Roastmaster General

By Richard Corliss reported by William Tynan/New York

Bette Midler testifies, "for years I never said a word that Bruce didn't charge me for." Robin Williams: "This man cracks my ass--with laughter." Nathan Lane: "He's given more great lines to celebrities than a Hollywood coke dealer."

To receive such praise, from such stars, in public, you should have to be either God or dead. Bruce Vilanch is neither. He is a comedy writer. His name can't be found on film scripts or Broadway marquees or even as Executive Associate Creative Consultant on a UPN sitcom. Yet he is the unseen perp of some of the funniest, most famous or notorious moments in recent show-biz history.

Vilanch, 51, writes material for celebs--everyone, he has said, "from abba to Zadora"--to deliver on award shows, concert tours and the TV talk circuit. He has written for the past nine Oscar fests, and for the Tonys, Grammys, Emmys--any outlet for the entertainment industry's endless need to taunt and flatter itself. When stars are booked for a big benefit, or for Leno or Letterman, they cry, Get Bruce! Which is also the title of Andrew J. Kuehn's fond, zippy new documentary about the Bruce who, on the Hollywood circuit, is the real Boss.

He has crafted most of Midler's routines, including her bawdy Sophie Tucker jokes ("I was in bed last night with m' boyfriend Ernie...") and her farewell song to Johnny Carson (You Made Me Watch You). He helped Billy Crystal with the '90s' most sit-throughable Oscar shows, capped by the 1993 gender-bending song parody (to the tune of The Tender Trap): "Those eyes/ Those thighs/ Surprise!/It's The Crying Game." He was the writer when Whoopi Goldberg performed before President and Mrs. Clinton--and when Ted Danson did his blackface bit at a 1993 Friars Club banquet. "He told the worst, racist, dirty, just filthy awful jokes," Vilanch recalls. "All mine." The assembled luminaries were embarrassed, aghast. "I mean, they were like marble. You could have chiseled them."

Stars typically take the cheers or the heat for these moments; writers just take the money. It has ever been thus. Bob Hope's gagmen were awakened at 3 a.m. for emergency jokes; James Allardice wrote the droll TV monologues that made Alfred Hitchcock a household deity. But these scribes were as anonymous as the Roman speechwriter who whispered into the dying Caesar's ear, "Say, 'Et tu, Brute?'" So it's nice that Vilanch, a wide guy with a blond mop that makes him look like an obscene Senor Wences puppet, is now (as one of his 1,500 T shirts reads) ALMOST FAMOUS, camping it up with Whoopi on the syndicated hit Hollywood Squares, for which he also serves as head writer.

This writing-class hero grew up in Paterson, N.J., the adopted son of an optometrist and a stagestruck housewife who performed in charity shows. Says Vilanch: "She'd sing, do sketches--she's naturally very funny--and I'd imitate her and her friends." At Ohio State he wrote reviews and appeared in plays. "I was going to be Neil Simon, batting out one Broadway show after another." Then he joined the Chicago Tribune as a reviewer-columnist. One night he met the young Midler and said, "You're very funny. You should talk more onstage." He began honing Midler's concert banter. One gig led to another, and voila, a playwright was lost, a quick-draw comic artist born.

Two decades earlier, Vilanch might have been writing for Caesar (Sid, not Julius). But by the late '70s, comedy-variety hours were giving way to knockoffs of Dean Martin celebrity roasts. "The people who had done variety TV, and were now without a form, found one. We all shifted over into awards pageants." And, for Vilanch, benefits: he is a tireless fun and fund raiser for AIDS research and other poignant causes.

As a child, Vilanch had done "a lot of reading and a lot of watching of things." These habits are helpful in a job that demands a breadth of knowledge for potential comedy targets (he subscribes to 64 magazines and newspapers) and an acute ear for a star's persona, vocal rhythms and insecurities. Vilanch will be backstage with Raquel Welch before she gives a speech he wrote, and in the wings on Oscar night to cue Crystal's on-the-spot jokes about Jack Palance push-ups.

Now that Vilanch is about to become more-than-almost-famous, we wonder: Who will be the comic wind in his wings? Who will be Vilanch's Bruce Vilanch? And one other thing--those testimonials that Midler, Williams and Lane give in Get Bruce! Did Bruce write them?

--Reported by William Tynan/New York