Comic Stands Up and Faces the Music : Theater: In ‘Beyond the Laughter, Beneath the Smile,’ perennial warm-up man Sammy Shore shares bittersweet recollections of a roller-coaster career.

Sammy Shore’s first job as a comedian came in 1949 at a Wisconsin resort.

“I was social director, I was the swimming instructor, everything, and then I did the shows at night,” Shore says. “I was watching the pool, and they called me upstairs to talk to the owner. About 10 minutes later, people were screaming. A guy was at the bottom of the pool.”

Shecky Greene, another young comic at the resort, was so shaken by the drowning that he didn’t go on stage that night, Shore recalls.

“I went out and did the show,” Shore says. “That was the beginning of my show business career, and I had a funny feeling that it was going to be very hard.”

Now, at age 60, he has survived a comic roller-coaster that spanned four decades and carried him from the depths of Midwest strip joints to the heights of the Las Vegas Strip. The man who opened for Elvis Presley during the early 1970s will open Saturday with a one-man play at the Center Stage Theater in Woodland Hills.

“Beyond the Laughter, Beneath the Smile” is as much confession as it is comedy. The material is autobiographical, the musings of an eternal warm-up comic who never reached stardom. Shore confesses anger and jealousy. His ex-wife, Mitzi, became more famous than he by turning the club he founded and gave to her, the Comedy Store, into one of the country’s top stand-up rooms. His youngest son, Pauly, has won overnight success as host of MTV’s “Totally Pauly” show.

“I’m not bitter!” the elder Shore says furiously at the start of his play.

Times reviewer Nancy Churnin wrote about the show during an earlier run in San Diego and called it “a masterful blend of old-fashioned battering-ram stand-up and gentle comic revelations.”

Shore calls it two hours of psychotherapy.

Comedian Paul Rodriguez insists that comedy has always been populated by souls who crave attention. “It’s a disease, is what it is,” he says.

Shore doesn’t argue. He says he became a comedian because of his father.

“He was an angry man, screaming and hollering at my mother all the time,” Shore recalls. “He would sit in our used-furniture store waiting for customers to come in” and he’d be annoyed when they did come in. “It would be like, ‘What do you want, lady?’

“And I could never make him laugh.”

After that first job in Wisconsin, Shore did a stint at the Blackhawk Restaurant in Chicago, making $125 a week. “For me, that was the big time,” he says. When the job ended, he embarked on a road-map career.

There weren’t any comedy clubs in the 1950s, so comics performed mostly in cocktail lounges and strip joints--places such as the Zodiac Room in St. Louis and Abe’s Colony Club in Dallas. Shore crisscrossed the country in a 1953 Kaiser.

Along the way, he had chances at stardom. He played the Catskills. “I was up there when Jackie Mason started,” Shore says. “Well, everyone forgot about me.” In 1956, he bombed at the Copacabana. Later, “The Ed Sullivan Show” booked Shore but cut his spot to less than two minutes to make room for a tribute to Charles Laughton, who died that day.

In Miami, he played hotels. In California, in 1965, he did a guest spot on the TV show “Route 66.” Shore ended up settling with Mitzi and their four children in Los Angeles and things took a turn for the better.

“I started working Vegas,” he says. “The suite. Free food.”

Tom Jones and Sammy Davis Jr. hired him as their warm-up. Elvis Presley saw his show and made Shore his regular opening act, both in Las Vegas and on tour.

Although he still had second billing, Shore performed for big audiences. And he got paid $10,000 a week.

“Those were great times.”

At this point in life, Shore believes he understands the machinations of fate. One man succeeds and another fails, he says, and the distinction is luck or timing or something equally ethereal.

Perhaps no amount of fame or fortune would have made him happy. Shore was driven by insecurities that required constant appeasements.

“When you’re on stage, you own those people. You’re dealing with their emotions and you can do anything you want to them,” he says. “But you can only live on the applause and laughter for so long. When that’s finished and you walk offstage and go to your hotel room, that’s very empty. Then you have to go back the next day and get that fix.”

In his 1984 autobiography, “The Warm-Up,” he writes about drinking heavily. He writes about cheating on Mitzi during their 21 years of marriage.

“I could get the women to like me in two minutes. I would make them laugh,” he says. “But after a while it would be ‘Enough, Sammy. You don’t have to make me laugh anymore.’ Then I had to become just me, and I had nothing. I had no identity besides being a comedian.”

The whole time he was grasping for acceptance, his family life was slipping away.

“It should have been my family first and my career second,” he says. “But I was obsessed.”

The Comedy Store was a hit as soon as it opened in 1972. Redd Foxx played there. So did Richard Pryor. A young Steve Martin used to sit quietly in back. Director Barry Levinson and actor Craig T. Nelson were members of the house comedy troupe. The room was packed most nights, and Shore was happy to have a stage to work between road jobs.

But he and co-owner Rudy De Luca knew nothing about business and couldn’t make a penny from it.

“I was a writer and he was a comic,” says De Luca, who wrote for “The Carol Burnett Show” back then and later for Mel Brooks’ films. “It was difficult for us to run a club.”

Shore didn’t want Mitzi involved with the place, but when he left for a monthlong stint in Las Vegas, she looked after business. When he came back, she had redecorated the room and restructured the show, with tight scheduling and more young comics.

The Comedy Store was suddenly turning a profit. Shore felt unneeded at the club and says his marriage went into decline.

“I wasn’t getting work, and I’d see all the young guys coming into the store and doing great. Every time I got on stage, I could feel the pressure,” he says. “It was Mitzi’s room, and I wasn’t wanted. You could feel the new comics saying, ‘Sammy, you’re old. Why don’t you go.’

“Worst time of my life.”

During the ensuing divorce, Shore gave her the Comedy Store in exchange for lower child support payments.

“He didn’t want to handle it anymore,” says De Luca, who had already backed out of the club himself. “It got to be headaches and it was really too much.”

Mitzi turned the place into a gold mine, with spinoffs in Las Vegas and La Jolla.

“I learned comedy, how it was created and delivered, the feeling of it from being with Sammy,” she says. “I wanted to give respect to the stand-up comics. They never had it when I was traveling with Sammy.”

“Everything we’ve been talking about,” he says. “That’s what the show is about.”

Shore has fought back from the dark times. He worked through it, opening for the likes of Julio Iglesias, Tony Orlando and Kenny Rogers. Alcoholics Anonymous and therapy helped out. Then he wrote his play.

“Beyond the Laughter” is set in a living room. At first, it’s all jokes. Then comes a phone call from a friend who wants to introduce Shore to a young woman at a Jewish dance. From then on, the audience is treated to a more serious side of Shore, as he talks of hip replacements and hairpieces, of memories and regrets.

The play is partially an attempt to start a second career as an actor, but Shore isn’t desperate for success as he once was. He has learned to curb his addictions. He is convinced that his peers respect him.

“He did a one-man show,” Milton Berle says, “and I was the one man to see it.”

Seriously, folks, in the foreword to “The Warm-Up,” Berle called him “a hilarious Little Giant who is capable of filling a room with laughter . . . he belongs with the best.” And Shore still gets work: He has a part in the new Mel Brooks’ film, “Life Stinks,” and will open in Reno soon.

“I had a great run with the Elvis years and Tom Jones in Vegas,” he says. “I haven’t reached stardom, but I came close a few times. There must be a reason why.”

Now he spends more time with his three sons and his daughter. He takes time away from working on comedy.

“Today, I just had a hamburger at McDonald’s and I’m riding my bike on Venice Beach,” he says. “What’s better than that?”