Andy, did ya hear...about this one?

It’s an American story, a paradigm for modern-day celebrity: A comedian works the road, getting by with funny props, with voices, with a juggling act in which he wears a paper toilet seat protector around his neck. Not exactly Woody Allen at the Bitter End, but it’s the 1980s--a good time to be even a passable comedian with hackneyed shtick, the stand-up boom putting a premium on warm bodies to throw in front of people paying inflated prices for their vodka and tonics. The comedian works and works, and back home in San Diego he tweaks his income by buying little beach-adjacent properties, fixing them up and renting them out. He hangs out in a bachelor scene that includes doctors, disc jockeys and former KCBS-TV anchor Michael Tuck. Somehow in the course of all this he never meets the right gal, and then there’s this nagging impulse for fame. When the stand-up comedy boom tails off in the ‘90s, he turns more to corporate work, sometimes earning a couple thousand dollars a pop with motivational speeches like “Laughing Your Way to the Top.” He’s always been a good salesman, always good at selling himself. But he’s getting older and there’s still that fame void, and when the Fox network signs off on a TV ratings stunt called “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?,” here comes Rick Rockwell, a guy looking for love, a guy who makes the right impression. In a sense, it’s another corporate job, this time for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Corp. Standing onstage at a showroom at the Las Vegas Hilton, Rockwell knows exactly what to do, understands fully what the producers and the network are selling. He picks the blond.

Since then, of course, Rockwell has been exposed as somewhat of a fraud. Behind every salesman is more of the truth, and the truth is an ex-girlfriend obtained a restraining order against Rockwell in 1991, a tidbit unearthed by the online news service theSmokingGun.com. Rockwell is undone by the same emerging medium, the Internet, that he uses to hawk his corporate comedy work. In the wake of the scandal, Fox puts out an all-points bulletin for its dignity, and Rockwell becomes pop culture’s latest zoo exhibit. It’s not exactly what he had in mind, but it’s not that far off, either. Literally, he feeds the story--bringing pizzas to the reporters camped outside his San Diego house. This is the same person who, in 1982, tried to get into the Guinness Book of World Records by telling jokes continuously for 30 hours and three minutes. Fittingly, in rejecting his stunt, Guinness said that what Rockwell lacked was a paying audience.

But that was then and this is now. For Rockwell, the Warhol-esque, Any Kind of Fame Is an Opportunity Tour continues apace, the audience having shrunk from the 23 million people who watched him marry Darva Conger on Fox to whoever will pay to see him at the nation’s finer Improv comedy clubs. This weekend, Rockwell tells his story at the Tempe (Ariz.) Improv (Tickets: $20.50. Memories: priceless), and then it’s on to the Miami Improv, the Addison (Texas) Improv, the Cleveland Improv, and the Washington, D.C., Improv. He’ll be at the Brea Improv April 5-8.

Will they laugh or spit at him? Does it matter? Hardly. Someone who hung out with Rockwell in the 1980s San Diego beach scene calls him “P.T. Barnum meets Kato Kaelin.” He says this lovingly, as though he’s talking about a character out of a Carl Hiassen novel. To be sure, Rockwell and Robert Hartmann, the Improv’s chief talent booker, seem amused by the notion of a backlash. To ask if they’re worried about the audience heckling is to sense you’re not quite getting it. For these two carnival barkers, this is just another chapter in a long co-dependent relationship. As Rockwell himself put it in a telephone interview this week: “You don’t last 20 years in this business without having a thick skin.”

To get the tour jump-started, Rockwell showed up at the Melrose Improv last Saturday night with a tabloid-obedient “Entertainment Tonight” crew and performed for a few minutes. He was followed onstage by comedian Steve Marmel. Rockwell was the setup from heaven.

“Wow, Rick Rockwell’s lips were near this mike,” Marmel said. “Let me wipe this off in case stupid is contagious.”

But other comics who can’t resist using Rockwell as a punch line are quieter on the subject of his newfound fame/infamy and how he might use it. They even betray a little envy. This isn’t surprising. The boom years in stand-up that produced too many Rick Rockwells have today given way to a post-boom malaise, an era in which the machinery for fame and fortune is still in place but sitcoms are slumping, talk shows don’t launch careers and even genuinely original performers struggle to be discovered, to stand out from the clutter.

