Rita Rudner remembers her favorite — and only — co-star, the irreplaceable Bonkers

Friday, April 29, 2011 | 4:08 p.m.

Rita Rudner is not a prop comic. Where Carrot Top pulls from a dozen trunks stuffed with disfigured artifacts, Rudner pulls from shopping and parenting anecdotes.

She is, consistently, a pure soloist in her show at the Venetian.

But it wasn’t always so.

For years, Rudner shared the stage with a co-star, playing straight woman to a somewhat distracted, long-haired companion who specialized in improv comedy. This was Bonkers, an unspecified mixed breed who, as Rudner notes, looked like a cross between a wheaten terrier and Kenny Rogers.

Rudner loved the dog. She is a dog devotee at heart and Sunday hosts the “8th Annual Best in Show” dog adoption event at Orleans Arena. A total 54 dogs will be put up for adoption and judged in a highly subjective contest in the annual Animal Foundation event; The Animal Foundation operates Lied Animal Shelter.

The show begins at 1 p.m., and tickets are $12 for adults, $5 for children ages 2-12 (for information, call 284-7777 or go to Orleans Arena's Web site for information). Also taking part are Holly Madison and Josh Strickland of "Peepshow," "Holly's World" and pretty much anywhere in which a crowd is assembled.

Typically, every dog entered in the event is lucky enough to find a suitable home. Bonkers, too, enjoyed such fortuitous fate, but he was not snapped up in any organized adopt-a-thon. No, Bonkers was a show dog of a different sort, one of the stars of a largely forgettable afternoon performance at Excalibur called “Mess of Mutts,” a PETA-rankling production of doggie stunt acts that featured a remarkably athletic mixed breed named … Bonkers.

This was during the days in the early 1990s when Rudner was headlining at MGM Grand’s Hollywood Theatre. One day, Rudner and her husband, Martin Bergman, ventured kitty corner (or, in this instance, doggie corner) across the street to Excalibur to take in “Mess of Mutts” and fell in love with the dog that performed amazing high-jumping acrobatics to close each performance. But during a return visit, the two were saddened to discover that Bonkers was no longer in the performance.

The couple went backstage and asked, essentially, “Whither Bonkers?” Well, he’d leaped from his yard and been hit by a car, suffering a career-ending broken hip. Bonkers would have to live the rest of his days as a simple pet. With his performance career snuffed out, Rudner said, “We’ll take him!”

“He was in such bad shape. He was in a cast, his leg was shaved, his teeth were knocked out,” she said. “We kept checking on him, he was getting better and better, and we finally made arrangements to take Bonkers.”

Rudner likened the doggie hand-off to “a drug deal, we picked him up out back by the garbage cans at the Excalibur.” The couple wanted the dog to join them at the MGM, but the hotel would not allow a pet in the room.

But the MGM would allow a canine as a guest -- if it were part of an act in a production at the hotel.

“Martin said, ‘We want him to be with us, so he’s part of the act,’ ” Rudner said, laughing at the memory. “So we put the dog in the act. The only problem was, Bonkers didn’t know how to do anything.”

He could jump on command, but little else.

Rudner worked around the dog’s lack of comedic dexterity, shouting commands as Bonkers performed little more than dog-like behavior.

“I’d say, ‘Be a windshield wiper!’ and he’d hit my leg with his tail,” Rudner said. “Wander aimlessly! And he’d just walk around. The crowd would applaud, which was OK because he was used to applause. I’d say, ‘Be as tall as Mickey Rooney!’ and he would stand. Somehow he knew that command. Oh, and I’d scratch his back and say, ‘Start the motorcycle!’ and his leg would move.”

During his performance career, with Rudner and prior, Bonkers performed at Sahara, Monte Carlo, Desert Inn, New York-New York, Excalibur and MGM Grand.

In terms of Strip appearances, the dog put up Sammy Davis Jr. numbers.

Bonkers, who had much earlier skirted death, passed away in 2007. He lived to be 15 and was the pet of Rudner and Bergman for 13 of those years. The couple now have a new dog, Twinkle.

“If Bonkers had a daughter,” Rudner says, “she would be Twinkle.”

But there was only one Bonkers, for a time the undisputed king of canines on the Strip.

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