Columnist Lisa Ferguson: Rhea rolls with the punches

Lisa Ferguson

Friday, Nov. 14, 2003 | 8:27 a.m.

On the surface it would seem 2003 has been a tough year for Caroline Rhea.

Over the summer the comic-turned-actress-turned-talk-show host's year-old, syndicated gab-fest, "The Caroline Rhea Show," was given the ax.

Just months earlier, plans to wed her longtime beau, non-celeb Bob Kelty, were pitched when the two parted ways. She'd previously joked about the couple's impending nuptials on the air.

But the perennially upbeat Rhea -- who tonight and Saturday brings her stand-up act to Catch a Rising Star at Excalibur -- doesn't put a woeful spin on her tale. In fact, her sense of humor appears to have emerged unscathed: "I still wear my engagement ring because it makes me happy knowing that he's paying for it," she joked recently from Los Angeles.

In all seriousness, Rhea was positioned for talk-show superstardom. She was tapped in 2001 to inherit the wildly popular, syndicated daytime series, "The Rosie O'Donnell Show," when O'Donnell made her highly publicized departure the following year.

The catch: Rhea -- who had guest-hosted for "Queen of Nice" O'Donnell several times -- had to somehow transform the hit show into her own vehicle, and convince Rosie's legions of fans to come along for the ride.

"That was crazy," Rhea says of the experience. "I would never replace anyone again. Also, they asked me to replace her, but not with her time slots. In 40 percent of the major markets, we were on at 12:30 at night ... It was tough."

She points to TV-industry politics as a factor behind the show's demise.

"Pretty much it was defeated before it ever got there, and I don't think it was particularly well supported," Rhea says. "I would certainly say at the beginning, everybody just wanted me to be Rosie, so that was hard.

"It was also the most exhausting thing I've ever done in my life. That year is like a complete blur ... In a lot of ways it was an incredibly fun experience; I met great people who I will love for the rest of my life, and then other people who I hope to never see again."

Luckily, her breakup with Kelty wasn't as public a spectacle. While she had chatted about wedding plans and goofed on bridesmaids' dresses and such on the talk show, details of the couple's falling out weren't revealed.

"We broke up long before the show was over," Rhea explains, "but I never discussed it because I didn't think it was respectful to him or his family."

If nothing else, the personal and professional speed bumps provided the 39-year-old Rhea more material for her stand-up act, which she describes as "culturally topical" and loaded with "observations of human conditions, of relationships and psychology -- and that makes it sound like a horrible 101 class that you have to take in order to be in something else."

She first ventured into stand-up in 1989, after moving from her native Montreal to New York and enrolling in a comedy class. Then she began working the comedy-club circuit.

"I think most people who are funny have been doing it their whole lives," she says, "and then they suddenly add an audience of strangers, as opposed to their families tortured in the corner listening to all their same stories."

About comedy, Rhea soon discovered, "It's how much we all have in common that makes people funny; it's how utterly similar we are."

These days, Rhea says, she strives to "tell the truth" onstage. "I lived with a man for five years, and I can gently probe at what it is to do that ... and I have a mother who's completely irreverent. I think I am sort of typical of a woman in her 30s who's single again, and you know how much fun that is."

She performs her act two or three weekends per month at clubs around the country -- a regimen she maintained even during her six-year stint playing Hilda Spellman, the spirited aunt/witch on the ABC (and, later, WB) sitcom "Sabrina, The Teenage Witch."

"You think it's an entertaining children's show; I think it's the wrong thyroid medication and bad hairdos," Rhea jokes of her appearances on 145 episodes of the series, which wrapped earlier this year (Rhea's character was written off in 2002, though she appeared in the series' final episode.)

"It was like being a factory witch: 'More magic.' 'Make that a zebra.' 'Make that a tiger.' It was the most exhausting experience, but the fun of doing that show was the hilarity of just making it so ridiculous."

While the family-friendly show airs in reruns -- bad hair and all -- five days a week on Nickelodeon; "I'm like, 'Until America lip-syncs the whole show? When does it go off?' "), Rhea is in talks to return to prime-time television with her own sitcom.

Though she can't discuss specifics about the potential series' premise, not surprisingly she says, "I want do something that's really my voice and my show, with a lot of support behind it."

Out for laughs

FYI: Riviera Comedy Club is dark Monday through Nov. 23. The club reopens Nov. 24 with a lineup featuring Jimmie Walker, Stanley Ullman and Don Learned.

Just how real is reality television? Tim Walkoe should know. The comic -- who headlines Tropicana's The Comedy Stop Nov. 24 though Nov. 30 -- starred on the creepy 2001 Fox series "Murder in Small Town X," which pitted actors against real people in solving a fictional killing in a tiny New England town.