*

Some of the comics who care about stand-up as an art form are chagrined to see Rockwell sullying their stage; it’s hard enough, they say, to get people to take stand-up seriously anymore without this kind of display. But club owners and bookers want people in their rooms, however they get them there, whatever the relative IQ of the paying customers. The competition for the entertainment dollar has never been more fierce, and if clubs can’t sell the experience of live comedy without names, why not take names out of the tabloids? Thus Rockwell joins a group that includes Kaelin, John Wayne Bobbitt, Monica Lewinsky and Joey Buttafuoco. Of these four, it’s worth noting, only Lewinsky hasn’t turned around and performed in comedy clubs.

“We’re always looking for headlining comics, and headline news comics as well,” said David Carlow, a booker and vice president of Funny Bones Entertainment. “That’s the appeal that Rick’s going to have for club owners and booking agents. He can say, ‘Look at the press I can generate for your club.’ ”

But unlike Bobbitt, Buttafuoco or Kaelin, Rockwell has been an observant student on the margins of mainstream fame. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and in this world, Rick Rockwell has always been a go-getter.

“When I moved to Hollywood,” he said from his San Diego home, “I bought a Skylark, and I would drive to three open mikes a night.” By the early 1980s, he added, “I was doing three shows every night. Most of my colleagues were doing three shows a week.”

Rockwell also tried other, less conventional means to make a name for himself. He rode a bicycle from the Melrose Improv to the opening of an Improv in Las Vegas. After the Guinness Book of World Records rejected him, Rockwell tried again, in 1987. He used a jet and embarked on the “Comedy at the Speed of Sound” tour, a journey that took him to six cities and five states in one night. At the end of his trip, an exhausted Rockwell told a Times reporter covering the stunt: “One way or another, I’m going to get into that book--although if I keep doing these stunts and they keep saying no, eventually I’ll have enough to start my own book.”

As it happened, Rockwell never passed muster with the Guinness judges, but he now has enough to start a different book. He’s hired a publicist and a business manager. True to the B- and C-list show business world he populates, neither the publicist nor the business manager are in the 310 or 323 area codes. They’re not even 818.

*

Ask Rockwell for his business manager, and he sends you to Theo Hanson in San Diego. On the phone, Hanson speaks enthusiastically if obliquely about himself and all the offers pouring in for his client, then adds that none of this is about the money or capitalizing on fame’s fleeting embrace. It is, Hanson says, about “the truth.”

“This isn’t about stretching 15 minutes of fame to become incredibly wealthy, it’s about taking the time to tell the truth. If it has a positive financial aspect to it, that would only be the reward and not the incentive.”

“I wanted to get right back in the saddle and ride and use humor as a cathartic exercise,” Rockwell said. “It’s really a unique opportunity to try and make some sense out of something so crazy.”

For comedy fans, this is actually good news. Visit Rockwell’s Web site and click on the “favorite jokes” icon, and you get gems like this: “I worked in Phoenix last summer and it was so hot . . . I saw two palm trees fighting over a dog.” On the same Web site, Rockwell is pictured in a black-and-white photo with Jay Leno, which doesn’t so much prove Rockwell’s stature as a comic as Leno’s enduring status as the Zelig of the stand-up comedy scene.

Also in evidence is the flair for self-promotion that Rockwell apparently used to impress the folks at Next Entertainment, the independent production company that put together “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?” for Fox, seemingly using the Dewey Decimal System to conduct its background check.

“Whether keynote speaking for McDonald’s, hosting a charity golf roast, passing himself off as a phony ‘service expert’ at AT&T;’s national meeting, or opening for Jay Leno on the road, Rick Rockwell’s versatile skills make him a comedy hit,” reads the promotional bio.

The same bio also trumpets Rockwell’s famous “In My America” routine (“In my America, all fast-food drive-thru workers will receive speech therapy. . . .”).

But it isn’t Rockwell’s America. It’s our America.

Says Stuart Fischoff, professor of media psychology at Cal State Los Angeles: “It’s almost part of our inalienable right as an American citizen to have a shot at fame. Whether they get it through a constructive act, or a farcical act like Rockwell, or a destructive act like a political assassin, that’s their ticket to ride.”