Scientist by Day, Comic by Night

By GINA PICCALO AND LOUISE ROUG

May 31, 2002 12 AM PT

A rocket scientist walks into a comedy club on Hollywood Boulevard

Improv comic Gregory Harrison’s best line is not a joke. Yes, his day job is rocket science, doing what he calls his “Mars work” at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.

And at night, he performs at the ImprovOlympic West in Hollywood.

“I’m not really funny around here,” said Harrison, apologetically, as he walked from the “sandbox”--a simulated Mars environment where rover test operations take place--to his office upstairs.

And no, he hardly ever jokes about space. The connections between his day job and his night job are more subtle than that.

“The romantic way I see it is to think of myself as an explorer here and as an explorer on stage,” he says. But at JPL, “there’s a lot of deep thought, absorbing something and exploring all the possibilities.” On stage, “it’s very different. I have to act and react fast.” At the lab, 37-year-old Harrison analyzes thousands of problems, denoted in spreadsheets. “I have a Type A personality,” he says. “I’m very goal- and success-oriented ... constantly thinking, how much time do I have? In five minutes, I have to do this. I’ve got it all mapped out in my head.” With improv, “there’s no way of knowing where it’s going to go. The lack of knowing the future--that’s what really gets me.” It’s an antidote, he says, to days spent anticipating problems and fixing them.

He bases his material on “the quirkiness of my own self,” like reading the entire car owner’s manual at 2 a.m. in preparation for a road trip to Sacramento. “It was totally insane. I was like, ‘OK, here’s the headset. This is how you adjust the headset.’ Nobody does that.”

This obsessive manual ritual became a skit in the one-man show he’s tentatively scheduled to perform at the ImprovOlympic in late June. “Basically, I will personify the owner’s manual and put it on the psychiatrist’s couch--the trauma of having been read cover to cover.” The one-man show is a divergence from Harrison’s other comedy work--long-form improvisation, the anarchistic performance of free association.

“Monty Python is a real big influence,” he says. “The freshness of the sketches, the wackiness.” His favorite skit is the “fish-slapping dance” in which Michael Palin slaps John Cleese on the cheek with a little fish, in what seems like a ritualistic dance. Cleese responds by whacking Palin in the head with a much bigger fish. “What does it mean?” Harrison says, grinning. “Nothing, but I love it.”

There was no fish-slapping as Harrison took the stage on a recent night with the eight-member group Stabile, just an improvisation on how a member of the audience might dream that night--and the word of the night: “peanut,” which Harrison played out as a peanut-news newscaster, a child with a benign tumor, a peanut-store accountant....

And there were no jokes about Mars.

More Power to Them

Natalie Portman brought a spot of color into a room full of studio execs, publicists and journalists.

She beamed at everyone who met her gaze, gave her publicists a high-five and held herself with a balletic poise that evaporated when she spotted a bearded man in the corner.

In one movement, she was in his arms. He was former 20th Century Fox chief Bill Mechanic.

After that brief but emotional moment, she moved on through the crowd, telling another guest: “I just masquerade as if I’m cool.”

It was lunchtime on Wednesday at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, and Portman was one of five people honored by Premiere magazine as Hollywood’s “new power.”

The others included actor Hugh Jackman and producer Nancy Juvonen, director Christopher Nolan, and 20th Century Fox executive Emma Watts.

Between the salad and the salmon, talk at one table turned to the Cannes Film Festival: Sharon Stone’s winning personality, the shortage of televisions at the Hotel du Cap and the lack of menu variety (“I had sea bass five nights in a row,” one woman said.)

At another table, Tracey Ullman amused her mates with a quick dance number between tables.

As waiters handed out mini lemon meringue pies, Carrie Fisher paid her respects to the “new” Hollywood power, which she said arrived just in time, as “some of the old power was beginning to smell.”

In her speech honoring Portman, Fisher joked that she and the 21-year-old actress share a special bond as participants in the “Star Wars” franchise.

“We’re both little dolls and big cardboard cutouts and Pez dispensers,” Fisher said.

“For a price, you can flip our heads back, and a tiny rectangle wafer will come out of our necks. How many people can say that?”

City of Angles runs Tuesday through Friday. E-mail: angles @latimes.com.