Brett Butler Isn’t Ready to Be Anyone’s Punch Line Just Yet

It’s a distinctly Hollywood story: A tough and funny stand-up comic from Georgia is discovered in a New York club and offered her own sitcom. The show, about a working-class single mother with an abusive former husband, immediately soars into prime-time’s top 10.

A star is born.

Then comes the fall: The media reports that the “mercurial” star has earned a reputation for being “temperamental” and “difficult.” Reports of the star’s “erratic” behavior follow. Production grinds to a halt, not once but twice, when the star seeks treatment for what is reported to be an addiction to painkillers.

Then, midway through the fifth season, production is suspended for good so that, according to a statement issued by the show’s production company, the star “may have time to resolve personal issues.”

So what’s Brett Butler, former star of “Grace Under Fire,” been up to since her ABC series ended 2 1/2 years ago?

“I just flat-out nearly died,” says Butler, who spent time in rehab. She won’t say for how long. “I don’t consider it important. Suffice it to say it was nasty, multiple episodes, and you really find out who your friends are.”

Butler said that what started as an addiction to painkillers for sciatica turned into an addiction to “everything. I wasn’t doing heroin, and I think I drank twice, but I was into a lot of drugs. Basically, I all of a sudden went, ‘Who’s going to tell my nieces and nephews how their Aunt Brett died?’ and I just stopped.”

She said she has been sober for a little more than two years. “I have just been totally regrouping, and I’m fortunate I had money left over just to do that for two years.”

Or, put another way, her comic sensibility kicking in, she’s been pampering her Shih Tzus--”my little Hollywood dogs, and hanging out with my boyfriend going, ‘What have I done wrong?’ ”

Finally she said to herself, “Enough of that. Let’s be funny.”

For Butler, that meant getting back into stand-up comedy. Her next gig is a three-night stint at the Irvine Improv beginning tonight.

The Alabama-born, Georgia-reared comedian was speaking by phone last week from New York, where she was winding up a two-week stint in the off-Broadway hit “The Vagina Monologues,” Eve Ensler’s Obie-winning play based on interviews with women about a subject few feel comfortable discussing.

“Compared to what I usually do for money, it’s really easy,” Butler said of the show. “I just sit on a stool for an hour and a half with two women who are good actors--Tonya Pinkins--oh, she’s only won a Tony--and Kimberly Williams. It’s two white chicks and one black chick sitting around talking.”

‘Sticky-Fingered Toddler on a Spiritual Path’

As for stand-up comedy, Butler said, “I’ve taken a couple of years off to think about stuff and see what counts [in life]. Some people may not like my new approach, but I think the ones that buy tickets will.”

Butler said her new material would prompt a lot of eye-rolling among peers if she put a label on it. “It is definitely going into [what some people] would call New Age or something. Basically, I talk about, ‘I’m a sticky-fingered toddler on a spiritual path.’ ”

That, she said, is the first time she has described her new take on stand-up. “I’ve always been kind of original, but I just want to go out further and deeper with this stuff.”

Butler, who managed to do a couple of comedy gigs while performing the play in New York, says her new stand-up act is a work-in-progress.

“Basically, what I’ll be doing in Irvine, and in Sacramento and San Francisco after that, is working on my act,” she said.

“I’ve got some notes and some jokes, but I’m going to be working with paper. I ask the audience questions. Like, for example, the other night, I said, ‘A show of hands. Who has to say these words in their job, ‘How can I help you?’ It’s just something I’m curious about. . . .”

She also taps into the presidential election--she’s no George W. Bush fan--and controversial topics such as guns, revenge and the death penalty. “I don’t know if people are going to be up on jokes on the death penalty. I’ve got to see what the tolerance level is for a left wing flapping. In Orange County. What am I thinking?”

As a stand-up comic, Butler has always been known to be outspoken, but she’s even more so now that she’s tapping into what she calls “the struggle between our humanity and survival.”

“I’m 42 years old now; I’ve been doing this 18 years, and I don’t want to talk about cats and dogs and cars,” she said. “And plus, I’m such a juicy American story. It’s like people that have--what do you call them?--past life regressions. I’ve had enough in this life; I’ve had incarnations.

