Comedy Was The Key For Dean Oleson

Dean Oleson with Lorne Counter and Todd Sawyer, Bailey's Comedy Penthouse, 821 Bellevue Way N.E. Tonight and tomorrow, 8:30 p.m and 10:30 p.m. Cover, $7.50. 455-4494. --------------------------------------------------------------- -- BELLEVUE Comedian Dean Oleson will be the first to tell you things have happened pretty quickly for him.

"I was working in advertising in Seattle, writing radio spots for, like, KVI and KPLZ," he says. "But I wasn't really getting very much out of it. Something was missing. So one night I went to see Jerry Seinfeld at Giggles, and I thought, `That's it! That's what I want to do!' "

Nine months later he was opening for Seinfeld.

"Within eight months of starting, I was in the finals of the (Seattle) Laff Off. That was in '88. What a show. I was way, way over my head. Everybody I was competing with were headliners, guys that had been doing it for a really long time. But it was a good experience. It threw me in the deep end."

Originally from Chicago, Oleson made his way to Seattle by way of Longview.

"I was 19 and writing radio ads there. Big career. I moved."

Once in Seattle he tried a number of things, including owning a singing telegram company.

"You can make a ton of money at it," Oleson explains. "There's no overhead to speak of, you just buy a Yellow Pages ad and some balloons, then all you need is some guy that doesn't mind being in drag.

"But it gets old after a while, especially after the sixth time you've put on a chicken suit in one day."

Although he picked up work quickly once he started comedy, it wasn't quite as easy as he originally thought.

"Seinfeld made it look so easy," he recalls, "but then that's the sign of really good writing, when it appears so natural and effortless."

Oleson's own writing and performances have been good enough to get him well out of Seattle. He's even worked in London.

"It was horrible at first, he laughs. I'm in a suit and my whole audience is in black and pale and looks like Keith Richards. This guy introduces me as from the States and they all start booing!"

"When I started out," Oleson says, "Portland was a big road trip. All of a sudden I'm taking six-hour plane trips and more, and that's a weird feeling, knowing you have an entire industry built around something you wrote in your underwear in your living room! I mean, I thought it was kind of cute, but here I am building an entire career around it."

And he's also moving into television work. Oleson appeared in a series of Fred Meyer's commercials last Christmas - he says they played as as far south as Utah - and appears on Channel 9's "Emerald City Comedy Hour" tomorrow night at 9 p.m. But although he remains very busy in the clubs, he sees the market getting softer.

"Comedy has definitely peaked, it's leveling out," he says. "We're seeing the demise of some clubs, and we're starting to see some people getting weeded out.

"Audiences are getting so hip, you just can't b.s. them anymore," Oleson says. "You just can't go up there with a big rubber nose and some balloons in your pants and start jumping around. People just look at it and say, `Oh yeah, that's been done.' Tom Phalen is a freelance writer who lives in Bothell.