Victor Borge Makes It Up as He Goes Along : Music: When the pianist-comedian performs at Cerritos Center on Sunday, he brings decades of experience but no set agenda.

When the Rolling Stones announced their 1994 tour, Jay Leno quipped, “I don’t know if they are getting old but . . . their opening act is Victor Borge.”

Mick can only hope to have a schedule like Vic’s when he hits 86.

Tonight, Borge is a presenter at the Golden Globe Awards. Sunday the pianist-comedian performs two shows at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts. Monday he begins a five-week tour of Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand that ends with a concert March 2 in Auckland; the next day, he appears in Thousand Oaks.

“I don’t know, but I think the authorities on entertainment are beginning to realize I might be worth more than I was,” said Borge, speaking by phone earlier this week aboard a cruise ship in Costa Rica. (He’d performed, of course.)

Certainly the TV authorities. Recent appearances include a Chicago Symphony program featuring Borge’s “Borgeism” on Mozart and a duet with violinist Itzhak Perlman. “On Stage at Wolf Trap” presented “Victor Borge: A Birthday Celebration.” “Victor Borge: Then & Now” served as a PBS fund-raiser special in December; a sequel airs this year.

Given the longevity of Borge’s career--he was a film and stage personality in Scandinavia in his early 20s--it was amazing that the PBS special featured so much more now than then.

“I just look at the world from the side somehow,” Borge said.

“Every audience is a new inspiration,” he said. “There is no such thing as a bad audience--nobody buys a ticket to be a bad audience. Maybe two or three routines have ever been prepared in advance. My challenge is not to get as many laughs as possible, but to be able to switch from hilarity and uproar to complete stillness when I play. And that is what I do well.

“My greatest fault, you know, is my modesty,” he added.

Modesty, shmodesty. The man who’s been called “The Great Dane” has been knighted by the five Scandinavian countries and honored by both the U.S. Congress and the United Nations.

“Yes, I speak many strange languages, most I don’t understand myself,” he quipped, then made a point from the side somehow.

“Even in the concert hall, people nowadays want entertainment. They watch a symphony orchestra arrive and tune up; the conductor comes in and turns his back the rest of the evening--that is not entertainment. The general audience is not familiar with musical vocabulary. . . . There’s no reason to speak a language they don’t understand.”

Audiences understand Borge. Who wouldn’t chuckle when he introduces Debussy’s masterpiece, “Clear the Saloon”?

According to Guinness, Borge holds the world record for the longest-running one-man show: 849 performances of “Comedy in Music” on Broadway. He’s co-author of two books, “My Favorite Impressions” and “My Favorite Comedies in Music.”

For fans who want to hear Borge actually play music all the way through, the recording “The Two Sides of Victor Borge” has pure piano performances on one side, comedy on the other. A mail-order video promoted endlessly on late-night TV called “The Best of Victor Borge” has sold more than 2 million copies.

It’s that sort of mass appeal that sets Borge apart from other comedic classical musicians such as Peter Schickele (a.k.a. P.D.Q. Bach).

“These others are sooo musical . . . what they do is mostly for music students,” Borge said. “It’s not a criticism. (But) this is one of the most difficult things for me, to not get into depths of music beyond the general audience. If I would make a medley of themes from concertos, it could be very funny musically, but maybe five people would know the joke.”

Borge has lived in the United States for more than 50 years. When the Nazis invaded his homeland, Borge--outspoken about Hitler--escaped aboard the last American passenger liner to leave Northern Europe before war was declared.

He is an expert skipper himself and is fond of saying that for him, the three Bs are “Bach, Beethoven and boats.” Borge and his wife, Sanna, have five children and nine grandchildren, so he’s probably also been exposed to the Beatles, B-52’s and Boyz II Men.

So then, what about those Rolling Stones?

“I’ve heard them, but I’ve never gone to the concert--I can’t go to everything ,” Borge said . “If (people) like it, it must be good. . . . “

And although whom people like seems to change more and more frequently, what they like, Borge says, doesn’t.

“What I do is not timely. A pianist comes on stage and begins to play. Suddenly he stops and says, ‘I don’t know this piece.’ He plays another. ‘I didn’t know I knew that one--but I did play it beautifully. . . . Now I will play the one I wanted to play to begin with.’ This is forever funny. It was funny in 1944, and it will be funny in 2044.

“When the Rolling Stones are old hat, Victor Borge is still new.”

* Victor Borge performs Sunday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive, Cerritos. 2 and 5 p.m. Sold out. (800) 300-4345.