Can Laughter Help to Heal? : Candice Bergen’s character battles breast cancer in the ‘Murphy Brown’ way: good humor through bad times.

Suddenly there is a silence, and it’s almost palpable. While a battery of doctors in quick succession offers up treatment options and other opinions to Candice Bergen’s character during a filming of CBS’ “Murphy Brown,” not a ripple of audience laughter is heard. Which is unusual in a sitcom.

But this is the year that Murphy Brown--the tough, smart and durable news anchor on Washington’s TV magazine “FYI”--gets breast cancer.

As she is hit by seven doctors with a litany of nearly unpronounceable words, unfamiliar medications and confusing statistics in the crucial third episode, “Ectomy, Schmectomy,” Murphy--the epitome of the impatient patient--cries out for the doctors to stop.

“How is anybody supposed to know what the hell to do?” she asks.

The scene is meant to convey “what women, what anyone, actually, who has to deal with it, experiences: the complete paralysis from [hearing] highly respected medical opinions that are in total conflict,” Bergen says softly in an interview. “And the frustration of having to be in charge of your own medical treatment for a condition you’re completely uninformed about.”

And yet, “Murphy Brown”--in this, its 10th and, she insists, final season--also promises to be quite funny, breast cancer notwithstanding. Maybe even because of it.

“Everyone asks me,” Bergen says in the Warner Bros. office of the show’s new executive producer, Marc Flanagan, “ ‘How is breast cancer going to be funny?’ Well, of course, it isn’t. Nor do we want it to be. [Yet] Murphy is going to make us laugh, having the experience of breast cancer. . . .”

In the segment with the doctors giving conflicting advice, laughter turns on a dime. There’s Murphy, bitingly saying she’d like to put them all in one big arena, lock them in, order Chinese food and keep them there until they come up with answers.

“Survivors” themselves laugh, notes Bergen, as “a way to get through it.”

The idea of a breast-cancer theme grew out of conversations between Bergen and Diane English, the show’s creator and its executive producer during the seminal first four seasons.

“We both felt,” explains Bergen, “that the show had become much too broad, that it had lost its sense of jeopardy, that it didn’t have the political edge, that it didn’t capitalize on current events the way we had in the past. And that the person to be put in jeopardy was Murphy.”

It was English, back now as executive consultant, who said “breast cancer.” “Candice felt there were no more stories to tell but the key was finding a strong arc,” English says from her home in Martha’s Vineyard. “This is a character who’s a survivor. And what would you put in front of her this last season that would be out of her control and cause her to bring everything into play we’ve learned about her--her cutting sense of humor, her inability to deal with authority figures, her skills as a reporter, her need to control?”

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English, who will write the series’ final episode next spring, believes that “all good comedy starts with drama,” and that “it’s all about execution. . . . Frankly, the color drained out of [TV executives’] faces the first time they heard [breast cancer], but then when we plotted it out, there was nothing but enthusiasm.”

The subject was a natural for Bergen, who has been actively involved in fund-raising for breast and ovarian cancer research at UCLA.

For Flanagan--who had been an executive producer on “Grace Under Fire”--the task was to straddle the line between “trivializing” the topic and going so heavy that it becomes what he calls “Cancer Playhouse.”

There are plenty of jokes. When Frank Fontana (Joe Regalbuto) concludes his search for a reconstructive surgeon, he tells Murphy he’s found “the best breast man” in Washington, and she snips: “House or Senate?” Laughter erupts when her “FYI” colleagues think she’s having an affair with Frank because the two of them are spending so much time together, while actually they’re confronting her diagnosis.

For Bergen, one of her funniest scenes comes in the fourth episode. Murphy is on the operating table. “She’s surrounded by her surgeons, she’s lying flat, and they’re about to give her anesthesia. And then she says, ‘First of all, did everybody wash their hands?’ ”

While breast cancer will be a theme throughout the 22-episode season, it’s only in the first six or seven that the issue is dealt with intensively. Even in tonight’s opening episode, the subject only surfaces toward the end, when Murphy and her boss (Lily Tomlin) go for mammograms together.

Flanagan says they’re being careful with the material, not even using dramatic license. “We went to UCLA and established a rapport with a number of oncologists . . . and radiologists. We have this network of people and we run scripts by them.”

Murphy’s cancer sounds like it falls mid-range. Obviously not so aggressive as to have horrific results but also not relatively simple. As Flanagan explains: “We sat down with an oncologist who said, ‘Here’s what we would like. We don’t want party cancer.’ A little bit of a scare.”

Hers will be a two-centimeter tumor (four-fifths of an inch), and she’ll have two positive lymph nodes, requiring chemotherapy. After much thought, Murphy will choose a lumpectomy over a mastectomy and will have radiation following chemo.

The decision for lumpectomy, says Flanagan, came out of discussion with the writers, input from the doctors, and what seemed to be most in sync with Murphy’s character.

In an episode scheduled for November, Murphy will try to get marijuana to relieve the severe nausea she’s experiencing as a result of treatment. But her chemotherapy will be the kind that doesn’t necessarily involve hair loss.

“I was perfectly willing to have some kind of wig that would make me look like I was losing my hair,” Bergen says. “But it was really a lot to reckon with for a sitcom.”

Asked how she prepared for the episodes, Bergen says she gave them more focus and concentration than she had in recent years, then adds: “Life prepared me for these episodes.”

No, she was “not necessarily” talking about her husband, film director Louis Malle, who died of lymph node cancer in 1995. “I’m talking about my friends . . . about the sense of jeopardy we all feel as we get older.”

But Bergen, who is 51, ends the interview as she begins it: upbeat. “I think we’re delivering more than anyone ever hoped for in a sitcom,” Bergen says. “It’s ‘Murphy Brown’ at its best--strong and funny and tough-minded.”

The other night she and 11-year-old daughter Chloe watched a tape. “It’s the first time I’ve seen Chloe laugh at a ‘Murphy Brown’ in years.”