"Garfield: The Movie" (2004): When the famous comic-strip cat made the leap to the big screen, Tobolowsky was hired to play the villain â a dog-napping television host named Happy Chapman.

SHARE Jackie Fabulous and other African-American comics will perform at 9 tonight at Ventura Harbor Comedy Club. Contributed photo Laugh it up with Filipino-American comic Rex Navarrette at 8 tonight in the Ventura Harbor Village Lawn Tent. Contributed photo "Chelsea Lately" star Michael Yo will perform at 10 p.m. Saturday in the Ventura Harbor Village Lawn Tent. Contributed photo

By Brett Johnson

Oh the stories actor Stephen Tobolowsky tells. Funny, poignant and scary ones ? and virtually none of the really good ones have anything to do with his fine Hollywood career.

He's been the name you mostly forget and the face you usually remember (with a little prodding) as one of the most respected character actors around.

But forget for a moment his turns as Ned Ryerson in "Groundhog Day," amnesiac Sammy Jankis in "Memento," Werner Brandes in "Sneakers," the CBS exec in "The Insider" or Commissioner Hugo Jarry in "Deadwood."

Forget his current recurring roles in Fox's "Glee" and Showtime's "Californication," or that he's in the cast of "The Mindy Project" that premiered Tuesday and runs this fall on Fox.

Forget that he's doing a comedy gig Saturday afternoon at the Ventura Comedy Festival, quite the 180 for someone known primarily for playing nerdy, anal-retentive business types or just plain annoying characters.

Forget all that and listen. Things just seem to happen to him in real life that make his showbiz career, the place where drama and action are supposed to run wild, seem pale by comparison.

Tobolowsky was once held hostage at gunpoint for 45 minutes in a Dallas grocery store. It was high drama: TV reporters doing live remotes from the scene, the SWAT team running around and slowly creeping into position as each precious, tense minute elapsed ? "They had their rifles pointed at us through the food in the adjacent aisles," Tobolowsky recalled.

He's a guy who can also now breezily announce, "I almost got killed twice in one week in Hartford, Conn." He had a gun drawn on him in a pub and he was stabbed at a pizza parlor while doing local theater there. It was two separate incidents "on a Monday and a Wednesday, or it was a Tuesday and a Thursday," he said.

Tobolowsky also was thrown out of two restaurants on two different continents two years apart when then-President Reagan decided to break bread there. Once in Washington, once in Helsinki, both for security reasons ? "Those same damn guys with those earpieces came in and said, 'You have to leave, the president is going to dine here,' " he recalled.

A few years back, Tobolowsky broke his neck in several places while horseback riding in Iceland next to an active volcano.

That incident, which left him in a neck brace for months and largely unable to do anything (much less act), is indirectly why Tobolowsky will grace the stage of the Ventura Harbor Comedy Club at 3 p.m. Saturday to do "The Tobolowsky Files Live" as part of the second annual Ventura Comedy Festival.

A storyteller emerges

One thing he could do was sit up at a computer. Tobolowsky began to write stories about his life ? "I realized after the fact that I could've never seen my (two) kids again," he said.

That led to a Internet podcast called The Tobolowsky Files. Some of the stories wound up on public radio in Seattle ? and now, they might form the basis for a national radio show via Public Radio International, which could begin a test run later this fall or in early 2013.

His storytelling acumen also landed Tobolowsky a book deal with Simon & Schuster for "The Dangerous Animals Club," which was released Tuesday.

The title refers to the club he had with his neighborhood pals as a 7-year-old growing up in North Texas. Its mission, he noted, was to "capture every dangerous animal there was." They had rife and potentially deadly pickings ? tarantulas, rattlesnakes, scorpions and the like.

The book, he said, is about "80 percent funny and 20 percent bloodcurdling." The other dangerous animals in it, he said, include agents and producers.

Longtime film critic-author Leonard Maltin said in a review that Tobolowsky "has found his true calling as a storyteller. He is candid, insightful, often profound, and very, very funny." Tobolowsky, he added, "weaves a spell not unlike Jean Shepherd or Garrison Keillor, but he has a voice all his own, and I love it."

