Comedian

64 Diane Ladd Actress 58 Garry Shandling Comedian 53 Joel Coen Movie director 52 Howie Mandel Game show host 43 Don Cheadle Actor

50 Stephen Fry Actor 47 Cal Ripken Jr. Baseball Hall-of-Famer 37 Kristyn Osborn Country singer 34 Dave Chappelle Comedian 19 Rupert Grint Actor

73 Garry Marshall Producer 60 Joe Mantegna Actor 52 Whoopi Goldberg Actress 40 Jimmy Kimmel Comedian 27 Monique Coleman Actress

If it weren't for his college football coach, comedian Brian Regan might have become an accountant. Luckily for his fans, Regan was persuaded by his coach to switch his major from accounting to theater and communications before leaving college in 1980 to pursue a career that would highlight his comedic prowess rather than his bookkeeping ability. Today, Regan is headlining a national Comedy Central-sponsored theater tour. At 8 p.m. tomorrow, fans can see him live at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.

Orioles first baseman Kevin Millar still is showing off the silver Porsche his wife gave him for Christmas. He says that he has gotten it up to 140 mph, but I can't really understand why anyone would pay six figures for a car that fast in a country where the highest legal speed limit is 80 mph. I'll defer to comedian Jay Leno, an avid car collector who asked and answered a similar question during one of his Tonight Show monologues: "It's like buying a...

"The Harmonists" tells the fascinating true story of the Comedian Harmonists, a singing group that rose to fame in Germany in the early 1930s, only to be crushed, like so many other artists, during Hitler's rise to power.Ulrich Noethen plays Harry Frommerman, an unemployed musician who, in 1927, is so poor and hungry that he is forced to steal seeds from his beloved bird's rations. In a last-ditch attempt to have a life in show business, Harry takes out an advertisement in a Berlin newspaper: "Attention: Baritone, tenor and bass singers wanted.

"Chris Rock: Bigger & Blacker" is smaller and louder than I expected this highly publicized concert event to be.Don't get me wrong. Like almost everyone else in the world, I think Rock is a brilliant comedian. And he has moments in this concert filmed at the Apollo Theatre that, if not brilliant, are at least more bitingly insightful than almost anything this side of Richard Pryor in the 1970s or Robin Williams in the 1980s.Rock opens the concert with a red-hot sociological riff on the shootings at Columbine High in Colorado: his reminder that it was white suburban teen-age boys doing all that killing, not black kids living in the city.

Ray Forrest, 83, who worked for many years at his family's jewelry store in Paterson, N.J., died March 11 at a hospital near his home in Kinnelon, N.J. He was all but forgotten as the man who became a hero to hundreds in 1939 as the nation's first television personality.If Mr. Forrest is better remembered among older New York television viewers for the acclaimed educational program "Children's Theater," which he produced and was a host for WNBC-TV from 1949 to 1960, there is a reason his earlier work has been virtually forgotten.

1987: "Star Trek: The Next Generation"1988: John Waters unleashes "Hairspray"1989: Comedian Lucille Ball dies

Bill disgraced the nation's highest office. The House Judiciary Committee put a bomb under it.How refreshing to escape the relentless storm and fury of Washington for the peace and quiet of Gaza!You will soon be able to fly cheap from BWI to Islip, L.I., but then you would be in Islip.Hizzoner, who doesn't want to be mayor any more, is trying out for late-night comedian.Pub Date: 12/13/98

THURSDAY THE FUNKY DIVAS OF COMEDY: Baltimore's Ayanna Dookie (who has an amusing Beyonce routine) hosts a night of serious funny peppered with serious attitude as dished out by "Funniest Mom in America" Meshelle, stand-up comedian Alycia Cooper (originally from Maryland, but currently working in Los Angeles) and D.C.-based stand-up comedian Erin Jackson. The jokes are on you at Magooby's Joke House, 9306 Harford Road in Parkville, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $12. Call 410-356-1010 or go to magoobys.

