A Toast to Those Ditsy Ditties : Novelty songs, all hits in their day, are the material for the whimsical ‘Crazy Words, Crazy Tunes.’

You don’t have to have a pedigree to be included on the hit list of “Crazy Words, Crazy Tunes” at the Center Stage in Woodland Hills. All that’s required is to be a silly song.

“Irving Berlin probably got a few more honors than ‘I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream’ did,’ ” concedes Milt Larsen, 60, who created this assemblage of novelty songs with Gene Casey. “But these are wonderful, fun songs--all of them major hits in their day. And the show is totally done for laughs. There’s no sermonizing, no moral issues.”

The production, which opened in August and became an immediate hit, features a cast of four in evening wear, and more than two dozen numbers--in solo, duet and medley form. Some of Larsen’s favorites include what he calls “the food songs”: “Does the Spearmint Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?,” “Yes, We Have No Bananas” and “The Prune Song.”

“It’s all done tongue-in-cheek,” Larsen said. “The look is very put together with clothespins. There’s no attempt to vie with ‘Phantom of the Opera’ for fancy scenery.” The source period is from the ‘20s to the ‘40s, which, Larsen reminds, included Prohibition, the Depression, and World War II. “Maybe in those times, people were able to laugh at themselves,” he says of the songs’ irreverence. “Today, we seem to take things much more seriously.”

Larsen and Casey initially mounted a 35-minute version of “Crazy Words” several years ago at Larsen’s Variety Arts Center downtown. For the current version, Center Stage Associate Artistic Director Pamela Hall knew she needed a lot more songs to fill out the evening. “Luckily,” she notes, “Gene said that he had an unending source of material--and he was right.”

Hall, director of the long-running revue “Broadway Sings Out” at the West End Playhouse, had intended only to direct, but ended up performing as well. “I’m up there hoofing, dancing, singing,” she says cheerfully. Even the audience gets into the act. “They’re much more participatory than with other shows,” she says. “You hear, ‘Oh, I know that!’--and they start singing before you do, or they chime in while you’re singing.”

Larsen has long been a devotee of period material. Born and raised in Pasadena, “I started liking everything that was old when I was a teen-ager,” he recalls. “I still have autographs on my wall I got from Mae West and Stan Laurel.” In 1975, he founded the Society for the Preservation of Variety Arts, and from 1973 to 1981 ran the Mayfair Music Hall in Santa Monica, where Casey was the musical director.

Although Larsen entered show business as a writer, beginning in 1956 with an 18-year stint on “Truth or Consequences,” he quickly found himself turning into a music historian, “collecting recordings of films, to learn about what I was doing.” In addition to writing several comedy songs, he was co-author of the musical “Dawgs” with Richard M. & Robert B. Sherman (“Mary Poppins”) and also did a screenplay with them on World War II.

“It’s fascinating to get into the folk history of America,” says Larsen, who with his wife and dog divides his time between Santa Barbara and Hollywood, where his Magic Castle will celebrate its 30th anniversary next year. As for the magic connection, “I come from a family of magicians,” he points out. “The Mayfair used a lot of magic, and the Magic Castle is all about magic. Really, my whole life has been kind of magical.”

Where and When

What: “Crazy Words, Crazy Tunes.”

Where: Center Stage Theatre, 20929 Ventura Blvd. (in the Woodland Hills Village Shopping Center), Woodland Hills.

When: 8 p.m. Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Indefinitely.

Price: $17.50.

Call: (818) 904-0444.