All Joking Aside. . . : You Hear the One About the Friars Club Getting a Face-Lift?

Did you hear the one about the Friars Club, home away from home for comedians and other wise guys?

They’re having a face-lift. Not the members--the building! (Though with some of those guys, it wouldn’t hurt.) The three-story building has more cracks in it than George Burns has wrinkles!

Take the steam bath--please! And the card room--with all those cigars going, it smells as bad as these jokes.

But seriously, folks, enough with the wisecracks already. Let’s give a big welcome to Milton Berle, a man who put off his honeymoon 42 years ago so as not to miss the insults at lunch around the Friars’ Round Table.

His straight man today is Irwin M. Schaeffer, the dean--that’s president to you--of the Friars Club, which is on Little Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

As the joke-meisters of TV’s Golden Age fade into retirement or worse, a new generation is redoing the decor at the 25,000-square-foot club, a building that has not been updated since 1962.

“It’s going to be like a garden room--bright and airy,” says Schaeffer, who is looking for new Friars to join the fun.

It turns out that you do not have to be an aging professional funnyman to join--Schaeffer is big in pharmaceuticals--or even elderly or a man.

The standard $1,000 initiation fee and dues of $175 a month have been cut in half for wanna-bes on the spry side of 35. And women have been members since 1987.

When Gloria Allred joined the club that year--she was the first of her gender--Berle thanked her for bringing down the average age of the members.

“Why,” she asks, “what is it now?”

Berle: “Deceased!”

After lunch the other day, the two went out to have their pictures taken.

“Milton, don’t forget your cigar,” a visitor says.

“I’ll hold my cigar. She can. . . .”

Whoops! Let’s just say that things are as raunchy as ever down at the Friars.

They may not be cleaning up their act, but they are cleaning up the clubhouse, which in addition to the restaurant also offers whirlpool baths, masseurs, an exercise room, cards and a bar decorated with a full-length portrait of a jaunty young Frank Sinatra.

“It’s a home away from home for many of our members. You can’t walk in without getting a hug or a kiss,” says Allred, the civil rights attorney. “It’s nice to have a hug in the middle of the day.”

It’s also a good place to make business contacts, she says. “And they have a great Cobb salad.”

Berle puts down his unlit cigar and blows her a kiss. “I love you,” he whispers across the table. She ignores him.

Berle is famous for doing anything for a laugh. He picks up a visitor’s hand and links fingers with him. “We’ve got all kinds here,” he says, bringing their joined hands to his lips. “We have a few . . .”

Allred rises. “I have a problem with that word,” she says with a tight smile for Berle, who first lunched at the New York Friars Club when Eddie Cantor brought him around as a precocious youth in 1920.

“I’m working on him,” she says of Berle. “We understand each other.”

Berle, who turned 87 on Wednesday, has been the club’s spiritual leader on both coasts for decades. He holds the title of Abbot Emeritus of the West Coast branch.

Steve Allen is now the abbot, a title that goes back, like the club itself, to the day in 1907 when a bunch of Broadway press agents decided they needed a hangout of their own.

Why “Friars”? Why abbots, deans and other monkish titles?

The answer to that question is lost in the haze of time and alcohol, but in any case, the club was soon overrun by actors, songwriters, comedians and other creative folk.

“None of the original Friars were religious. They were boozers and hellions of the worst sort,” Berle wrote in “B.S. I Love You,” his history of the organization.

The club’s seal shows a plump, mustachioed figure in a cassock--probably the jolly Friar Tuck of the Robin Hood stories--and the phrase “Prae Omnia Fraternitas,” which is Yiddish (not!) for “fraternity before all.”

The Friars made a name for themselves by staging in-house shows and yearly awards dinners featuring popular entertainers. Then there are the club’s members-only roasts, which are famous, or infamous, for insulting and off-color humor.

A roast at the New York club in 1993 caused some unpleasant publicity because of racially tinged jokes from Ted Danson and Whoopi Goldberg.

On the West Coast, the Friars Club dates back to the great migration of entertainers--and everybody else--to Los Angeles in the late 1940s.

The story goes that one night Jack Benny, George Burns and George Jessel went to dinner at the Brown Derby in Hollywood and then on to the fights a few blocks away, only to end up with nowhere to go when the fight card turned out to be a bust.

Someone said, “What California needs is a Friars Club,” or words to that effect, and a franchise was soon granted, with Jessel, Bing Crosby, Robert Taylor, Bob Hope and Jimmy Durante as the original officers. The group met in restaurants before moving into its own building in 1962.

Over the years it has given millions of dollars to good causes through the Friars Charity Foundation, a separate legal entity. The foundation actually owns the building.

Card-carrying Friars include Tommy Lasorda, Roseanne, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Liza Minnelli and Billy Crystal.

Not all the members are in the star category, and many are not even in show business.

“We’d like to take the mystery out of it,” says attorney Edward G. Lewis, the club’s prior, or first vice president.

That’s right, adds Schaeffer, the club president, and when Arnold Schwarzenegger comes in, “you can walk up to him and B.S. with him. It’s wonderful.”

Speaking of Schwarzenegger, Milton Berle says he introduced the muscular actor at a recent roast as the illegitimate son of Gloria Allred and Kurt Waldheim.

Wait, you forgot the punch line, Allred says.

Here it is: “Waldheim says, ‘I vas chust followink ordahs!’ ”