A Comic Sheds Tears of Laughter

Bruce Smirnoff is talking about the endless series of managers he’s had in his 20-year, misbegotten career as a stand-up comic.

There was the woman who said she had an engine that could get 100 miles to the gallon; she was hiding the inventor in her bedroom. There was the manager who went to Peru on vacation and returned to say that he’d contacted aliens, who told him to sell off all of his worldly possessions, including Smirnoff.

Is it shtick or the God’s honest truth? Since this is show business, the most likely answer is both. But these anecdotes weren’t even sad or bizarre enough to make the cut in “Other Than My Health I Have Nothing . . . and Today I Don’t Feel So Good,” Smirnoff’s one-man show of entertainment industry horror stories, which runs for the next three weekends at the Two Roads theater in Studio City.

Horrifically funny in the vein of Julia Sweeney’s one-woman show about cancer, “God Said, ‘Ha!,’ ” “Other Than My Health” takes the audience along on Smirnoff’s bumpy ride in the Hollywood slow lane. The stories amount to a variation on a theme, the theme being Smirnoff’s dogged, almost pathetic determination to hang in despite a rich career of failure.

Cast in 1981 as Carroll O’Connor’s lawyer, Rabinowitz, on the CBS sitcom “Archie Bunker’s Place,” Smirnoff was fired his first day on the show for stepping over O’Connor’s lines. On a rare night when “The Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson dropped in at the Improv, Smirnoff was heckled off the stage by his own manager’s drug-addled son. But wait, there’s more: He had to follow a Holocaust film onstage at a B’nai B’rith charity event; his comic friends became Armani-suited TV executives while Smirnoff languished in such stand-up outposts as Natural Fudge, a health food restaurant in Hollywood.

Co-written by Hiram Kasten and directed by Dan Cohen, “Other Than My Health” works as an evening of theater because the stories don’t come off as bitter show business gripes but as universal tales of rejection--and there’s nothing as entertaining as someone else’s misery. And while tales of Hollywood heartbreak are as old as the town itself, Smirnoff’s bemused rendering of his career creates an empathy that a more openly bitter comic couldn’t pull off.

Smirnoff (no relation to the “What a country!” Russian comic Yakov) has been shopping “Other Than My Health” around town off and on for the last year, hoping to land a sitcom deal. It’s a case of life imitating art--there have been vague promises and thumbs-up from people in high places, but no deals, he says.

On the one hand, Smirnoff’s is an all-too-familiar story: Comedian is getting nowhere showcasing his eight minutes of stand-up, so he cobbles together personal experiences and puts on a one-man show, hoping a comedy development executive will catch him from a fresh angle and offer big bucks. Seen in that light, Smirnoff, 41, who recently got hair transplants to beat back the aging process, is a kind of tragic hero (think Jerry Seinfeld meets Rupert Pupkin), a guy who can’t give up in a business where middle-aged is 30 and two holding deals ago.

“Once you’re not a fresh face anymore, they don’t want to take a chance on you,” said Smirnoff, who came to Los Angeles from Boston in 1977 and has been waiting for his break ever since. “But people used to say Jay Leno’s face scared children.”

“It’s a sad dictum in this town that because you’ve been around for a long time you’re not considered the flavor of the month,” said Billy Riback, an old stand-up friend of Smirnoff’s who went on to write for “Home Improvement” and then created the sitcom “Ask Harriett” for Fox.

“To give someone a holding deal because he has seven minutes of ‘A’ material and nice hair, that’s an insane way to work.”

Smirnoff’s show evolved on the road, when the comedian would regale younger stand-ups with his cautionary tales from Hollywood. He debuted “Other Than My Health” in his living room, a 10-show run for which he invited friends and strangers over, fed them dinner, did his show, then heard what they said, turning his audience into a focus group.

The show has since bounced around town, put up most steadily at the Belly Room at the Comedy Store. But it hasn’t landed him a sitcom deal yet; indeed, Smirnoff’s optimism in the face of such long, cruel odds is almost perverse.

“This is going to be so exciting; this is going to be it,” he said.

“And if it doesn’t?” He paused. “You know, it’s not possible. This is the beginning.”

BE THERE

Bruce Smirnoff’s “Other Than My Health I Have Nothing . . . and Today I Don’t Feel So Good” runs Saturdays and Sundays at 8 p.m. through March 29 at Two Roads, 4348 Tujunga Ave. in Studio City, (818) 766-9381. Tickets are $15.