"If You're Not Sick . . ."

The fat comic felt at peace with the world, so he decided to call a boyhood pal, now an undertaker in Ohio. "This is Elwood P. Suggins," he said, choosing a phony name and his best rube twang. "My brother passed away Sunday a week, and I wonder if you could do a job." Said the undertaker: "Good God, man, Sunday a week! Where is he?" Replied the comic: "Out on the porch against the lattice. That cold spell that set in kept him harder than a carp. But then that warm spell set in, and he commenced to get pretty fleshy . . ."

By now, the undertaker was beside himself ("This is criminal!"), and his caller finally let him off the hook by switching to his natural voice: "Hi there. This is Jonathan Winters. Only kidding." Exploded the undertaker: "You were an idiot even in high school!"

Next Time St. Vincent's. This, too, was something of an exaggeration. Jonathan Harshman Winters III, 32, longtime vagrant on radio, TV and in nightclubs, easily one of the funniest comedians in the business, is hardly an idiot, even though his humor springs out of and depends on idiocy. Last week Winters displayed his loony magic in Chicago's Black Orchid nightclub, racing hysterically through his varied roles--from a harassed father scared of his own kids, to the whole cast of a jail break complete with the rataplan of a Tommy gun, produced by his elastic larynx. "As long as someone laughs," says a friend, "Johnny is on. And someone is always laughing." Johnny was "on" the night he toured Manhattan bistros with an empty hand grenade (pulling the pin, he would cry: "Everybody goes when the whistle blows"). He was "on" when he panicked a staid hotel lobby by turning to a friend and barking in a loud, serious "tone: "We should have never operated in a hotel room. Granted he's alive, but you shouldn't have let that brain fall on the rug. Next time St. Vincent's." He is "on" whenever he rides a plane. He likes to look down on the snow-covered Rockies and say to a stranger sitting next to him: "Looky there. I wonder what that means. HELP. Oops . . . there it goes. Snow blowed over it. Tough luck, Jack."

The Funny Farm. The origin of such far-out fun can probably be traced back to Winters' paternal grandfather, a delicately balanced bank president given to walking the streets of Dayton, flapping his arms at his pal Orville Wright and screeching: "How's the airplane, Orville?" Johnny's wealthy parents were divorced when he was seven, and his mother moved him to Springfield, Ohio, where he slept in a "brass-rail bed with a dead mouse in the corner." After a World War II tour with the Marines and a nodding acquaintance with college, Johnny entered a Dayton amateur show--and won. Jack Paar gave him his big chance on TV.

His wacky onstage humor and macabre offstage antics have inspired the story that he is as strange as any of the characters he invents--one step away from the funny farm. For further evidence, his friends point to his house in Mamaroneck, N.Y., where in his black secret den he keeps a lonely chair which he considers his throne. "I sit in it and pretend," says he. "I pretend I'm king."

Winters tried psychiatry a couple of years ago. "I was analyzed," he says, "and it was interesting. I went for five months. Finally, I told him I was Mrs. Woodrow Wilson. That's when he said, 'I can't put you away, but you should go away.' " Then Johnny adds solemnly: "Who's to say who's sick? If you're not sick, you're a bore."

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