Me without a cigar is like Zsa Zsa Gabor blushing on one of her wedding nights.”)

The comedian’s self-deprecating humor--so familiar to audiences who have followed his career on television, in the movies and in his widely read books--depends on both the patently obvious (“I comb my hair before I put it on”) and the patently absurd (“I used to do a little dance here, but I sold it to Gregory Hines”).

Yet it is Burns’ mere presence on stage that inspires a certain awe. The fact that he is still breathing, let alone telling jokes with exquisite timing, can’t help but get him laughs.

Parenthetically, the woman next to me remarked to her companion: “He looks great for 95, doesn’t he?” Her companion, seeming to take a cue from Burns himself, replied, “Compared to a headstone, he looks fabulous.”

“No kidding,” said the woman, “his skin looks so smooth.”

“Do you think he’s had a face lift?” asked the other.

Julie Budd opened the show with a 45-minute act before the intermission. Her singing was strongest in a medley of songs by Kander and Ebb and in another by George and Ira Gershwin. The songs from her own new album sounded anemic by comparison. Her weakest moment, however, came in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Music of the Night.” She forgot the lyrics in mid-song, panicked and stopped the music. It happens.

* ANN CONWAY

The comedian holds court at the Center Club.