Sitcom actor shines in old-school stand-up

SHOW REVIEW /// ‘Paul Reiser’



Paul Reiser

Paul Reiser

Ed Wynn, best known as Uncle Albert in “Mary Poppins,” is widely credited for coming up with the axiom, “a comic says things funny; a comedian says funny things.”

Paul Reiser, who appeared Oct. 26 at the Scherr Forum Theatre in Thousand Oaks, is definitely the latter. His brand of humor is a throwback to a style of stand-up rarely seen these days, a kinder, gentler variety that flourished during the 1960s and ’70s on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.”

Comics like Alan King, Jackie Mason and Robert Klein used observational humor to make comedy relatable to the average American. Today, Reiser and Jerry Seinfeld are among the few “clean” comedians who still continue this tradition, which has been rendered nearly invisible in today’s world of scatological, profane routines about previously taboo topics.

Reiser is the creator of the hit situation comedy “Mad About You,” which had a successful seven-year run on NBC between 1992 and 1999. Beginning Nov. 20 on the cable network Spectrum, Reiser and co-star Helen Hunt are reprising their “Mad About You” roles for a 12-episode reboot that gives fans a peek into the current lives of their characters, New York couple Paul and Jamie Buchman.

Reiser’s stand-up act is not completely innocent. At the Scherr, he did punctuate his material with occasional profanities, but they are used casually and are not gratuitous. At 63, Reiser has graduated to material relating to age: nagging maladies relating to sight, hearing and memory loss, all-too-familiar subjects for many of the older audience members.

“Once you reach 50, don’t help anybody move a couch,” he advised while giving a play-by-play account of a visit to his doctor, who tells him he has a detached “Popeye muscle” in his right arm.

Reiser’s “advancing” age is giving him grief in other ways, too. He has difficulty sleeping, for instance, and even though he owns 14 different sets of eyeglasses, he can never find any of them. Communicating with his wife is a pain, too; the phrase heard most often around his house, he said, is “What?”

Reiser’s hilarious observations sparked rolling waves of laughter that rarely stopped. His ability to look at everyday occurrences and find the funny is what made “Mad About You” such a great show.

Reiser even used California’s now-frequent brush fires as comedic fodder. A self-proclaimed expert at “emergency evacuation,” Reiser described how he only takes “clothing, medications and photographs.” But that plan unraveled during a recent fire scare when he and his wife loaded up their car with so many photo albums that there was no room for any humans. To conserve space, they decided to save photos of “immediate family members only—no cousins.”

All of this material is delivered in a stream-of-consciousness manner, with Reiser roaming the stage, head down, as if he’s talking to himself. Many of his musings could easily have been expanded into episodes of “Mad About You.”

Before the show, audience members were invited to pose questions for him to answer, written on index cards, but the results were paltry. (“200,000 people in Thousand Oaks and I get 11 questions,” he complained.) One card simply asked, “How’s Murray?” referring to the Buchman’s collie mix dog on “Mad About You.”

“We’ve been off the air 20 years,” Reiser said. “Do the math. Murray’s dead.”

After the show, Reiser posed for pictures and signed autographs in the Scherr lobby. I chatted with him briefly about his inspirations, telling him that he reminded me of the stand-up comedians of old who were everywhere during television’s so-called “golden age.”

“I take that as a compliment,” he said, smiling.