SUNDAY STRANGE CUSTOMS: THE FLURRY FAMILY ODYSSEY: Fluid Movement, the quirky Baltimore-based performing arts group, presents its latest water ballet at the Patterson Park Pool, 148 S. Linwood Ave., at 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. This time around, the troupe chronicles the journeys of the Flurry family as they travel from the chalets of Liechtenstein to the exotic jungles of Peru while you kick back and relax poolside. Tickets are $10. Go to brownpapertickets.com. 98 ROCK PRESENTS SUMMER ROCK FEST: Get ready to rock out with the metal band Bulletboys at Rams Head Live, 731 Eastern Ave., at 7 p.m. The lineup also features late 1980s artists Faster Pussycat (whose songs include "Poison Ivy" and "Where There's a Whip There's a Way")

WASHINGTON - -Al Franken, the funnyman who wrote the best-seller Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, was sworn in as the junior senator from Minnesota on Tuesday without doing one single funny thing. Once, he was known on the Saturday Night Live stage as the lisping, sweater-wearing bundle of insecurities Stuart Smalley ("I'm good enough, I'm smart enough and, gosh darn it, people like me"). But Franken stepped into the ornate Senate chamber to take his oath of office in a charcoal gray suit, Bible in hand, surrounded by political allies eager to cast him as a "serious" addition to Congress.

FRIDAY Polish festival Enjoy food, drink, music, dancing and crafts from Poland. Vendors and performance stages surround Patterson Park's memorial monument of Gen. Casimir Pulaski, the Polish hero of the American Revolution. The festival runs all weekend, from 4:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday, noon to 9 p.m. on Saturday and 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Sunday. Admission is $2 on Friday and $5 on Saturday and Sunday; children younger than 12 are admitted for free with a paying adult. The Pulaski Monument is at Eastern and Linwood avenues.

It is inevitable that actor Greg Kinnear's name is going to come up in any discussion of actor-comedian Joel McHale. Both became widely known through the irreverent and popular E! entertainment channel TV show now known as The Soup. And both have moved beyond it. Kinnear used the show as a launching pad to become a film star. And McHale, who appears Saturday night in a comedy concert at Baltimore's Meyerhoff Symphony Hall as he continues his winning weekly performance with The Soup, is starting to break out on screens big and small as well.

You don't have to look very hard to find evidence that no one seems to know what makes for a successful TV awards show host anymore, particularly when it comes to the biggest video gala of them all, the Oscars. After years of declining ratings and scathing reviews for its comedian-hosts, the Emmys this year went with five hosts, all of them from the reality TV genre. But the ratings and the reviews only got worse. The Grammys, meanwhile, taking a page from the Golden Globes, gave up on hosts altogether this year.

Fame and success came fast for comedian Gallagher. His third-ever gig as a comic was opening for country music legend Kenny Rogers in Dallas in front of 17,000 people, he recalls. Audiences loved his colorful clothing and trademark watermelon bashing, and his TV series and specials made him a smash hit (pun intended). Nearly 30 years since his explosive start, Gallagher is still bashing fruit and making snappy remarks about society. The clubs are smaller and so are the crowds, but that barely puts a dent in Gallagher's gusto.

Lisa Lampanelli is an equal-opportunity basher. Blacks, whites, Asians, Jews and Hispanics are all in the cross hairs of this up-and-coming insult comic. The only demographic she doesn't lampoon on stage? Europeans. "You only hurt the ones you love," she said. "That's why I don't make fun of French people and Europeans - because they smell and I hate them. They do. Try smelling one. I have. Horrible." Tomorrow, Lampanelli brings her stinging stand-up act to Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. She has about a week to refine her live routine before she tapes a one-hour special for HBO at the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Inside the Actors Studio, one of TV's smartest and most engaging productions, celebrates its 200th episode tonight by putting host James Lipton in the guest's seat with comedian Dave Chappelle doing the interviewing. The two-hour program covers the celebrated 14-year run of the program, revisiting interviews by Lipton with Tom Hanks, Angelina Jolie, Will Smith, Sally Fields, Al Pacino and, it seems, just about everyone who is anyone in the world of theater, film and TV. During an era of increasing incivility on television and in American life, Lipton has achieved the near-impossible feat of creating and starring in a show that is both popular and distinguished for its intelligence and grace.

Judge in Britney Spears' trial tells deadlocked jurors to deliberate more Jurors at Britney Spears' driving-without-a-license trial said that they were unable to reach a unanimous verdict yesterday morning, the Los Angeles Times reported on its Web site. But Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge James Steele told them to try again after he read them additional legal instructions. The jurors deliberated less than two hours yesterday at a San Fernando Valley courthouse. They also spent about two hours on the case Friday.