Veteran Comics Play With ‘Late Night’ Theme

Among them, they have a few hundred appearances on Carson and Letterman to their credit, but they are not young anymore. They are comedians who, at middle age, are finding audiences in less likely places--in casino showrooms on Indian reservations, or at company retreats.

George Miller still appears regularly on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” supplementing his year with corporate work and dates in Reno and Las Vegas. Gary Mule Deer, who lives in Spearfish, S.D., tours with Johnny Mathis and has found a niche performing at golf tournament fund-raisers. Jimmie Walker, after hitting it big as J.J. on the sitcom “Good Times,” today lives in Las Vegas. Still a headliner, Walker, 54, has of late branched out into punditry, on radio and as a regular guest on “Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher.”

And Bobby Kelton, among other things, has done a few cruise ships, enough to know he’d just as soon not play to geriatrics at sea, where you have to cut out the suggestive stuff and find material that will appeal to a cross-section of elderly from around the world.

“You do bits about the ship and the food,” he says.

On Sunday, Kelton, Miller, Mule Deer and Walker will do a show at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts. Officially, the show, which begins with a video clip package of their many appearances on late-night TV, is called “Classic Comics of Late Night,” and Kelton, for one, hopes it blossoms into a full-fledged tour.

“All these guys are headliners in their own right,” says Kelton, 48, the driving force behind the show. But they are also headliners who have had a harder time getting high-profile spots despite the fact that, in the 1970s and ‘80s, they were an integral part of the standup boom that launched the likes of Letterman, Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld and Garry Shandling.

If no one wonders what Shandling and Seinfeld have been up to, the same can’t be said for Kelton, Miller et al. A year or two ago, Kelton says, he was “listening to the guys saying how frustrating it is, [that] once Johnny left it was harder to get on late-night shows. But a lot of people would still come up and say, ‘Are you doing comedy still?”’

Thus was born “Classic Comics of Late Night.” It’s a themed show with a hook that takes its cue from the success of the African American “Kings of Comedy” tour, which made mainstream stars of such performers as Bernie Mac and was developed into a feature film directed by Spike Lee. Since then, other themed tours have popped up, packaging comedy not so much around individual performers as around themes or points of view. There is the “Blue Collar Comedy Tour,” featuring down-home, white-bread material from the likes of Jeff Foxworthy and Bill Engvall, and there have been tours of Latino comedians as well.

The “Classic Comics of Late Night” got a little boost from Letterman, a friend, who set up a meeting for Kelton and Miller at Creative Artists Agency. What Kelton and company hope to do is both remind people of their historical place in comedy and point out that they haven’t dropped off the face of the earth. Oh, yeah, and that they’re still funny--observational comedians who haven’t lost their relevancy.

“The older you get, if you have any skill at all, the better you get,” says Miller, who won’t give his age, joking instead that he’s not a kid anymore.

Mule Deer, 59, epitomizes the tweaking of a comedian’s career to keep the cash flow going. He’s a busy man, between touring with Mathis and performing at golf tournaments (a golfer himself, Mule Deer says he’s built up a healthy supply of jokes about the sport). He also does shows for the Royal Caribbean cruise line.

In his act, Mule Deer used to put a typewriter on his shoulder and tap on it as he read a mock newscast. That bit is gone, though Mule Deer’s guitar isn’t. The death of the variety show forced the comedian to reinvent himself for a country audience; after leaving Los Angeles in 1995, he took his act to Nashville, got regular spots on a TNN show called “Nashville Now,” and soon was touring regularly with country music acts.

Kelton says that such career reinvention was a necessity, given the glut of comics who flooded the marketplace in the 1980s and the industry’s perennial search for the youngest, freshest face.

“This is one of the few businesses where the more time you put in, it actually hurts you ... The more you’ve been around, the more they kind of say, ‘Well, we’ve seen him. We know he’s been around.’ That’s what we run into.”

Consider “Classic Comics of Late Night” a reintroduction. If the early shows are successful, Kelton says other comics of his era--Johnny Dark, Steve Landesburg, Kelly Monteith--could become part of a tour.

“Being friends, it gives us a chance to work together and be backstage and share stories,” Kelton says. “That was a big motivating factor.”

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“Classic Comics of Late Night,” featuring Bobby Kelton, George Miller, Jimmie Walker and Gary Mule Deer.” Sunday at 5 p.m. at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive, Cerritos. Tickets are $25 to $35. Call (800) 300-4345 or (562) 916-8500