Rita Rudner Exposes Her `Naked' Truths

Rita Rudner writes about all those little things in life you'd prefer not to deal with.

On differences in body temperatures: "If I raise the temperature in the room high enough to warm my feet, I will cook my husband."

Or frequent-flier plans: "It's like giving a garbage person who has completed several thousand successful runs a free ride on the truck."

Or tipping: "If tipping is supposed to make people do a better job, I think it should be upfront, and I think two other professions should be added to the list: pilots and surgeons."

Rudner - former dancer, well-traveled comedian, star of comedy specials on HBO and British television - tackles these three subjects and 42 more in her collection of essays, "Naked Beneath My Clothes" (Viking Penguin, $17).

Rudner uses her comedy like an inexpert acupuncturist - she begins gently, but then jabs you when you least expect it. Her material is the stuff of everyday life, such as marriage, taxes, motels and loud people in movie theaters, all of which she relates back to herself. Of course, she's a mirror facing the audience. If she makes herself out to be a major ninny, and the audience laughs, it's really one big private joke.

If the essays sound like stand-up comedy routines, well, they are. And like those of her hero Woody Allen, Rudner's routines transfer well to print. She has the barbed mundaneness as Dave Barry and the self-deprecating irony of Erma Bombeck, but overall a subtle rapid-fire humor that's all hers.

"I wrote the book knowing it was going to work," Rudner said by phone from her home in Los Angeles. "When people wrote about me, they wrote the jokes in their reviews. I thought of how I would expand upon that."

Some parts of "Naked Beneath My Clothes" show the advantages print has over stage performance. For instance, she talks about her incompetence in photography. Immediately thereafter is the proof, in glorious Blur-o-vision. Or when she rattles off lists, like "Things That Sound Better Than They Are" ("staying home with a good book," "being a princess"). She emphatically says, however, that writing comedy is an extension of, not a replacement for, stand-up comedy.

Besides writing her book and performing almost 100 stand-up dates a year, Rudner has in the past year and a half filmed "Peter's Friends," an ensemble comedy starring Kenneth Branagh ("Henry V," "Dead Again"). She and her husband, English comedy producer Martin Bergman, co-wrote the screenplay to "Peter's Friends," and are now writing a comic screenplay for Disney.

"All of a sudden, we're considered legitimate screenwriters," Rudner said. "We're having all these meetings with people who wouldn't have seen us a year ago."

Much has been made of her dislike for the whole Hollywood scene, although she says she's grown to like the town. "It's a strange place - it took a lot of getting used to," she said. "It was a foreign place where I didn't know how to drive, didn't know where anything was, where I didn't know anyone. But we're happy here now.

"This is where show business lives," Rudner continued. "I suppose it could be done (elsewhere) if you want to make it 10 times worse. There are worse places to live. Bangladesh - wouldn't want to live there."