Thursday, Oct. 10, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.
Rita Rudner is writing a sitcom, and last Friday she was living one.
"My husband is in the bathtub, my dog is in the paint and I'm on the phone. Welcome to my morning."
It all started with a decision to paint.
"We decided that our walls were white and that it felt like we lived in a hospital," Rudner says. "We decided to try a color."
Then they stripped the doors, but the stripping solution caused an odor that required the opening of a window that had never been opened and, wouldn't you know it, was stuck.
Amid the painters painting, the handyman fighting the window, the dog tracking paint and the husband washing it off, was Rudner, a testament to tranquility.
Where others see chaos, she sees fodder.
"Absolutely. There's nothing that happens to me that doesn't wind up in my act," she says.
Part of which includes the aforementioned pooch, Bonkers.
"He used to be in the 'Sooper Dogs' show in Las Vegas," Rudner says. "He was a high jumper."
That is, before he was hit by a car. "That ended his career at a very early age."
But he's had a rebirth with Rudner.
"He comes out on stage and sings 'Happy Birthday' to people in the audience."
You'd never catch Rudner doing that. Soft-spoken and coquettish, Rudner prefers a low-key approach to comedy. She is less a joke teller than an observer, but her explorations always carry a setup and a payoff.
When she began her standup career in 1981, after spending several years in Broadway productions, Rudner's style was more or less fully formed. That's because she never tried to be anything other than who she was.
And that, she believes, has been the secret to her success.
"The audience always responded, I think, because they knew it was real. I couldn't put on something that wasn't real," says Rudner, adding that her stylistic kinship includes Jack Benny and Woody Allen.
Asked what makes her laugh, Rudner responded in short order: her life, husband (Australian producer Martin Bergman), dog and friends.
"I'm not really good at laughing at comedy, because I know it. It's like, 'Oh, that's a joke. I know how that works.' I laugh at real things that happen in life. When I was starting comedy, somebody once told me, 'If you start from the truth, at least you have a place to start.'"
And that's where she has stayed, although the comedienne has padded her resume writing books (essentially an extension of her standup act) and films. She co-wrote (with Bergman) and starred in "A Weekend in the Country," a 1996 USA Network movie in which Rudner played a travel writer who gets pregnant via artificial insemination. The donor? Merely the winery owner Rudner's been sent to write about.
In 1992, she and Bergman co-wrote "Peter's Friends," which starred Rudner, Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson.
She is working on a sitcom treatment for CBS that she declined to describe, saying she'd rather wait for a sale. She and Bergman also have sold another script to Universal Pictures.
"I love doing different things," Rudner says, "but I only like doing comedy. I don't want to be a dramatic actress. I only enjoy being funny."
Writing for each medium requires her to take a different approach, she says, but writing standup material is different from the others "because it's something you have to say to an audience. The audience tells you if it's funny, and the audience is always right. They never get together beforehand and say, 'We're gonna laugh at it or we're not.'"
Rudner has one rule of thumb for her material.
"If it's funny, I leave it in."
Which means her act is nothing but funny. Asked how she reacts when her material is met with silence, Rudner says, "That never happens anymore. Luckily, I've done it for a long enough time. I do try out a joke here and there, but I don't do that in Las Vegas. I have an act I can depend on 100 percent of the time. When I do my act in Vegas, I do things that pertain only to Vegas, I've worked there so often. I'm always trying to add, but I would never set foot on stage (in Las Vegas) and say, 'I have a new act.'"
Rudner saves her tryout material for smaller venues, and even then not until she's finished her "list of things I need to talk about."
Of the myriad projects in which she's involved, standup remains the most gratifying.
"It's something I do by myself. When you start doing TV and movies, those projects cost millions of dollars, and everyone has input. With standup, it's me and the mike. It's a no-risk situation. No one tells me what to do, and that's what is so great about it. Nobody's given me $5 million to build an act.
"I've written little jokes, I say them and people enjoy it. There's no pressure. I have a really good time."
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