Understanding Rita : Comedian’s flat delivery is a style that sneaks up on audiences

On stage Rita Rudner always looks as if she’s slightly amazed. She has these bright blue, saucer-sized eyes and this dainty little voice and a way of delivering punch lines that makes you wonder if she even knows she’s being funny. But she knows. She definitely knows.

“If I didn’t know why people were laughing, I could never go on stage,” she was saying, sitting in the living room of her home on Benedict Canyon Drive. “When I first started doing comedy, I spent a long time analyzing it, deciding what makes a joke funny. I’d listen to Woody Allen and Jack Benny and try to figure out why they were funny. I even drew little diagrams to Woody Allen routines, diagramming the shapes of the jokes.”

“Ah, yes,” said Rita’s husband of three years, English comedy producer Martin Bergman, admiring her analytical mind, “that’s the ballet dancer in her.”

Bergman, while not exactly an impartial witness, has his own analysis of why his wife has become one of America’s most successful stand-up comedians in the last few years (she was named best female stand-up at last year’s American Comedy Awards) and, more to the point, why she’s becoming such a big deal in England lately, a hot enough property that the BBC asked her to do six half-hour comedy shows last August. Those shows (or, as they say in the U.K., “programmes”) have been re-edited into two one-hour specials that will air on the Arts and Entertainment Network this weekend.

“English people have a perception of Americans as loud,” said Bergman, who co-wrote the comedy sketch material in Rudner’s BBC’s shows. “They see her and say, ‘Look, a quiet American.’ I think that’s why they like her.”

What Rudner liked about the BBC was the freedom she was given to try something other than stand-up. While she does do monologues (filled with dryly delivered lines, such as “I was very overprotected as a child. My tricycle had seven wheels. And a driver”), the shows have a British music hall sensibility, a hodgepodge of sketches, musical numbers and an ongoing bit called “Going Hollywood,” where Rita introduces the English TV-watching public to some of Southern California’s strangest real-life residents, including the guy who runs Grave Line Tours, a woman who owns an upscale pet bakery on Rodeo Drive (they bake treats for pets, not the pets themselves) and what some may consider a somewhat scalpel-happy Beverly Hills plastic surgeon.

“It was so easy. We had one meeting with Jim Moyer, the head of what they call ‘light entertainment’ at the BBC and he commissioned the show. One meeting! That’s unheard of here,” Rudner said. “And they just trusted us to deliver a half an hour a week of entertainment. What we put in it was really up to us. It was a great chance to be funny in lots of different ways.”

What may come as a surprise to American viewers are Rudner’s singing and dancing skills, abilities she hasn’t called on in 10 years, since, at 25, she decided to give up her career as a Broadway dancer and try her hand at stand-up.

“I left home (Miami) when I was 15 and worked as a dancer for 10 years,” said Rudner, who had parts in Broadway productions of “Annie” and “Promises, Promises,” among others. “I loved Broadway, the history of it, going in those old theaters to perform. I wasn’t unhappy at all.

“But I could see there were fewer and fewer Broadway shows, that there were fewer auditions, fewer dancers being hired, more shows failing. Television, on the other hand, was getting bigger and bigger, so I thought, ‘How do you get on television?”

“And then I thought, ‘Well, there aren’t too many female comedians. Maybe I could learn how to be funny.”’

And that’s what she did. It took her nearly two years to work up her first good five minutes of material. Even now she’s not sure if she was naturally funny, or if she just studied hard enough to acquire a skill. “I probably was funny, but I never said anything. So It was hard to tell.”

Rita Rudner went from dancing on Broadway to scraping for stage time at any rundown joint that could supply a microphone and a stage. Developing the understated style that has become her trademark. “I have very traditional punchlines,” she said, “but I never say it like it’s a joke. I always have to say it like it’s the truth.”

So you believe her when she says things like, “It wasn’t that no one asked me to the school dance. It’s that no one would tell me where it was.” And you think she means it when she says, “I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage. They’ve experienced pain and bought jewelry.” And you wonder if she knows just how funny she is.

She knows.

Part 1 of the “Rita Rudner Comedy Specials” airs Saturday at 7 p.m., repeating at 11 p.m.; and Part 2 airs June 23 at 7 and 11 p.m.