Family shakes dark history, comedian lightens up

Thursday, Dec. 13, 2007 | 7:24 a.m.

Who: Deb Filler starring in "Don't Get Me Started"

When: 1 p.m. Sunday

Where: Starbright Theatre in Summerlin

Tickets: $15 for residents, $17 nonresidents; 240-1301

There's a thin line between comedy and tragedy.

"Like Mel Brooks says, a guy walks along the street and falls into a manhole and it's funny," says comedian Deb Filler, who divides her time between her native Auckland, New Zealand, and Toronto. "It's tragic if it happens to me."

Filler credits her parents - her father, Sol, survived the Auschwitz concentration camp and her mother, Ruth, fled Germany before World War II - with instilling her sense of humor.

"We all need to lighten up," Filler says. "This family with such a dark history really liked a good laugh."

Filler will bring her brand of comedy - songs, jokes, stories, characters - to the Starbright Theatre on Sunday.

Her one-woman production, "Don't Get Me Started," combines material from several of her shows, including "Punch Me in the Stomach" and a play she is working on, "I Only Laugh When it Hurts."

In her show "Filler Up!" she bakes a loaf of bread while telling stories. It pays homage to her father, who was a baker. She won't be baking bread this time, but she will tell a few jokes.

"I have 500 pages of dirty Jewish jokes I've collected over the years," she says from Toronto.

This is her first engagement in Las Vegas. "The only time I was ever there was in 1979 and I was driving through in an old Plymouth Fury on $10 a day."

Filler has another reason for this trip - to visit Sam Kuflik, a Vegas resident who spent three years in Auschwitz with her father.

"Sam was from the same little town in Poland as my dad," she says. "My father passed away a few years ago and I felt a little kinship with this gentleman."

Kuflik moved to the United States after he was freed from the death camp. Sol Filler went to Australia, where he met his future wife, and they moved to New Zealand.

"I was brought up in the luxury of a wonderful social welfare state where pretty much everybody was equal," Filler says. "It was a very, very comfortable existence. We had free schools, free medicine. There was a real opportunity to do something without having to worry about the things that can sometimes really cripple people, like trying to find medical insurance.

"Of course we had other problems, like being isolated, which gave me a sense of being an outsider, a sense of being able to see the world from a bit of a further away place."

Her family encouraged her to perform. She played with a folk group and a rock 'n' roll band through high school.

After attending the University of Auckland she wanted to go to London to study theater. She made it as far as an audition in New York for the school, and stayed in the Big Apple to hone her skills. In the '80s Filler worked in underground coffeehouses and bars and studied theater with the famed Stella Adler, Uta Hagen and Deborah Hedwall.

"I started out to be a singer but realized I didn't have the voice of Aretha Franklin and figured that's what it would take for me to be a singing sensation in the United States," she says. "I perform characters very well and tell stories, so as a comedian, that's how I made my mark."

Her career took off after her father took her on a tour of Eastern Europe's death camps. She wrote the show "Punch Me in the Stomach" after the trip and performed it off-Broadway. Filler played all 36 characters in the play. Film director Francine Zuckerman persuaded her to move the production to Toronto, where Zuckerman turned it into a film in 1997.

"What I do is humor with a bit more depth than just straight stand-up," Filler says. "I play 36 characters in one of my shows, 27 in another. If you met me you'd probably say, 'There's somebody who has an appetite for life.' And that's what I think one gets from seeing a show of mine. You feel fed.

"This show will rekindle you and reconnect you with why being alive can be so much fun and important. I think that's the gift I've been given, having come from a family of Jewish refugees who have seen how lucky we are and how important humor is to get you through."