PERSONALITIES: Steve Coogan seems poised to hit it big in the States

12:00 AM CST on Friday, February 24, 2006

By DESSON THOMSON The Washington Post

Hugh Grant was just another poker-faced Brit before Four Weddings and a Funeral made him the go-to leading man for Hollywood romantic comedies. More recently, English comedian Ricky Gervais – the obnoxious, goateed manager on BBC's The Office – has broken into the American scene with a Golden Globe Award, an American version of his TV show and an upcoming project with Christopher Guest.

So what will it take for Steve Coogan – whose mordant, self-referential humor has made him a household name in Britain for about 15 years – to stake his comic territory here?

It won't be movies such as 2004's Around the World in 80 Days, in which Mr. Coogan, as the inventor Phileas Fogg, played straight man to Jackie Chan's goofball. Even Mr. Coogan diplomatically admits that the Disney remake, which opened to dismal reviews, "didn't utilize what I can do." And his run of smaller-scale movies hasn't helped the cause: In 2005, he was a gay restaurant proprietor who fathered a child with his stepsister (Lisa Kudrow) in Happy Endings and a sleazy businessman who developed alibis for cheating husbands in Alibi.

What really brings Mr. Coogan's unique brand of comedy to bear are films such as Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, which opens today. Michael Winterbottom's contemporary spin on Lawrence Sterne's 18th-century novel (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman) stars Mr. Coogan in three parts: as the title character, as Shandy's father and as a well-known British actor named "Steve Coogan" who is playing them.

In the latter role, Mr. Coogan is a slippery womanizer, whose wife has just had a baby but who is clearly attracted to the beautiful production assistant taking care of his daily schedule. He's also terrified about being upstaged, so he insists his co-star shave his shoe heels to ensure "Coogan" looks taller onscreen. Meanwhile, he does his desperate best to contain a pending tabloid article about his dalliance with a lap dancer.

Reprehensible qualities are bread and butter to Mr. Coogan, who has built a cottage industry of amusingly unappealing characters, from insincere talk-show host Alan Partridge to Paul Calf, a chain-smoking lout whose blond mullet and drunken swagger suggest Rod Stewart's estranged, beery brother.

With a following in England that approaches Jerry Seinfeld's in the United States, Mr. Coogan's edgy comic routines and utterances have become common parlance.

Fans soon began mimicking Partridge, Mr. Coogan's best-known creation, who was born as a radio sports personality in the 1991 show On the Hour before evolving into a socially maladroit, self-absorbed talk-show host. In the spirit of his favorite band, ABBA, he'd greet all (fictional) guests with the same obnoxious greeting: "Knowing me, Alan Partridge, knowing you (guest name). Aha!" To which the guest was required to respond: "Aha."

The routine became increasingly funny to Cooganistas for its sheer repetitive banality – akin to Seinfeld mantras "Yadda yadda yadda" and "Not that there's anything wrong with that."

After starting off on the wrong foot with his interviewees, Partridge would further alienate, ignore, enrage or embarrass them. When one guest came on the show with a head-jerking tic, for example, Partridge was so distracted by the man's frequent convulsions, he could hardly form a question. And when a female singer talked about her upcoming concert at the Earls Court, then cooed with false modesty, "I never knew I had so many fans," Partridge's response was quintessentially awkward.

"Then why book Earls Court?" he asked her. "It's massive."

This discomforting, quasi-reality-TV humor also resonates in the work of American comedians such as Ben Stiller and Christopher Guest, in Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm and in Ms. Kudrow's The Comeback, in which she plays an erstwhile sitcom star trying to revitalize her career. And, of course, in Garry Shandling's The Larry Sanders Show.

"I did Alan Partridge before I'd even seen Larry Sanders," says Mr. Coogan, 40. "But you see commonality there. I have all Larry Sanders' shows on DVD now. I think the zeitgeist emerges from shared cultural experiences that just happen. I used to do stand-up comedy in London years ago and frequently you'd find yourself with three other comedians that had the same gag."