Mommies’ Fodder Knows Best : Comedy: The trials of motherhood and marriage are fair game for Fullerton-raised Caryl Kristensen and partner Marilyn Kentz. They perform Thursday at the Coach House.

Loquacious and effervescent, Caryl Kristensen of the comedy duo the Mommies doesn’t come across at all like a person whose network sitcom was recently canceled.

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Indeed, although NBC pulled the plug on “The Mommies” after two less-than scintillating seasons, Kristensen says she and her partner, Marilyn Kentz, aren’t the least disappointed.

“I was in a gift store in Studio City when I ran into DeLane Matthews from [the sitcom] ‘Dave’s World,’ ” Kristensen said last week from her Tarzana home. “When I told her we were canceled, she started to get visibly shaken up. She said, ‘I’ve been through this so many times, and I know how hard it is to be rejected.’ I said, ‘It’s OK. Marilyn and I are having a party!’ Something must be wrong with us, but we were so ready to let it go. It was never us.”

On stage is where the true essence of the Mommies, who perform Thursday night at the Coach House, is revealed. Their live act finds the two comedians performing separately and in tandem, all the while relating anecdotes and observations about the trials and tribulations involved in being a mother and wife in the ‘90s. The act is embellished by costume changes and props. They even tackle musical parody on occasion.

The Mommies’ stage show is clearly geared toward suburban mothers and husbands. Its knowing depiction of motherhood in the cul-de-sac, with its endless demands from rambunctious kids and sex-starved husbands, is sometimes risque but hardly raunchy. The Fullerton-raised Kristensen, 34, rates the routine powder blue.

But NBC wanted to remold the comedy team into a family-directed act.

“Our comedy is more adult,” said Kristensen, who lives with her husband and two boys, ages 12 and 8. “It was never intended for children. It’s intended to be a relief for parents who can say, ‘We’re all in this together, and we’re doing the best we can, so let’s laugh about it.’ ”

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Instead of portraying themselves as they do in their stage act, the women were forced to play characters who had little in common with their own personalities. The maneuver made little sense to Kristensen because both performers entered the project with limited acting experience. Plus, the scripts just weren’t funny to Kristensen.

“It was frustrating for Marilyn and me because we were much more clever in real life.”

With a new executive producer on board, the quality of “The Mommies” improved during its second season, Kristensen said, but the revamped show never managed to substantially increase its viewership, partly because it was still relegated to the less than desirable 8:30 p.m. time slot on Saturdays.

“How many mothers do you know who are home on Saturday night?” she asks. “It’s the only night they can go out.”

Kristensen and Kentz, however, have hardly given up on the television medium. A Mommies’ cable special recently aired on Showtime, and the two funnywomen are hard at work developing a “secret” TV project they hope will be unveiled next spring. This time the Mommies have retained the artistic control they lost when they signed on to star in their ill-fated NBC sitcom.

Kristensen and Kentz, 47, first met as neighbors in 1983 in the Northern California community of Petaluma. They subsequently enrolled in acting classes together before finding a more comfortable niche participating in improvisational comedy courses. They also noticed that there weren’t any comedians talking about the everyday experiences of wives and mothers.

In 1990, the duo rented a woman’s club for $50 and promoted their first show. About 100 supporters, most women, showed up.

“We really wanted to perform for our friends because everyone we knew was losing it,” Kristensen recalled. “Everyone was living from paycheck to paycheck, and it’s so hard to enjoy your kids when you’re always on the grind. We thought, ‘If we could just laugh about it.’ We realized that there was nothing out there for this whole group of people.”

They quickly graduated to small clubs and by 1993 were headlining 2,000-seat theaters.

The 13-year age gap between the two has helped broaden the Mommies’ appeal. The Woodstock-era Kentz and the came-of-age-in-the-late-’70s Kristensen complement each other, each bringing different life experiences and perspectives. Kentz has a daughter, 9, and three grown children in their 20s.

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Both women mine their family experiences for material, which initially stirred some feelings of trepidation on the home front.

“In the beginning, everybody [in the immediate families] was a little nervous about where it would go,” Kristensen said. “Marilyn actually had a teen-age son who wanted to be paid for the material she did on him. But there are things that are off-limits. You can always make a point in a non-destructive way. Generally, the families have been really proud because they know we respect them.”

When her mother attended her first Mommies’ live show, Kristensen admits to having been particularly nervous. She feared even a powder-blue show might have been too blue for a traditional Catholic mother of 11 children. (At 70, Kristensen’s mother still teaches full time at the all-girl Rosary High School in Fullerton.)

“I just knew she was going to be shocked,” Kristensen said. “But after the show she said, ‘It’s really nice that your generation has something like this, because I never knew if I was doing things right, and I could never talk to my friends about the [family and marriage] issues that you talk about on stage.’ She thought it was so much healthier to put these issues out there.”

* The Mommies perform Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $17.50. Information: (714) 496-8930.