Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, October 31, 1995                   TAG: 9510310065
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DOUGLAS J. ROWE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium

CAREY, LIKE HIS FAVORITE TEAM, IS RIDING HIGH

And these days, that means riding high - for the city formerly known as the Mistake On The Lake is enjoying a renaissance, and the team formerly known as perennial doormats played in the World Series.

Carey, a Cleveland native and big Indians fan, has a new sitcom that's getting good reviews and ratings - ``The Drew Carey Show,'' 8:30 p.m. Wednesdays on ABC (WSET, Channel 13).

By his own estimation, he's having a year in which everything is going right. During a recent interview in a midtown Manhattan hotel suite, he even was still enjoying the afterglow of a date a couple days earlier with Ice, one of the Amazon women on the syndicated ``American Gladiators.''

So life isn't exactly imitating art for the 5-foot-10-inch, 214-pound Carey, who jokes that if he put on a pair of Speedo swimming briefs he'd look like a pear with a rubber band around it.

Along with that body comes The Drew Carey Look: buzzcut and Steve Allen glasses. It's not a contrivance - he wasn't striving for ``a character,'' he said, marking quote marks in the air with his fingers.

``It just happened. I was in the Marine reserves and I started doing stand-up,'' he said.

The haircut didn't have much time to grow out after he put in his one weekend a month, he explained. And he couldn't afford more fashionable specs than the ones he wore in the reserves.

He said he wishes his look were part of a grand plan; that way, he'd have a ready answer for the impertinent people who ask: ``Boy, you look so goofy. How'd that happen?''

In the show, he plays the assistant personnel director of a Cleveland department store. He's a single, with three close buddies: two guys and the currently requisite female friend (Bruce Helford, the show's co-creator, told him that they'd never sell the show without a woman character).

The 37-year-old Carey, who started doing stand-up in 1986, said he and Helford developed the show by trying ``to imagine what my life would have been like if I had never become a comic.''

With a previous stint on another sitcom, the short-lived ``The Good Life'' with John Caponera, Carey sees clear-cut differences between television and soloing in comedy clubs.

``It's more like an Outward Bound adventure. You can fall backward, blindfolded and you trust somebody to catch ya,'' he said. ``You really do have to have to trust everybody else, the co-stars ... to pull you through. There's no way to do a successful TV show and do it all yourself.''

Comparable to an Outward Bound journey, too, was the spelunking and rappeling Carey did to get to this point.

He took a ziggy-zaggy route that got detoured at Disney when he had a personality conflict with a producer there.

``Right from the get-go it was a disaster,'' Carey recalled.

They disagreed on just about everything, including the show's basic premise and title. At that point, he figured he would never be a lead in a show. Then he met Helford, who served as a consultant on ``The Good Life'' and who hired Carey as a writer on another series, ``Someone Like Me.'' Together, they wrote the pilot for Carey's show.

Now his biggest hassles come from the ``standards and practices guy,'' the network's censor.

``People complain about bad language and stuff, but all of my favorite jokes are dirty ones,'' said Carey, whose stand-up routines can be rife with raunchiness. ``They're the funniest.''

With a vintage Indians baseball jacket and hat hanging on a chair nearby, Carey recalled how he threw out the first pitch at an Indians game this season, and he trembles at the suggestion that he might someday do the same at a World Series game.

``Oh man, oh man,'' he whispered with an incredulous awe. ``Too much - please. Too much to ask for. [And] maybe Cindy Crawford will be crawling in my bedroom.''

Even at that, Carey isn't sure he'll ever enjoy a greater moment than when he appeared during the waning days of ``The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.'' He did so well that Carson called him over to sit after his routine.

``That was THE turning point,'' Carey said. ``I can't imagine having a moment like that again. It was just like a sweet, perfect, Kirk Gibson-hitting-the-home-run thing.''