His Jokes Spring Eternal : Comedy: At 85, Milton Berle still pumps out the funny lines. He’ll be in Orange County this weekend to host a benefit golf tournament.

Sometimes things are just the way you’d imagine them to be.

Suppose you were going to meet Milton Berle at the Friars Club. Wouldn’t you expect the place to seem just a bit time-worn, exhausted, perhaps, by all the grand events of its heyday? And don’t you imagine the ever-dapper Mr. Berle hunkered down in one of the club’s red leather booths with a couple of old cronies, each wagging big cigars in the air while mulling comic bits?

And so it was last week at the Friars, where Berle, comic Sammy Shore (Paulie’s pop) and longtime Berle friend Buddy Arnold (who authored the theme music for Berle’s “Texaco Star Theater” show in the late ‘40s) were convened.

Berle, by the way, is looking great for a guy who is 15 years shy of 100. He wears just a bit of makeup, has his own hair, and, whether the teeth are his own or not, he still has one of the most charming smiles in the world, at once goofy, mischievous and slyly “Who me?” innocent.To see it is to understand his onetime reputation as an ace ladies’ man between marriages.

On this slow Friday afternoon, Shore was running a new routine by Berle for his advice: “So I go to the dentist. He looks in my mouth and says, ‘Yes!’ He walks over to the telephone and says, ‘Ida, the trip to Europe is sitting in my chair.’ That’s the joke,” Shore said, hopefully.

Berle thought for a second. “It’s too much on the nose here. It’s too ‘red hat.’ Do you need the joke?”

“Well, I wanna talk about the dentist. I talked about everything else--my hearing, my prostate.”

“Do you talk about the lawyers ? It’s funnier with a lawyer than a dentist,” Berle concluded, and immediately jumped to another subject: his comedian friend Jack Carter, who, he says, is always trying to finagle parts in his friends’ productions.

“He’s always asking, ‘Is there anything in it for me?’ So I wanted to put him on about four months ago, so I said, ‘Jack, I’m thinking of doing a one-man show.’ So the schmuck says to me, ‘Is there anything in it for me ?’ The best joke (in that vein) is the guy who does a one-man show, and it closes the second night because he couldn’t get along with the cast.”

Berle surmises he has about 200,000 jokes always at the ready in his mind. He says he has 6 1/2 million yuks filed in his computer at home, about 10,000 of which have been selected for his just-published “The Rest of the Best of Milton Berle’s Private Joke File,” the companion piece to an earlier volume of 10,000 other jokes.

He will be putting some of his humor to work this weekend in Orange County when he hosts the Chrysler Milton Berle Senior Pro-Am, a one-day tournament at the Pelican Hill Golf Club to benefit the Arthritis Foundation.

He, singer Rosemary Clooney and other entertainers kick off the event Sunday night with a gala dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel in Newport Beach. (A few seats, at $250 a pair, may remain. Call (619) 673-5909.) On Monday, amateur golfers donating $750 get to tee off in fivesomes with Miller Barber, Jim Dent, Bob Rosburg and 14 other big-time pros.

It bears some mention that Berle has been on the planet 17 years longer than the Chrysler Corp., and that he has been in show business since 1913, when, at age 5, the poor Harlem-born kid worked the vaudeville stage and was cast that same year as a child rescued from the railroad tracks in the silent movie serial “The Perils of Pauline.”

Another long-term part of Berle’s life has been his role of abbot, or president, of the Friars Club, serving 22 years at the New York chapter, and 21 at the L.A. one, a position he stepped down from only last year.

“It’s a home away from home, and it’s kept me out of trouble. Even though I loved it, it kept me from certain things I wanted to do. I used to be a fairly good golfer, and in the last 19 years I haven’t even touched a club. I’d won two or three tournaments at Hillcrest (in L.A.) and all that, but then I’ve had no time for it, serving on so many committees here.

“So I was a great golfer, back 40 years ago, but I tried to play a couple of holes the other day and I was so bad I lost the ball in the ball wash,” Berle said, his internal joke computer just beginning to gear up:

“A Scotsman--or Jack Benny--says to a caddy, ‘Are you good at finding balls?’ The caddy says yes, and the golfer says, ‘Well, find me one and I’ll start to play.’ It’s a cheap joke.

“This one is true, from 45 years ago. I was at Hillcrest Country Club playing a threesome with Jack Benny and George Burns, and Burns used to be a good golfer, and Jack Benny played nicely . So, we’re playing golf, ready to tee off. And Jack says, ‘Do you mind if I go first? Because it will be the only chance I get.’ George and I say yes. So we tee off and he swung at the ball so softly and gently.

“And George said after the swing, ‘Does your husband also play?’ That’s the first time that was ever said,” Berle noted, referring to the oft-repeated golf remark as if confirming when the Magna Carta was signed.

Though Berle can remember his past with uncanny detail, he doesn’t live in it. Along with the ever-present charity events to which he lends his talents, he recently co-authored and guest-starred in a “Matlock” episode, was a presenter on the MTV awards, and, in the span between this interview and his appearance Sunday, was scheduled for an East Coast publicity blitz for his new book.

He is also actively marketing a trio of one-hour videotapes culled from his seminal television show, “Texaco Star Theater,” which aired from 1948 to 1956.

The Tuesday night NBC comedy variety show was an entertainment phenomenon. Its premiere captured 92% of the national viewing audience, and it went on to maintain shares such as 83.9.

“Not to seem immodest,” Berle said, “but at the time, people would actually tell the days of the week as ‘Sunday, Monday, Berlesday, Wednesday . . . ‘ “

He says his was the first TV show to demonstrate to the resistant Hollywood movie studios that television was a powerful medium they would have to come to terms with.

