Ben Stiller Isn't Funny. Or So He Says . . .

The tricky thing about being a comedian is that people expect you to be funny.

If you're Ben Stiller, you can walk around telling everyone who will listen that you don't consider yourself a particularly rich source of hilarity, and a critic for the New Yorker will agree, asking you to please relax a little, and still, Parade magazine will put a picture of your face on its cover asking (if not quite answering): "Who's America's Funniest Comic?"

Which is probably okay, because it will at least give you the opportunity to talk some more about how you're not really a riot, can't tell a joke to save your life, don't walk into a room needing to make people laugh.

And how you have a big new comedy out just in time for the Christmas movie rush!

Must be exhausting, all this cognitive dissonance.

Exhausted, actually, is how Stiller sounds at the moment, sitting through the requisite series of 15-minute phone interviews to push "Night at the Museum" and noting, probably for the hundredth time, that the monkey cast as his tormenter in the flick was awfully sweet except "she was trained to hit me and I wasn't allowed to hit her -- which I didn't think was fair."

Maybe not, but being hit by a monkey -- or abused by an in-law or lacerated by a zipper -- is Stiller's most reliable conduit to laughs. And it's the one he turns to again in "Museum" (see review on Page 29), as a hard-up divorced dad and museum guard whose gig turns calamitous once the history exhibits come to life. The lions try to eat him, the Huns want his head on a stake -- hence there is opportunity after opportunity for Stiller's blue eyes to bulge in panic for the cameras.

The man may scramble as well as any actor working today.

Which is not, by the way, an accolade Stiller would have dreamt of as a kid. The son of famous comedy duo Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller was brought up in a world of nightclubs and dueling shticks. His rebellion was a penchant for serious drama: At age 11 and 12, he was directing sister Amy in heavy home movies.

The conversion occurred in the late 1970s, the first time he saw "Second City TV," a Canadian sketch comedy show populated by such now-legends as Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara and John Candy.

"I remember I was 17 or 18 when I saw 'SCTV' on TV and being really amazed -- thinking it was the funniest thing I'd ever seen," he says, on the phone from Mexico after a day of shooting "The Heartbreak Kid," a remake of the 1972 romantic comedy that brings him back into the potty-mouthed fold of the Farrelly brothers. "As a kid, you're trying to find your own way. I went, 'Okay, I sort of want to be like that, think like that.' "

And then it was off. After a year of film school in California, Stiller returned to his native New York and in the late '80s began to make a name for himself with small films and a writing stint on "Saturday Night Live." By 1992, he had a short-lived but acclaimed sketch comedy series of his own, "The Ben Stiller Show." His coupling with the Farrellys came in 1998 with "There's Something About Mary," and suddenly Stiller had a place among the brightest comics of a generation.