Richard Belzer was blunt on the telephone. The standup comic had just been asked what, after a busy few years on television and the movies, was the motivation behind his latest Showtime comedy special.
”Because I`m a standup comic,” said Belzer simply. ”You can`t take it out of me. If I was a dancer and I stopped dancing, I`d still be a dancer. I`ll always do standup, it`s my first love. And it`s one of the things that I enjoy doing and will continue to do.”
The half-hour ”Belzer on Broadway,” taped at Caroline`s Comedy Club on Broadway in New York City, will be shown Wednesday and Nov. 29 on Showtime.
Belzer was talking from Baltimore, where he was performing yet another acting assignment. He is part of the cast of a new NBC midseason replacement series called ”Homicide: A Year on the Street,” whose creator and executive producer is Academy Award-winning director Barry Levinson (”Rain Man,”
”Bugsy,” ”Diner”).
Belzer`s answer was fair enough. He is, in fact, a 20-year veteran of standup comedy. But Belzer has been seen recently in a different setting from the comedy stage. He was a semi-regular on the short-lived CBS shows ”The Flash” and ”Good Sports.”
He appeared in the movie ”The Bonfire of the Vanities,” and filmed a role in Chicago last year in the yet-to-be-released ”Mad Dog and Glory,”
starring Robert de Niro and Bill Murray.
In Levinson`s TV series, Belzer is playing one of a group of homicide detectives in the director`s beloved Baltimore.
The series, which also stars Yaphet Kotto and Ned Beatty, is ”not gun fights and car chases; it`s more character-driven,” Belzer said.
All the recent thespian activity prompted the question: Why so many appearances on the big and small screen?
”Because I`m an actor,” said Belzer, again with just a hint of bluntness. ”It`s my job, I`m in show business. I audition for parts, and I do standup, and that`s the world I`m in.”
Belzer, who regularly appears on ”The Tonight Show” and ”Late Night with David Letterman,” had his own six-part comedy series on Cinemax, ”The Richard Belzer Show,” and was also a regular on ”Thicke of the Night” with Alan Thicke.
He also been seen in the movies ”Fame,” ”Scarface,” ”Author, Author,” and ”Night Shift.”
Blunt is probably a fair description of Belzer`s humor, which is fairly represented in ”Belzer on Broadway.”
The 48-year-old comic is blunt about Broadway plays, talking about how it ”cost, what, $12 million to get a Broadway ticket” for a play with an unnecessarily lavish musical production number to make people feel they`re getting their money`s worth.
Belzer is blunt about New York police officers, who he says ”don`t want to get involved in crime. . . . You can be driving down the streets of Manhattan with a beer between your legs, seat belt flapping out of the door, big joint hanging out of your mouth . . . (and) a New York cop will go, `Will you get me a coffee on your way back?` ”
Belzer, who provided commentary for NBC`s ”Today” and on the Comedy Central cable channel during the presidential election, said that while doing standup this year, he provided a lot of laughs thanks to the candidates.
”They were writing my material for me,” said Belzer, who also admitted he was ”glad to get rid of Bush, that`s a big relief. We`ll see about Clinton.”
But it didn`t really matter to Belzer who won the White House job, because ”whoever is president gives you material, because they`re in the public eye so much. It`ll take a little while, but Clinton will have his things that comedians discover will get them laughs.”
But there is one politician Belzer is especially glad is out of the spotlight:
Dan Quayle is ”gone, thank God. He was too easy. There was no challenge to make him funny. He was just funny. You could just say his name and get a laugh.” With a laugh of his own, Belzer added, ”He`ll be missed by the comics who couldn`t write jokes.”