Tobolowsky also began telling his stories on stage. He believes his Ventura gig resulted when some Comedy Festival folks caught one of his L.A. performances last year.

"I was very moved and flattered when the people in Ventura wanted me to perform at the comedy festival," he said.

His stories are spinning an impressive web ? podcast, new book, comedy shows and potential national public radio show.

And he might be adding to his collection. This interview last week began with nary an introduction and Tobolowsky on the streets of Beverly Hills amid another crisis.

"I'll explain everything in a minute," he said as he came on the line, a bit out of breath. "It's been quite a day, quite a day. I'm trying to get out of my ? a-a-a-h-h ?. car. My wife's (actress Ann Hearn) had emergency dental surgery and I'm waiting for her to be finished."

The truth is funny

Tobolowsky dislikes dipping into the same stories too often and said he will tell a new one at his Ventura show.

It involves visiting his 90-year-old dad in Dallas a few months back. He was considering selling the family home and asked Tobolowsky to rummage through it for his things. He went to his childhood bedroom and found a little knickknack ? a tiny ceramic book with a rose in one corner and his name written in gold.

The find triggered a flood of memories in Tobolowsky. The story, he said, is about how "there's no such thing as a piece of nothing" and how the past informs the present.

It's akin, he added, to the end of Thornton Wilder's classic "Our Town" in which Emily returns to the small town where she grew up and finds that all the supposedly mundane activities in it are what's special in life.

There's humor in there, but also poignancy. Some of his stories also have dark elements, he noted.

"My stories are not standup ? Warning! Warning!" Tobolowsky said.

He's more in the vein of Bill Cosby's long-form stories. Tobolowsky's two rules are that every story is true and each happened to him. By telling the truth, the story is more universal and funnier. The humor will come from the truth, and that's better than trying to be clever.

"I've learned the hard way that if you do it any other way, you screw it up," said Tobolowsky, who's also written plays and movie scripts in his long career.

He tells Hollywood stories on stage (as well as in his new book), but noted that most of them have "a very limited shelf life."

He said he could tell stories from his days on NBC's "Heroes," but the coming generation won't even know the show ever existed. Likewise, he has great stories from doing "Bird on a Wire" with Mel Gibson ? but few people remember it "and," he deadpanned, "it was made back when everyone liked Mel Gibson."

When he filmed "Mississippi Burning" in the late 1980s, he played a local Ku Klux Klan leader, and the real-life KKK guy he was portraying hunted him down ? not to give him pointers but to find out "how the hell" he was to be depicted. Or something to that effect. Things got a little tense for a while.

"The whole story got real scary," Tobolowsky remembered. "The head of the KKK tracked me down to the hotel where I was staying at."

In addition to Ventura, Tobolowsky will be doing a sprinkling of gigs across the country this fall amid his "Mindy Project" shooting schedule ? Seattle, Louisville, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston, Denver and Charleston, S.C., among others.

The real world interjected. Another line buzzed in the car. It was the dentist's office. "My wife is out of surgery," he said. "I gotta go get her. Call me back in a few."

A guy goes into a bar in Hartford and ...

Tobolowsky, 61, was born and raised in Dallas, graduated from Kimball High School there, attended Southern Methodist University and later got his master's degree in acting from the University of Illinois.

At Kimball, he was part of a state champion high school debate team ? "We were the terrors of North Texas," he said. One classmate was the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, who'd go on to become a famous guitarist before dying in a helicopter crash after a gig in Wisconsin in 1990.

He and Vaughan were in different bands, and Tobolowsky fondly recalled the time when the two groups were asked to be on the same album. No one, he said, took the 14-year-old Vaughan seriously until he started playing lead guitar. He still remembers the agog faces of all the guys in the recording booth.

"Afterward, one of them buzzed into the studio and with that dry Texas humor said, 'That was pretty good, son, you got another one in ya?' " Tobolowsky said with a laugh. "This was the first time these guys saw the real thing. And when you get that close to the real thing ? it was awesome."

Current events intervened as Tobolowsky reached the dentist's office.

"Ann, Ann, are you OK?" he said to his wife. "Hey baby, everything OK, sweetheart? We're in a recovery room. Are you in any pain? They said it all went super well. Just sit back and rest."

