Bedtime for Rhonda Shear

Lisa Ferguson

Friday, June 26, 1998 | 12:21 p.m.

Most people know Rhonda Shear from her eight-year-long stint hosting the USA Network's cult movie series "Up All Night."

These days, the voluptuous comedian really is staying up all night -- or at least until 3 a.m. most nights -- while she and a handful of her funny gal pals host old-fashioned slumber parties at comedy clubs in Southern California.

It's a new twist on the traditional standup routine, which Shear conceived earlier this year while performing in Reno. The month-old act plays The Improv at Harrah's hotel-casino tonight and Saturday.

"I knew my ('Up All Night') fans were extremely voyeuristic," she says, and "that women loved coming on the show because it ... was like anytime women get together and just start chatting; and men are always mystified and mesmerized about what a woman really has to say when a guy is not around."

Shear and her pajama-clad comic cohorts -- Diana Jordan, Joan Fagan, Diane Nichols and Suzan Hughes -- tell it like it is during the act, which is part sketch comedy, part improvisation and part standup, with a question and answer session squeezed in the middle.

"It's much like a play in that we each have our own individual stage persona," Shear explains, describing Fagan as "kind of this nervous, Martha Stewart-lover" who is "shocked at everything," and Nichols as "a Mae West-kind of broad."

The topics of conversation run the gamut. "It's everything from Viagra to Clinton ... just everything women talk about when they get together," she says. "But it's not five women ... bashing the poor guys in the audience." (They do bring one onstage, however, and dress him in drag.)

The ladies field the audiences' "burning questions" about sex during the Q&A segment. They also get a chance to stretch their standup muscles by ranting about issues broached in the act, such as flirting.

"I just thought this would be a really cute, feminine way of looking at the female point of view -- girly, but also intelligent," Shear says.

"It's time for having a women's show that's not a 'Women of Comedy' (show). You never see an all-man's show being called 'The Studly Men of Comedy.' "

Not that she's trying to exclude males from the pajama party. "The men are gonna love it, of course, because of the eye candy," she says. "They're gonna love the fact that they're gonna be like a fly on the wall at a women's lunch or tea or in a ladies' bathroom."

That's the incarnation she figures the show would take on should it become a television series (Hollywood executives have already approached Shear with the idea). "The buzz has been amazing," she says.

Could Broadway be far off? Shear doesn't think so. "If you think big, then it happens."

Tickets to Shear's slumber party, tonight and Saturday at 12:30 a.m., are $18.65. Call Harrah's box office at 369-5222 for more information.