A comic impresses as a cast of many

In the world of comedy, Frank Caliendo says, impressionists are like catchers in baseball.

"If you're a catcher, you have a better chance of getting to the major leagues if you're good, because not many people can do what you do," says the seriously funny stand-up, who plays the Music Box theater at the Borgata Hotel Casino tomorrow and Saturday. "And if you get there and can actually hit, well, then, everybody wants you."

For Caliendo, cracking jokes - in addition to doing hilarious impressions of President Bush and John Madden and the cast of Seinfeld, among many others - is akin to hitting. And luckily for him, as comedian-catchers go, he's more Joe Mauer than Rod Barajas. (Phillies fans know that's no joke.)

And lately, everybody seems to want him. Caliendo made his debut on The Late Show With David Letterman in January 2006. Since then, Letterman has reversed his long-standing antipathy to impressionists and has had Caliendo back half a dozen times, once as part of an "Impressionists Week."

Caliendo appeared in full makeup to do his blustery Madden (who, Caliendo says, is "the master of telling you things you already know"). And despite standing only 5-foot-7, the self-described "chubby guy who looks like he got stung by a bee and got an allergic reaction," is equally convincing and amusing as Bush, whose mannerisms he has down cold. ("I think it's great we have a president who seems he's always staring directly into the sun," he says, before doing squinty-eyed W.)

The Mad TV veteran also provides the comic relief on the Fox NFL Sunday show alongside Terry Bradshaw and Howie Long; he took over for Jimmy Kimmel in 2004. And this fall, he'll star in Frank, a sketch comedy show that TBS will televise at 11 p.m. on Tuesdays. "We were going to call [it] Chappelle's Show, but the lawyers wouldn't let us," he says.

Caliendo, 33, is an ex-jock (yep, a catcher) and son of a minor league baseball player. He's been doing stand-up since he was studying broadcast journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He wanted to be an ESPN anchor, but comedy got in the way.

His dead-on Madden - which he has on good authority that the former NFL coach and current NBC analyst and video-game kingpin "hates" - has become his trademark. Caliendo admits this is a blessing and a curse.

"That's the way this business works," he says, talking on the phone as he drives from Cleveland, where his wife's family lives, to a gig in Columbus. (When he's in Left Coast mode, he's based in Tempe, Ariz.) "You pigeonhole yourself to get known. You need a gimmick. And then you spend the rest of your career trying to fight your way out of it."

Caliendo has more than Madden in his trick bag. He also does a raucous Al Pacino, who "yells for no reason. I want to do him as a librarian," he says, shifting into full-throated Pacino mode: "Where's the P section! And what in the hell is the Dewey Decimal System!" (There are free ringtones, including ones of Caliendo as Pacino shouting "Phone call!" at www.frankcaliendo.com.)

The thrilling thing about Caliendo's act is the way he moves from one character to the next in a nanosecond's time. Early in his career, a Hollywood Reporter reviewer said that Caliendo was "like Jim Carrey meets Robin Williams," which Caliendo took as the highest compliment "because that was exactly what I wanted to be."

More even than Letterman or the NFL Sunday show, YouTube made Caliendo's career take off in the last year. Many of his bits are massive on the Internet video-sharing service, with one nine-minute riff receiving 5,447,445 hits, as of yesterday.

He's so popular on YouTube that one blogger has labeled the shift from traditional entertainment-industry outlets to the Internet "the Frank Caliendo effect."

With the help of his brother Terry, Caliendo keeps FrankCaliendo.com stocked with video clips and uses the site to sell stand-up DVDs by mail order, cutting out the need for an entertainment conglomerate middleman.

"We started doing that just before Dane Cook blew up with MySpace," says Caliendo. "We started using the Internet as a tool - it was my brother's idea to give away ringtones on the site, which we started doing, like, five years ago. We don't make any money off of it, but it brings so many people to the site."

YouTube also has made Caliendo's audience "much younger. My act is very clean, so I've become the comedian that dads watch with their sons, which is really cool," says Caliendo, who has a 3-year-old son and an infant daughter.

Not all of Caliendo's impressions are as brash as Madden or Pacino. He's done Eagles coach Andy Reid on NFL Countdown, and his understated Jeff Goldblum is devilishly funny.

"Big and over the top isn't always the best," he says. "And you can disguise a bad - or not so good - impression with good mannerisms. If you have the cadence and the mannerisms down, and the pitch is off a little bit, people will still like it. If it's funny, it's good."

To watch video of Frank Caliendo, go to Dan DeLuca's blog at http://blogs.phillynews.com/

inquirer/inthemix.EndText