“Initially, I had nothing but vaudeville acts because the studios wouldn’t give me any stars. They didn’t believe television was there for keeps until I finally broke the ice. Now, to preview a picture, they spend, what, about $500,000 a minute for a TV ad?”

Berle was signed to a $100,000-a-year contract, by far the biggest amount paid by TV in the early ‘50s. To viewers, that might have seemed a lot of money just for having a good time for an hour a week. To Berle, though, there could be 100 hours of work between those hours of fun.

“When we got through on a Tuesday night there at Rockefeller Plaza in New York, the writers and the whole entourage used to come into my dressing room. Quote: ‘Milton, you did it again,’ and such kissing on the lips. And I’d say, ‘Thank you, thank you, but hold it: What are we going to do next week?’ These shows were live, and we needed to come up with a script for the following week.”

Berle would like you to know that you can order the best-of tapes for $29.95 by calling (800) MB-VIDEO.

“After 45 years you can see them, the greatest laughs and greatest scenes from the Texaco shows with all the stars: Hope, Martin and Lewis, all of ‘em. You know, I discovered Presley on there,” Berle said, referring to Presley’s pre-Sullivan appearance on the Texaco hour.

Then, without warning, he and Arnold launched into their old theme song, originally sung by a quartet of service station attendants on the show:

We are the men of Texaco. We work from Maine to Mexico.

There’s nothing like this Texaco alive. Tonight our show is powerful, We’ll wow you with an hour-full,

Of howls from a shower full of stars.

We’re the merry Texaco men, tonight we may be showmen,

But tomorrow we’ll be servicing your cars.

“The comedy then was clean and funny,” Berle said. “I must say this sincerely, the way comedy is going today, I’m really not in favor of it because of the vulgarity of the words and all. The school that I came from, vaudeville, with Jack Benny and Bob Hope and George Burns, we played to family audiences. I don’t think it helps a comedian to add a four-letter word to hypo a joke. If a joke is no good, no four-letter word is going to help it, right?

“Years ago, the guy that was put on the block all the time because he was being supposedly dirty and vulgar was Lenny Bruce. Well, the guys today, and the ladies, that are doing these performances on cable make Lenny Bruce look like Mary Poppins. I’m also against the violence on television.

“And what’s that new cartoon, Bughead?”

“Beavis and Butt-head,” Arnold replied.

“Beavis and Butt-hut, it’s a cartoon,” Berle continued. “The kids watch it and get the idea to burn down a house, which is sad.”

To exert some influence, Berle holds monthly comedy seminars at the Friars.

“They’re for the youthful comics that are trying to make it around the various comedy clubs here. We all sit around, and they ask questions.

“It’s like them being in school and learning from someone that’s been through it, what not to do and what to do. How to greet an audience, how you must have a certain amount of charm, and simpatico that goes with it. Chaplin is the answer there, the greatest. Of the comics around now, I’d say look to Robin Williams. I like him.”

Within the confines of the once-all-male Friars, anything goes, and in that setting, Berle has told more than a few of the sort of blue jokes he objects to being publicly aired. Though its limits have been strained by the recent Whoopi Goldberg roast at the New York chapter, it is still a given at the Friars that any gibe or insult is told in the spirit of fraternal affection.

Berle was the butt of one insult a few weeks back, which, had it occurred at the Friars, it doubtless would be forgotten by now. Instead it happened on the MTV Video Awards, with a potential world cable audience of 250 million, and he’s still fuming over it. Seven-foot transvestite singer RuPaul and Berle--who’s been known to don a gown or two himself--were paired to announce one award.

“They invited me, because in my particular era I was the one to wear women’s clothes. I wasn’t the first. Wallace Beery did it, for chrissake. He was one of the great female impersonators. I did it, too. So they thought it would be good for contrast, me and this 7-foot tall Afro-American.

“I have one thing that I’ve always gone by in my whole career: practice, rehearse, practice,” Berle continued, tapping the table emphatically. “Learn your lines. RuPaul didn’t show up for the rehearsal, and arrives four hours late just before the show went on. He said to me, ‘Just don’t worry about a thing. I can read.’

“So, we’re out there, and doing the lines as I’d written them. He’s reading everything off the Teleprompter and is doing all right until I do the line, ‘I used to wear dresses, but I don’t wear them anymore,’ and he ignores the script and says ‘What do you wear now, diapers?’ suggesting that at my age I pee in my pants, right on the air.

“I was so angry that he said that. It was just so undignified of him to do this. One paper later called him Rude-Paul for talking that way to a guy with 80 years in show business, one who has measured every word he says not to really hurt somebody. And he’s been in the business what? Two months? I don’t even know what he does.

“To do that to me, I could have torn him to pieces. I know I’m still able to, and if this was Milton 20 years ago, I woulda whacked him out right on the air, but I don’t need that publicity. Then when we got off the stage, he got out of there so fast. He wasn’t man enough, or woman enough, to hang around and offer an apology or anything.”

That globally aired glitch aside, Berle doesn’t have many complaints.

He expects soon to be caught up in doing a two-hour TV tribute to his 80 years in entertainment. Like his friend George Burns, one of the few people senior to Berle still working in the business, he has no interest in retiring. It is his work, he thinks, that keeps him alive.

“The two most important words in the dictionary are h-e-a-l-t-h and l-a-u-g-h-t-e-r. Laugh yourself well. It takes the trials and tribulations of life off your mind. If a guy tells a joke, listen to it. Laugh. If you’re not feeling well, that laughter does something in you. It makes me relax when I see people laugh, when I’ve made them laugh.

“Now, there’s other things I could tell you, but it would take too long because I’ve got to be on the set in June.”