The Farce Is Still With Andrew Bergman : Movies: The writer-director of ‘Honeymoon in Vegas’ has a Ph.D. and loves hearing audiences laugh at something he wrote.

Though he comes across like an unassuming guy who grew up playing stickball in Queens, N.Y., film writer-director Andrew Bergman can’t help throwing off the intellectual aura of a scholar. He certainly has the credentials for it: a Ph.D. in American intellectual history from the University of Wisconsin.

But it’s not just the academic credits. Bergman, whose latest laugh-out-loud farce, “Honeymoon in Vegas,” opens today, seems to have had discriminating tastes from the time he was a baseball-loving boy in Corona, where he was born 47 years ago.

A fan of the Yankees at their 1950s peak, Bergman didn’t embrace the obvious pin-striped gods from the era such as Mantle, Berra or Ford.

“Hank Bauer,” Bergman says by phone from his vacation hide-out in Wyoming. “He was my favorite. I lived for Hank Bauer. I was at the World Series game when he hit his first series home run. It was a shot down the left-field line. It was an exquisite memory of my childhood.”

Bergman’s connoisseur’s instincts make you wonder why such an avid, cultivated mind prefers writing mainstream movie comedies such as “The In-Laws” and “The Freshman” to, say, writing essays for literary magazines.

Besides the obvious answer of (like Damon Wayans) “mo’ money,” Bergman also draws what he calls “an almost narcotic rush” from “having a room full of people laughing, screaming at something I wrote. There is literally nothing like it anywhere.”

Bergman first felt this rush back in 1974 at a pre-release screening of “Blazing Saddles,” which he co-wrote with Norman Steinberg, Alan Uger, Richard Pryor and the film’s director Mel Brooks. He went solo in 1979 with the Peter Falk-Alan Arkin cult hit “The In-Laws.” Since then, his success as a farceur has grown with his scripts for such films as “Fletch,” “Chances Are,” “Soapdish,” “So Fine” and “The Freshman.” Bergman directed the latter two as well. He also had a respectable Broadway success with his play “Social Security.”

“Honeymoon,” he says, started out with the notion of someone pathologically afraid of commitment--in this case, a private detective played by Nicolas Cage, who can’t seem to shake his conscience free of the deathbed wish of his mother that he never marry. Somehow it all works out, but not before Cage is driven to near-madness in New York, Hawaii and back in Vegas again.

Asked to explain his predilection for high-concept farce, Bergman says, “I don’t know. It’s just something I do. It’s not, like, the challenge of the form or the pace that appeals to me as opposed to doing, say, ‘The Miracle Worker.’ It starts, literally, with an idea, a situation. And then you go where the characters take you.”

He’s able to talk about the process with a scholar’s objectivity-- probably because he doesn’t live and work in the moviemaking hothouse of Southern California. He resides with his wife and children in New York and Massachusetts and keeps bankers’ hours in an office in Manhattan. His decent track record at the box office has guaranteed Bergman a latitude and freedom to develop projects that budding screenwriters can only dream of.

Bergman was already a fairly successful writer before he got into film, best known as the author of two highly regarded detective novels, set in the 1940s, featuring a wise-cracking New York detective named Jack LeVine. Both “The Big Kiss Off of 1944” and “Hollywood and LeVine” are still in print--as, for that matter, is Bergman’s doctoral dissertation on Depression-era movies, “We’re in the Money.” Bergman says he cherishes the royalty checks from the latter book, “more than anything.”

“Saddles” was not only the first movie-writing gig for Bergman. He also remembers it as perhaps his best movie-writing experience. “It was, literally, four or five guys sitting in a room throwing one-liners at each other. And that was just the first draft.”

Actually, Bergman sold the very first draft a couple years before to Warner Bros. It was called “Tex X,” a 90-page film treatment whose story Bergman characterizes as “H. Rap Brown on horseback in the desert.” The concept of the militant black cowboy was just about the only aspect of the original treatment that survived the final print. Bergman didn’t mind--especially after hearing all those people laugh that first night.

For all his post-graduate involvement in movies, Bergman says he wasn’t a movie-obsessed kid, baseball being, as he put it, “my fantasy outlet.” Nevertheless, he remembers being “obliterated” the first time he saw “Some Like It Hot,” the Billy Wilder farce with Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe.

“I remember sitting through it twice with my friends from school,” he recalls. “Not just for her. But because it was just so funny. It’s funny to this day.”

One would think that the experience was galvanizing enough to inspire Bergman to go directly to constructing the similarly broad farces that have made his fortune. But he was much more interested in his history and literature courses.

“I wrote constantly ever since I was a little kid. But it never occurred to me, growing up, to make a living at it.” Bergman says. “I imagined myself writing history then sucking up to the next guy who wanted to be President and being his adviser-speechwriter, like Ted Sorenson. I thought that would be a nice life.”

Some traces of the political animal remain. “I would love to do a good political comedy. I’ve been watching the conventions; the whole discourse of politics has become so debased. It’s reached a point where everything is based on polling. Everything! On pleasing as many people as possible, going for the lowest common denominator. There’s a strange kind of story lurking there, waiting to be written.”