Stillers still play for love and laughs

Jerry Stiller has nearly cornered the market on playing outrageous fathers -- first as George Costanza’s blustery pop, Frank, on “Seinfeld” from 1993 to 1998, then as Arthur Spooner, the equally eccentric dad of Carrie on the CBS comedy series “The King of Queens,” from 1998 until this year.

But Frank and Arthur don’t hold a candle to Stiller’s latest patriarch, Doc, in Bobby and Peter Farrelly’s comedy “The Heartbreak Kid,” which opens Friday.

The 80-year-old comic actor plays the foul-mouthed Lothario father of Eddie, who just happens to be played by his son, Ben Stiller. Eddie is a fortysomething owner of a sporting goods store in San Francisco who doesn’t have a way with the ladies. Doc keeps pushing Eddie to get married or at least have a few hot and heavy flings.

The elder Stiller describes Doc as “an aging Romeo. He’s a man who lost his wife and who is living in a world that’s in a fantasy space. Love is in his genes. I also think he’s a father who probably felt he hadn’t passed on enough fatherly advice that could make his son relate to women, so he’s giving his son all of this information at once.”

Jerry Stiller, who came to fame in the 1960s with his wife, Anne Meara, as the comedy team Stiller & Meara, finds it rewarding sharing the screen with his son.

“I have such an easy kind of understanding of what my relationship is to Ben,” Stiller explains. “It isn’t even like performing, in a way. It’s like listening to each other. What the words in the script tell us to do, we do. The one thing I have with Ben is that I have such a trust in his instinct as an actor -- it’s going on and playing in the moment.”

Stiller and son have worked together in other movies, including “Zoolander.” But they first played father and son in a 1987 Oscar-nominated short called “Shoeshine,” set on a Staten Island ferry.

“It was a wonderful film,” Stiller says.

-- Susan King