“If I went through what I put myself through and didn’t want to look harder, then it would have been for nothing. Or my glib line is, ‘I’m glad I didn’t die. I would have made the wrong people happy.’ ”

Laughing, she added, “That, of course, will be lift-quoted as an example of my ‘bitterness.’ ”

Butler wryly describes her years on “Grace Under Fire” as being “a delight.” As for her rise and fall as a sitcom star, she said: “It’s a real simple story, really. Being sober helped me get all that [success], and basically losing my sobriety made me lose it.”

And despite reading reports that she “really fell a long way,” Butler said, “it’s not a big deal. At the same time, I don’t want to deny the importance [of drug addiction]. . . . One in 10 people have some kind of addiction or addictive behavior. So I’m not unique, I’m just public.”

She also said she doesn’t blame anyone else for her series ending.

“In my darkest days, it never occurred to me that it was any undoing but my own, because I hate whiners in Hollywood,” she said.

“The worst thing I did was endure negative things and keep them to myself. I thought with all that fame and money, I didn’t have a right to be wounded by anything. This will sound really corny, but I basically turned my back on God when I needed God the most.

“But I’m not going to get into all that [expletive],” she added, then laughed: “I may be on a spiritual path, but I still cuss.”

Butler doesn’t think her series would still be on the air if she hadn’t had a drug problem. The show had been getting more and more diluted, she said.

Roseanne gave her a tip when she first started the show. “I didn’t think it was germane to me, but it ended up being great advice: ‘If you have anything to say, sit back in your chair and say it quietly,’ and I didn’t. I said cruel and eviscerating things to people I believed to be mediocre help, and what I should have done was just leave.”

She now regrets her behavior. “I may be one of these people that’s never completely forgiven, but what am I supposed to do, sit in a corner the rest of my life?”

Butler said the irony that Roseanne, a temperamental sitcom diva who wielded a heavy creative hand, told her to speak quietly is not lost on her. But Roseanne had to learn that lesson too, she said.

“We’re powerful, creative, larger-than-life women--no pun intended. We’re a dream come true and a nightmare in the same package. The bad part is I found out I really liked acting.”

Since her series ended, Butler has turned down an offer to do a talk show (“I just realized I saw the handcuffs on the artistic horizon”). She is also in development with ABC for a new series. But for now, she’s focusing on her stand-up and the artistic freedom it brings.

“I can write and say things that come out of my head that people are willing to pay for, and it’s largely unedited. I never knew how much I appreciated [stand-up] comedy until I was in a more constrained environment” in a TV series.

Butler said she discusses her personal life onstage, “but not to the point where it’s some damn ‘Oprah’ episode. . . . The point I make is I’m public and interesting and fascinating, but I’m not the only one. There are all kinds of crises in the world that people go through and, hopefully, live past.”

And how have the fans responded?

“People have been fantastic,” she added. “We drove around the Southwest for a few months, took some time off, and perfect strangers would come up to me and say, ‘How you doing?’ ‘Good.’ ‘So when you coming back?’ So, that’s kind of what I’m thinking.”

Offering Her Own Take on Her Rise and Fall

Although she’s more subjective than usual onstage, Butler said it’s not easy for her to sum up her current act. She does say she has never liked to do a “canned act.”

“I have always liked, for example--and I’m not comparing myself--but I have to tell you Richard Pryor is it. Actually, one of my first jokes [when she returned to stand-up after becoming sober] was, ‘I should have set myself on fire.’ ”

So she doesn’t do the same show from one night to the next; it’s more like sewing together pieces of a quilt, she said.

“Isaac Bashevis Singer said, ‘If you tell about one place really well, you tell about the whole world.’ It’s what Faulkner did, and, in my lame, little way, it’s what I want to do.

“I want to tell people what it’s like to get in the big house--what it’s like to get rich and famous and powerful. I [talk] about hanging out with really rich people and the extremes of life that can befall someone--some that I resisted and some that I didn’t. It’s a very isolating experience, and I think I’ve got a pretty funny take on it.”

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* Brett Butler, Irvine Improv, 71 Fortune Drive, Irvine. 8:30 p.m. Also Thursday, 8:30 p.m., and Friday, 8:30 and 10:30 p.m. $25. (949) 854-5455.