Tobolowsky started out in theater, and wrote and directed a few plays. His film career didn't take off until the mid-1980s.

He was doing theater in Hartford in the early 1980s when two brushes with death occurred. He was at a bar, playing pinball after a performance, when a guy attacked Tobolowsky's then-girlfriend, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Beth Henley ("Crimes of Passion").

The guy, Tobolowsky recalled, literally was on top of Henley. He shoved him away; the guy pulled out a gun and pointed it at him.

Another interruption. Tobolowsky left the recovery room to retrieve his car for the drive home.

"Here comes my wife in a wheelchair," he said soon. "This is so exciting. I was almost given a parking ticket by the police. But he recognized me from 'Sneakers.' He said, 'Oh, it's Werner Brandes. I won't give you a ticket but what's the deal?' The officer did escort me back to a proper parking space."

He then picked up the Hartford pub story without losing even a wheel on his train of thought.

After the guy drew the gun, "Beth says, 'Can I go finish my drink now?' and I said, 'No, we gotta get outta here.' The guy was saying, 'Turn around, m-----f-----, it's payday, m-----f-----.'"

He and Henley ran out of the bar to the street below, and hid. The incident passed.

Two days later, he decided against going to the bar but did patronize the next-door pizza parlor.

Three people approached the parlor door at the same time; Tobolowsky attempted to open it for them, but botched it. A guy said to him, "Trying to block my way, pal?"

"He pulls out a knife and sticks it into my stomach," Tobolowsky recalled.

Fortunately, it hit his belt buckle; he was also wearing a thick overcoat that blunted the blow. It was a minor wound.

Trouble from Dallas to Iceland

But "far more serious" than Hartford was the time he was held hostage at gunpoint at a Dallas grocery store. This happened several years earlier, around 1975.

It started when Tobolowsky got distracted by a sign touting mangos.

"This guy came up to me and put a .45 handgun to my head," he said. "I looked around and the store was empty. Everyone else had seen a guy with a gun come in and ran out of the store, but not me. I was so into picking out my mangos."

Tobolowsky was frightened; he could see police teams and TV crews outside. To try to ease tensions, he began talking to the gunman, who was drunk and angry. He told him about his life, and his dad.

"I was talking faster than a racetrack announcer in Mexico," he said. "I finally realized the only way out: I had to invite the guy over for dinner. I was so scared I gave him my real address."

Fortunately, the police used "my nonstop blather" as a diversion to gain access through the back of the store and slowly advance into position. That's when Tobolowsky noticed the rifles pointed from adjacent aisles.

The guy eventually gave in; "they had him tied up and out of there in like eight seconds." Still mightily dazed from the ordeal, Tobolowsky walked up to a deserted checkout line and waited around idly, until an officer came back in and said, "Hey buddy, you can go now."

As if the Hartford and Dallas circumstances were not unusual and scary enough, Tobolowsky, in perfect deadpan, noted that, "The broken neck was pretty bad, too."

He and Hearn are horseback riding enthusiasts and have been to Iceland twice; a famous rider there is the father of their L.A.-based trainer.

None of which helped on the fateful day about four years ago.

"I broke my neck good," he said. "I was hit by this gigantic wind. It lifted me and my horse off the ground. It threw us onto this lava flow.

"Now, this horse was not a nice horse; it was a nasty, sonofabitch horse," he continued. "After we got thrown onto the lava flow, it got up and left."

Actress Brooke Adams, who was along on the trek, recognized his symptoms; her sister was once thrown from a horse. Adams, he said, "saved my a--." He said the experience was "like I was dead, but I was awake, maybe like being in a coma."

But, he noted, some good came out of it; it led him to write his stories.

'It happens'

He's got loads of them, far too many to recount in this space.

Sometime in the 1990s, Buzz magazine nominated him as one of the 100 coolest people in L.A.

"Talk about high comedy," Tobolowsky recalled. "This caller from Buzz magazine says, 'I don't know who you are, but can you tell me some cool things you've done? And can you give me some phone numbers of friends who can attest to your coolness, and send us something telling us how cool you are?'"

