STEVE KELLEY IN TWO ACTS

A DARTMOUTH REVIEW FOUNDER DOES STANDUP COMEDY NO KIDDING.

FIRST CAME THE DUMMY, then the juggler, then Steve Kelley '81.

"You've seen him on 'The Tonight Show,'" shouts the master of ceremonies. "You've seen him on 'Comic Strip Live." Let's have a big Comedy and Magic Club welcome for"

And the audience claps politely as Kelley's name is announced. His first punchline And I couldn't help noticing how those overhead storage compartments are exactly the same size as crying babies gets only a fleeting chuckle. But the crowd is clearly intrigued: here's this guy standing at the mike, blond hair neatly combed, a button-down shirt tucked squarely into fresh Levis, his voice practiced and mild a comic without a shtick.Thank God they built Yugos.. .finallyPinto drivers can be snobs to somebody. His third or fourth joke has them applauding again, this time for real. Kelley, meanwhile, hasn't moved. He doesn't prowl the stage, heckle the fat ladies, fill the smoky air with four-letter words, or do accents. His jokes simply hammer away at one obvious fact: in the hunt for stupidity, our society is a sitting duck.

They actually named a car the FordProbe. What's next? The Chevy Catheter?The Buick Enema?

And now, as his 20 minutes come to an end, laughter rattles the crowd's frozen cocktails. The waitresses for whom standup comedians are so much white noise have stopped to listen to this one. He's wondering aloud how a woman with silicone breast implants could possibly assume she'd look natural once she turns 80.. .And her grandsonsays, "Skip the kiss, grandma I want to slow dance!"

At a nearby table, a woman from Oregon wipes a tear from her eye and asks a companion, "Why haven't I ever heard of him?"

IF THE WOMAN HAD BEEN FROM San Diego, or had passed through Dartmouth a few years back, she would certainly have heard of Steve Kelley. Because before the jugglers and jokes, there was a pole vault, Dick's House, and The D.

Laid up at the infirmary after a track-team injury, Kelley, who asserts his West Virginia background left him "hopelessly naive," began reading the newspapers. He decided then and there to switch from doodling gag cartoons to drawing political ones. The first involved Jimmy Carter and a hotair balloon.

From the offices of The San Diego Union, where he drafts a daily cartoon syndicated in 1,200 op-ed sections nationwide, Kelley reflects on that harbinger of his life's work and pronounces it "really, really stupid." But Kelley kept drawing. First at The Dartmouth, then he joined with some friends and co-founded The Dartmouth Review. "I really became politically aware at college. I admired the zeal that the students who worked at The Review had and still have," recalls Kelley.

Though he now considers The Dartmouth Review "a little sophomoric" and opposes its "gratuitous jabs," his zeal led to a job at The Manchester Union-Leader. His trademark, prizewinning S. Kelley cartoons are now a necessary part of every San Diegan's complete breakfast. They zero in on the barn-sized target of political idiocy. "I tend to think the U.S. Congress is a bunch of ninnies," he says. "I tend to blame them for everything, and rightfully so."

Attempting to describe the singleframe, boldly drawn cartoons might be like trying to sniff a rose through Cling Wrap, but here goes a Kelley sampler following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait:

• August 8. A Befuddled Consumer stands at a self-serve gas pump, reading the instructions. "1. Turn off engine. 2. Extinguish cigarettes. 3. Reach for the sky. This is a stick-up."

• August 17. An anxious American GI stops a kaffiyeh-clad soldier at gunpoint. GI: "Halt! Who goes there friend or foe?" Soldier: "Iranian." GI: "That doesn't answer my question."

• August 22. In one half of the frame, an American businessman sits at his desk reading the headline, "MIDEAST DEPLOYMENT COSTING MILLIONS DAILY." He moans, "Imagine pumping all those dollars into a rat's nest like the Middle East." The second half widens our angle on the businessman we see he is sitting in the office of a savings and loan. He

continues, "When we've got a perfectly good rat's nest here at home."

• August 23. A picture of the White House, with this conversation emanating from it. Aide: "Sir, maybe it was a mistake to send some of our troops to the Middle East on commercial airlines. President: "Didn't they arrive safely?" Aide: "Yes, sir, but their duffel bags ended up in Cleveland."

IF YOU THINK THESE captions also work as one-liners, you aren't alone. A local San Diego comedian liked Kelley's zingers so much, he appropriated them for his act. Alerted by friends, Kelley phoned the comic for an explanation:

Kelley: Hello. This is Steve Kelley.

Comic: Hey! I know you. I read your stuff all the time!

Kelley: Clearly.

At the comic's encouragement, Kelley began reciting his own punchlines at open-mike nights around San Diego. "It was like playing golf for the first time. You make a lot of bad shots, but it's that one perfectly smooth shot that makes you want to go out again. You write a cartoon and never hear about it. Standup gives you immediate feedback."

There was, for instance, the immediate feedback of a heckler who once long ago called out from the back of a club: "Hey! Don't quit your day job!" Kelley claims that's the best advice he's gotten, though he has little reason to follow it. After five years on the standup circuit, the comic ne cartoonist has appeared on "Comic Strip Live," "An Evening at the Improv," played every major standup venue, and made three pilgrimages to that Kaaba of comedy "The Tonight Show." "It's a big audience in a small room, they're jazzed," Kelly remembers. "But having Carson 15 feet behind my right shoulder does heighten the tension."

Kelley's comedy act is, surprisingly,

apolitical.

"Jokes take a lot of time to perfect, and topical humor doesn't have a long enough shelf life." By taking to the stage at night, he can pick off whatever targets eluded his pen that morning and vice versa. That way, Kelley sidesteps the rut of repetitiveness that he says plagues the editorial cartoonist.

Not incidentally, the night gig may also propel him to stardom. Last fall, Kelley began hosting "Million Dollar Video Challenge," a nationally syndicated television show. The job involves a lot of winking at the camera and saying things like, "Remember if it's worth doing, it's worth doing on video," but that's show biz.

In the meantime, Kelley hasn't quit his day job. "I always tell my friends: comedy's great, but there's no dental plan."

"Keep your dayjob," a hecklertold Steve Kelley.So he kept oncartooning.

Kelley cut his cartoon teeth at theDaily D and moved on to penningone-liners at the San Diego Union.

The clean-cut comic vaultedfrom Dartmouth jockdom tolate-night status with Leno.

Rob Eshman lives and writeswith his dog in Los Angeles.When Steve Kelley met thedog, he said to Eshman: "I'dget a goldfish. Dogs aremore cuddly, but when theydie you can't flush themdown the toilet."