Brenner riding the current at Westin

Friday, April 23, 2004 | 8:30 a.m.

"My main source of information is from newspapers," he told his fans during a recent performance in the 250-seat theater that bears his name. "I once read that 42 percent of the people don't believe anything they read in the paper I read that in a paper."

Current events is the catalyst for much of the comedy generated by the former documentary film maker.

"I Scotch-tape everything on cards," Brenner explained to the audience as he held up a 3-inch-thick stack of oversized index cards. "I don't know what I'm going to say when I get up onstage in other words, I don't have an act. I'm like a member of an improvisational group, and I'm the only one that showed up."

Brenner's one-man, 90-minute performance is crammed full of humorous observations, bits of irony, stories that may or not be true and reminiscences about a 30-plus year career that essentially was launched by the late Buddy Hackett.

"My first appearance on 'The Tonight Show' with Johnny Carson was on Jan. 8, 1971," Brenner recalled. "Buddy Hackett saw the show. I had been a comedian a little over a year, but I had never met him.

"The next day, Buddy called the entertainment director of the Sahara and said, 'Did you see the kid last night with Johnny Carson?' Buddy said, 'Book him into the main showroom.'"

There aren't a lot of sidesplitting belly laughs in Brenner's comedy.

He is a thinking-man's comic, one of the best. He is as witty today as he was in the '70s and much of the '80s, when he was one of the most sought-after comics in the country and a mainstay on the Las Vegas entertainment scene.

He appeared on Carson's show a record 158 times. And Brenner has fun with numbers.

"How stupid are some Americans?" Brenner asked during one of his bits about statistics. "(Poll takers) asked parents, 'Are you putting money away for your child's college education?'

"The response was, 51 percent said they were, 41 percent said they were not and 8 percent didn't know."

Statistics on how satisfied Americans are with their lives revealed that "57 percent were very satisfied, 34 percent were fairly satisfied, 6 percent were not very satisfied and 2 percent were not at all satisfied.

"One person said 'Other.' How do you get that answer? Question: 'Are you satisfied?' Answer: 'Elbow.' 'Thank you. Put him down as other.' "

Brenner was the first stand-up comic whose humor was classified as "observational."

"I had been a comedian six or eight months when a reviewer from the New York Times came in to see me," Brenner said. "He gave me a nice review in the Times. He said, 'The young comedian does observational comedy.'

"I used to do observations, like, 'You never see flies die of natural causes.'

"I don't do that observational stuff (anymore), though I still think that way," he said. "For example, a major corporation here in Vegas took out an ad -- 'Free comps.' As opposed to the other kind?"

Brenner told his fans he began getting away from the observational humor five years ago, and focusing more on the news.

"I've been in the business a long time," he said. "I don't want to keep doing the same stuff."

Still, his routines are riddled with observations.

Mottos on license plates, for example.

"We are the Silver State," Brenner noted. "The Lone Ranger's horse died on Fremont Street.

"Pennsylvania, my home state, is the Keystone State. I never knew what that meant as a kid. I thought the Keystone Kops lived there."

Brenner said the state changed its motto to "You have a friend in Pennsylvania."

"Who the (expletive) has a friend in Pennsylvania? Actually, it said, 'You got a friend ...' They didn't even use proper English."

Washington, D.C., changed its motto to "Taxation Without Representation," to highlight an effort by the district to be allowed to elect a senator.

"Former Mayor Marion Berry wanted, 'The bitch framed me,' " Brenner said.

His comedy sometimes is almost too serious to be funny, making you shake your head in disbelief at some of the stupidity that pervades the nation.

"When NASA first started setting up the astronaut program they discovered ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity," Brenner said. "To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent 10 years and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, on any surface, below freezing and over 300 degrees centigrade.

"The Russians used a pencil."