COMEDY REVIEW : Warm Up for TV Sitcom

“I’m not doing comedy anymore,” Ellen DeGeneres announced to the audience at the beginning of her Saturday night performance at UCLA’s Royce Hall. She was only half-kidding--she’s abandoning the grueling world of stand-up for the equally grueling world of network television. Her ABC sitcom, “These Friends of Mine,” is scheduled as a replacement for whatever fall premiere gets canceled early; she vowed that Saturday’s show was the last for quite some time.

Happily, she exited gracefully, with an evening that served as something of a collection of her best routines. DeGeneres’ wryly incisive observations of life’s little annoyances have won her comparisons to Jerry Seinfeld, while a bit she does about a phone conversation with God recalls Bob Newhart at his button-down best. Some of her vignettes suggest a post-modern Mary Richards, which bodes well for her assault on the sitcom world.

First and foremost, however, DeGeneres’ sometimes hapless, sometimes disingenuously politically incorrect persona is her own blissed-out creation. Her comic riffs often threaten to spiral out of control, veering off on unexpected tangents--a bit that begins discussing her father’s propensity for practical jokes takes a hard left into material set on an Indian reservation and winds up with her fondly recalling guest actors on the old “Mannix” TV series.

Though many of her targets for comic fodder are benignly familiar--her 90-minute set included long musings on airline minutiae, her cat’s high jinks and singing along with one’s car radio--DeGeneres’ wit has just enough of an edge and skewed sensibility to be memorable. Discussing the short-lived fad of licking frogs to get high, she asked, “How many animals did they have to lick to find out about the frog?” Regardless of the fate of her upcoming TV program, DeGeneres will always have a welcome home on the stand-up circuit.