NONFICTION - July 5, 1992

NAKED BENEATH MY CLOTHES by Rita Rudner (Viking: $17; 162 pp.) Rita Rudner won the 1990 American Comedy Award for Funniest Female Stand-up, and has had her own specials on HBO and A & E, a fairly long list of credits for a category that until too recently had a Men Only sign posted over the door. Rudner tackles a fairly standard list of topics, from the travails of a non-cooking woman in a society that still expects haute cuisine from a hot date, to her skepticism, after tandem-baby-sitting a dog and a kid, about the joys of any kind of long-term caretaking relationship. She bemoans the sorry state of datable men, wonders about men and their cars, and agonizes over the cult of the physically superfit. Which is to say, this is not Robin Williams rollicking through the speculative universe. It is a set of fairly spiffy riffs on predictable topics. What it also is is material that is meant to be spoken. I found myself reading lines aloud, and even with my miserable amateur delivery, they often sounded funnier than they had read on the printed page. Publishers might want to think that anyone who is funny standing up is funny being held between the readers’ hands, but the transference is not quite that simple. Rudner is very funny when you say her. She is less reliably funny when you read her, which is a function of her being more proficient at her chosen medium than at her ancillary one.