COMEDY : Henton Flies High After ‘Tonight Show’ Leap

Rock stars, says comedian John Henton, are just plain strange.

“You know they’re strange because they name their kids bizarre names,” Henton says. “David Bowie has a son named Zowie. I’m talking Zowie Bowie. . . . Frank Zappa has three children. Check this out: Dweezil, Moon Unit and Motorhead. . . . I would kick my daddy’s butt if he named me Motorhead. And then he made his daughter Moon Unit. . . . Anybody knows that’s a boy’s name.”

The comic from Cleveland’s take on rock stars, rap music, Arizona’s refusal to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday (“you got to be prejudiced as hell not to take a day off from work”) and the dumb things he encounters on the road all helped him win the 1991 Johnny Walker National Comedy Search.

Not a bad career boost, especially considering that it caught the eye of a “Tonight Show” talent scout, resulting in a performance on the show a year ago that gave Henton’s career what he calls a “serious jump-start.”

Henton--who headlines at the Irvine Improv this week--still is basking in the glow of not only killing the studio audience but receiving the ultimate accolade: At the end of his six-minute set, Johnny Carson invited him over to the couch.

In a phone interview from his Hollywood home, Henton recalled that doing “The Tonight Show” was “weird because I haven’t done anything before or since that compared to that crowd. It was like I was at a comedy club on Saturday night. It was that type of crowd. It was like that’s what they were there for--primed up and ready to go, and every joke just worked. It was crazy.”

Happy he had done so well, Henton looked over to Carson to see if he might give a thumbs-up or OK sign. Instead, Henton said, not only Carson but also Ed McMahon and guest Tony Bennett were waving at him to come over.

“I couldn’t believe it. I just kind of went into shock because nobody does that, especially not the first time out. I thought I was having some weird fantasy thing that came true. I looked at the stage manager and he was like, ‘Go over.’ ”

Henton’s chat with Carson was just the start of the good things that have come his way a result of those six golden minutes.

The next day, Henton said, “The phones were ringing off the hook and Joyce at Mr. Carson’s headquarters got two typewritten pages full of agents and managers wanting to talk to me. Somebody even called me that night at 12:30. I thought, ‘How in hell did you get my number?’ ”

Henton said his “Tonight Show” appearance has “made all the difference in the world” to his career. Not only has he signed with the William Morris Agency, but he also has landed a “high-powered” manager and publicist. Henton--who returned to “The Tonight Show” for a second appearance in October--also has appeared now on MTV, “The Arsenio Hall Show” and “Bob Hope’s Young Comedians Special,” and he said all that exposure has made it easier for him to get readings for acting jobs.

In April, he taped a pilot for a sketch-comedy series produced by Eddie Murphy’s production company and, the same month, he returned home to Cleveland to tape his first half-hour comedy special, to air on Showtime in January.

It’s the classic “overnight success” that took him a decade to achieve.

In 1982, Henton was working in a Cleveland paint warehouse during the day and studying computer science at night. A career in comedy was the last thing on his mind, he said, although he and his fellow warehouse workers always “made up our own jokes and had a good time.”

After reading about amateur night at a Cleveland comedy club, a co-worker urged Henton to give it a try.

“I started scribbling down stuff,” Henton said. “It was stuff I used to do at the warehouse. It could be pretty rude and blue. It did go pretty well. They were laughing. But none of the other amateurs was doing anything like that.”

The next week, he toned down the risque material and won the amateur night contest. He continued doing comedy part-time until 1988, three years after he moved to Los Angeles, when he went full-time.

He said his creative process hasn’t changed much since Cleveland.

He described his comedy style simply as “observational. That’s what I do. I’m not a comedy writer per se. I wait for things to happen, or (for) a situation that you see and you say, ‘Well, what if?’ . . . and you take it a step further.

“But it’s got to be something that sparks. I couldn’t sit down and say, ‘I’m going to write a joke about driving’. It has to be something I’ve seen. I’m always looking, reading the paper and watching the news and just being observant.

“What with the people you got out there now, there’s always something funny.

“It’s dumb stuff that gets on your nerves. I’m at the grocery store walking down the aisle, look on the shelf, I see Minute Rice is now microwaveable. Why? I mean if it only took a minute in the first damn place.”

Then there was the time he got into a hotel elevator in Hawaii “and I see this family. I don’t know where they’re from--North Dakota, South Dakota--but one thing I do know: They never saw a black man before in their life. . . . Man, I get on the elevator, little kid’s got these tennis shoes on, right? They got these designs on them. I’m just making conversation: ‘I say, my man, what’s that?’ He say, ‘Ninja.’ . . .

“I say, ‘What?’ And his parents thought that I thought that he had said that special N word. They’re like, ‘Oh, no no no! Ninja! Teen-age Ninja Turtles! Don’t kill him, black man, he’s our only son!”

Who: John Henton.

When: Thursday, July 30, and Sunday, Aug. 2, at 8:30 p.m.; Friday, July 31, at 8:30 and 10:30 p.m.; Saturday, Aug. 1, at 8 and 10:30 p.m. With Milt Abel and Lee Allen.

Where: The Improv, 4255 Campus Drive, Irvine.

Whereabouts: Take the San Diego (405) Freeway to the Jamboree Road exit, go south onto Jamboree, then left onto Campus Drive. The Improv is in the Irvine Marketplace shopping center, across Campus Drive from the UC Irvine campus.

Wherewithal: $7 to $10.

Where to Call: (714) 854-5455.