Las Vegan Pat Morita becomes a stand-up guy again

Who: Pat Morita.

When: 8 and 10 p.m. today and Saturday.

Where: Whiskey Pete's Showroom.

Cost: $15.95, plus tax.

Information: Call 1-800-386-7867.

Most people may not think of Pat Morita as a comedian. Instead, he's Arnold the restaurant owner from "Happy Days" or Mr. Miyagi ("Wax on, wax off") from "Karate Kid I, II, III" and "Next." But comedy is what broke Morita out of a stuffy job at the age of 30 and propelled him to celebrity status.

And that is where he is returning.

The television and film character actor and Las Vegas resident performs stand-up comedy at Whiskey Pete's tonight and Saturday (his 67th birthday) at 8 p.m. in the showroom.

Las Vegas is anything but unchartered territory for Morita, who got his big break in hotel showrooms in the '60s, opening for such acts as Connie Francis, Bobby Darin, the Fifth Dimension and Glen Campbell. He and his wife, Evelyn, moved here six years ago with thoughts of retiring.

"(Las Vegas) always had a pulse and a vibrancy of its own, even way back when I started," Morita says.

He had relegated the club act to the back of his mind and dabbled in acting more in recent years.

"(But) there is a magic and a fascination about turning on a roomful of people, and a live audience touch that you would never get in film work would call at my innards every now and then," he says.

Many times Morita has been noticed in an audience and called on stage by performers to play to the crowd, he says. "Those little reminders would always pull at my heart, but I always put it away because I have a very busy film life," he says.

Morita's long list of television and film credits only hint at the sense of humorous spontaneity and depth of character he has brought to his roles, much of which he was instructed to ad-lib. "That's the most dangerous thing to tell a comedian," Morita says. "They will go anywhere."

For instance, in the 1996 film "Spy Hard," Morita played a bit part as a waiter -- and made Leslie Nielsen fall out of his chair laughing on the first take. "They had all this bondage and psychedelic stuff on the walls and it was a scene where Leslie and (Nicolette Sheridan) ate dinner and her end line was 'What would be fine with you?' " he says.

Morita enters the scene and calls off-camera, in a rather effeminate voice: " 'Just some red underwear and a little convertible, thank you' and then I turn to them and say "Hi, my name is Robert, may I take your order please?' "

And then there's "The Karate Kid's" "drunk" scene in which the stoic Miyagi is found three sheets to the wind by his pupil, Daniel-san, played by Ralph Macchio.

The director initially ended the scene with Macchio simply finding Morita drunk. Morita rounded out his quiet character by drawing on his own background. He invented for Miyagi a wife and son who died while he was away during World War II, serving in the 442nd division, giving the character more depth and the scene more poignancy. Morita, who was born in California, had lived as a boy in a Japanese interment camp in Phoenix, watching many young men go off to war.

Morita's personal struggles and triumphs, all faced with a touch of humor, could easily make a movie.

He was diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis in 1934 at the age of 2 and was in Northern California hospitals for the next nine years, most of which were spent in a cast from his shoulders to his knees.

In the hospital, a nurse -- not always kindly -- would turn Morita and he was told when eat, sleep and play. But then there was the radio. "We listened to the radio from 7 to 10 (p.m.) ... We'd listen to 'I Love a Mystery,' 'The Lone Ranger,' but I really liked the speaking voice of the news," he says.

He listened keenly to the sing-song cadence of the nightly news anchor and the presidential tones of Franklin D. Roosevelt in his fireside chats. "I was mesmerized," he says. "The radio was fascinating because of all the characters."

This would be early training for the future celebrity's knack for quickly drawing up characters for improvisation. "It gave my imagination exercise, those early seeds began to manifest themselves," he says.

At age 11 Morita had four vertebrae fused so that he could walk. Days after he finished rehabilitation, the wobbling boy was whisked away by an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who arrived at the hospital to take Morita to his new home, a Japanese interment camp.

"I thought I was an important, man," he says. "He had a badge and a gun."

Morita got a free tour of the West, he says, as they drove to San Francisco to catch a bus to Los Angeles and then ride a train to their final desert destination, where his family waited.

It opened the world to him. "I'd never seen the countryside, the landscape change, elevations," he said. "It was fascinating."

It was a long train ride from L.A. to Phoenix.

"I talked and chattered, talked to myself, which I learned to do in the hospital," he says. "He would leave me and go off and have a few drinks, I think, because I couldn't shut up. All I had was a mouth anyway, nothing else worked."

At the end of their stay in the camps the family moved to Sacramento and opened a Chinese restaurant, where Morita worked 14-hour days with his father, mother, aunts and cousins.

After high school Morita joined the corporate world at a Sacramento aerospace company as a middle manager, got married and had a daughter. By age 30 he weighed almost 200 pounds -- a lot for the 5-foot, 3-inch-tall man with a back problem. He also preferred the bright lights of the stage to the corporate florescent variety.

"I wanted something different," he says. He worked clubs around the Bay area and soon found it was costing more to get to these gigs than he was making at his full-time job. He quit the full-time job and made comedy his life, with the support of his first wife.

Within a year the smattering of gigs turned into a steady stream as he played the lucrative lounges of Las Vegas, giddy with pleasure from doing exactly what he wanted in life. "Airplane travel was still new, I was young and hungry and I had never seen the country before," he says.

He began pinch hitting for opening comics who couldn't make a gig and, after 50 weeks on the road, his once supportive wife had had enough. "Things got better and better, we could afford a car, move into a nice home, Morita says. "I think the year that I took 50 weeks on the road was the straw that broke the camel's back."

Although he was devoted to his family, the pressures of road life took its toll. "We are only human," says Morita, who has since remarried twice. "Sometimes we bust apart."

He eventually left the stage spotlight for the camera and his television career became his bread and butter -- but the excitement of a live audience has always pulled at him. "I was always busy in television or movies," he says. "Minimally I had worked (in comedy) for more than 15, 20 years."

While his television credits stretch back 35 years, it's his stand-up roots he will return to this weekend.

"I'm really looking forward to it because it is that wondering again," he says. "Do you have what it takes to go up there, man, and cook for 40 or 50 minutes, hold their attention, captivate them, enthrall them?"

Of all he's been through, he has this to say: "There is no normalcy. It's all a perception of how well you walk the Earth and live amongst the people around you."

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