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The Albert Einstein of Comedy

Throw the 49-year-old Albert Brooks a question, and you can feel him locking onto it with the intensity of a radar scanner. When he gets the go-ahead to answer, he takes off and doesn't land until he's clean out of subject. While he's aloft, it's not his appearance (curly hair, dark green eyes, six-foot frame) that impresses you; it's the voice. With his rising, almost-whining cadences, Brooks doesn't talk so much as play a verbal violin, full of comic minor tones.

"Did I answer that question too weird?" he asks at one point.

In case you haven't seen "Real Life," "Lost in America" and "Defending Your Life," which he directed and starred in, or his hilarious, Oscar-nominated performance as the neurotic TV reporter in "Broadcast News," being funny is Brooks's raison d'e^tre. But his funniness is a deliciously misanthropic kind. It tells you life is a bowl of putrid cherries and someone -- most likely Brooks himself -- is gonna be stuck cleaning up the mess.

Brooks's agenda, in this interview, is to promote "Mother," his latest comedy, which opened here last weekend. He keeps trying to swoop back to it, but connecting thoughts divert him in mid-answer, such as his frustrations at working in an industry that routinely demands over-adorable, over-simplistic comedies ("I don't think lovable has been anything I've been good at") and his firm belief that studio executives exist primarily to harm his work.

"When you drive by a studio," he told a crowd of admirers at a comedy arts festival in 1995, "every car in that lot represents someone who is there to keep from you doing what you want to do."

When a San Francisco preview audience had difficulties with Brooks's 1981 "Modern Romance," the suits at Columbia Pictures asked the filmmaker to throw in a psychiatrist scene. The purpose of this, Brooks recalls, was to "explain the behavior" of the morose character he played.

Brooks steadfastly refused. According to Brooks, Mike Ovitz (Brooks's agent at the time) turned to him in exasperation and asked him why he always took the "hard road."

"I said, `You think I see two roads!' And I don't. You think I'm an idiot? There's an easy road? I'd have an apartment on the easy road. I'm not a jerk. What am I crazy? This is all I know how to do. . . . My comedy is like a cheese. You may not like it the first time, but you try it. But the next time, it's `Wow, I wanna try that again.' "

Cheese, funnily enough, is part of the shtick in "Mother." Brooks plays John Henderson, a science fiction writer who blames his lack of inspiration and string of failed relationships on his mother, Beatrice (played by a mischievously appealing Debbie Reynolds). He decides to move back in with his mother, now widowed, in a bizarre attempt to see where things went wrong for him.

The reunion doesn't go well at all. Beatrice is particularly fond of discussing John's personal problems in public. She's hopeless with modern implements, such as call waiting, and she insists on plying her health-food-conscious son with ice cream and cheese she has stashed in the freezer for years.

One of the biggest laughs -- certainly at a recent Washington screening -- comes when John finds himself having a tense moment with his mother on her couch.

"Mother," he exclaims, "you must be upset -- we're actually using the living room."

"That gets a giant laugh every time," says Brooks, who claims to have watched "Mother" with an audience 65 times. "You just know that nobody's ever used their living room."

The movie, clearly, is based on personal memories. Brooks's mother, the former singer Thelma Leeds, "freezes everything she can," he says. "And she can't operate anything electronic that's ever been installed in her house." After seeing the film for the first time, Brooks recalls, "she said, `You know, I think one or two lines are from us.' I said, `One or two lines?' "

As usual, "Mother," the fifth film Brooks has directed, and one of many collaborations with screenwriter Monica Johnson, got good reviews. The night before this interview, in fact, "Mother" won the New York Film Critics award for best screenplay.

But the award illustrates the Brooks dilemma: The media often love him. So do fellow comedians, from Carson to Letterman. But America doesn't show up at the box office.

"Mother," which opened on a modest "platform" of nine cities, took in just over $2 million last weekend. The number of theaters has been increased this weekend -- a sign of studio confidence -- but the take isn't likely to make Jim Carrey, or even Woody Allen, look over his shoulder.

Producer David Geffen, who made Brooks's "Lost in America" and "Defending Your Life," puts it plainly: "He's never had the career that his talent deserves."

Brooks, as one reporter has observed, was born as a one-liner. His original name was Albert Lawrence Einstein. The son of Harry Einstein (known to an older generation as comedian Eddie Cantor's Greek-accented sidekick, Parkyakarkus), he was a show business cutup from the beginning.

The Beverly Hills youngster, who grew up with Rob Reiner, Carrie Fisher, Richard Dreyfuss and Charles Grodin, goofed his way through school. As a teenager, he had Carl Reiner howling with laughter when he played an inept escape artist who couldn't break free from a handkerchief placed across his wrists.

In the 1960s there were few nightclubs. So Brooks cut his teeth on television shows -- Steve Allen, Ed Sullivan, Merv Griffin and, most of all, Johnny Carson. For a time -- a draining time -- he opened for rock acts. On one occasion, in Washington state, Brooks was about to precede Sly and the Family Stone when Sly's manager stopped him with an unusual request. Could Brooks stretch his act a little? the manager asked. Sly was still in Ohio.

"I did stand-up for years and years," says Brooks. "I did it because I thought it would get me into acting, but all it was doing was making more stand-up comedy. I was an unhappy person. When I was in my twenties I felt very lost."

In 1975, he accepted an offer from TV producer Lorne Michaels to make short films for the new "Saturday Night Live" show. After one season, he appeared in movie bit parts (he was the romantically frustrated campaign worker who loses Cybill Shepherd to Robert De Niro in "Taxi Driver") and concentrated on filmmaking.

His first film, 1979's "Real Life," took three years of fund-raising ("I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy," says Brooks). But the deadpan, sardonic mockumentary, in which Brooks is "assigned" to spend time with an all-American family (which falls emotionally apart during the filming) didn't land well, even with the critics. "Half the reviews I got in America were literal," Brooks laments. "Rex Reed, who liked `Mother,' wrote, `Why would a studio give money to this jerk to make a documentary?' "

"Modern Romance," "Lost in America" (1985) and "Defending Your Life" (1991) scored better with the critics than the public. But if his support isn't wide, it's deep. Brooks aficionados often cite the "nest egg" scene in "Lost in America" as his greatest piece of work. In that movie, Brooks and Julie Hagerty are yuppies who drop out and drive across the country. Unfortunately, Hagerty impulsively blows their funds in Vegas. When she later mentions the nest egg, Brooks goes a little haywire.

"Please do me a favor," he tells his wife. "Don't use the word. You may not use that word. It's off-limits to you. Only those in this house who understand `nest egg' may use it. And don't use any part of it, either. Don't use `nest.' Don't use `egg.' If you're out in the forest, you can point."

"Each time he makes a movie," says Geffen, "the amount of people who get it gets bigger, as though the Brooks vernacular gets easier."

But progress has been incremental. Brooks hopes that "Mother" will give him the bigger audience that has eluded him. He has a great chance, he says, "because I treat the audience exactly like myself. There's no other way to do it. Once you start thinking of your audience as, somehow, less smart than you, you're dead. And over the years, I've just kept my head down. I've plodded over the years, and it's gotten a little easier. People get a chance to maybe figure it out a little bit."

Maybe it'll work this time, he continues, because "Mother" hits home. "On TV," he says, "football players go `Hi, Mom' -- they don't go `Hi, Dad.' "