He faxed them a list of 10 cool things he'd done, "one of which was almost getting killed on a Monday and a Wednesday in Hartford." The Dallas grocery store hostage situation made the list, as did catching tarantulas and getting booted out of two of Reagan's dining haunts.

"I never got to meet him, but I felt his presence," Tobolowsky cracked.

Eventually, Tobolowsky didn't make the final Buzz magazine "coolest" list.

"Andy Dick got chosen instead of me," he said. "I think this was before he ran over his houselady."

Around the turn of the most recent century, Tobolowsky was dubbed the ninth-most-visible screen presence by USA Today due to his plethora of character actor parts.

"I don't think they count the minutes," he said self-deprecatingly, noting most of his roles are bit parts. "It's a matter of statistics, not impact."

Lead actors, such as Meryl Streep, might do two movies a year, he noted. Tobolowsky estimates he gets around 16 to 20 parts a year. He's been in more than 100 movies and 200 TV shows.

He indicated that the key to his character actor longevity is to understand the role as art form and in the big picture. He said his role as an amnesiac in "Memento" is the "most difficult part I've ever played."

It resulted after he told director Christopher Nolan that he once had undergone experimental, medically induced amnesia to get over a kidney stone. He wouldn't be asleep, but he'd forget pain ? and other things.

For the next several days, Tobolowsky said, he'd find himself in the middle of a room holding an empty glass. Once, he found himself befuddled in the bathroom.

"I wasn't sure if I had already peed or needed to pee," he said. "Finally, Ann came along and said, 'You're done; you've been in there for 10 minutes.' "

Soon, Tobolowsky and Hearn were back in their Studio City home after her dental trauma.

"You have to have at least two pillows under your head," he said to Hearn. "Do you want some soup?"

He soon added, "I've got to go get Ann an ice pack."

Asked how she was doing, he replied, "She's got a high tolerance for pain. I remember when she gave birth to one of our kids, she shot that baby out something like 20 feet across the room."

To which Hearn, apparently recovering nicely, replied in the background, "I'm a hillbilly."

Tobolowsky's real life seems to trump his Tinseltown tales. He noted that he's up to 58 hours (or episodes) of podcast stories now, adding, "I'm writing No. 59 as we speak."

Gun hostage, stabbing victim, a broken neck in Iceland, creepy crawlies ? he's got lots of fodder.

"Man," Tobolowsky said with a drawn-out sigh, "you live long enough, it happens."

Ventura Comedy Festival

Actor Stephen Tobolowsky is one of more than 140 performers taking part in the second annual festival. He'll perform "The Tobolowsky Files Live" at 3 p.m. Saturday at the Ventura Harbor Comedy Club, 1559 Spinnaker Drive, Ventura. Tickets are $15.The festival continues through Sunday at several different Ventura venues. A portion of proceeds from events will go to Cancer Support Community (formerly the Wellness Center) in Westlake Village.

Tickets are available at the venues or online at venturacomedyfestival.com. Call 644-1500 or visit the website for more information.

Highlights include:

Bad Girls of Comedy: 7 p.m. today, Ventura Harbor Comedy Club, 1559 Spinnaker Drive in Ventura. With Allison Breen, Bernadette Pauley, Bridget Renee, Candace Brown, Dana Nasser, Grace Fraga, Henrietta Komras and others. $15.

Rex Navarrete: 8 p.m. today, Ventura Harbor Village Lawn Tent, next door to Blackbeard's Seaside BBQ, 1591 Spinnaker Drive. The Filipino-American comic performs with Justin Rivera. $20.

Black Friday: 9 p.m. today, Ventura Harbor Comedy Club. Featuring African-American comics Annie McNight, Chinedu Unaka, Chris James, Dennis Wilson, Eric Blake, Jackie Fabulous, Jerry Winn, Michael Batts and Rawle Dee. $15.

Jews Gone Wild: 9 p.m. today, The Greek at the Harbor, 1583 Spinnaker Drive. With Ben Rosenfeld, Bruce Baum, David Race, Eric Schwartz, Ester Steinberg, Henrietta Komras and others. $15.

Left vs. Right political showdown: 5 p.m. Saturday, Ventura Harbor Comedy Club. With Bob Dubac (making his case for the left) and Evan Sayet (arguing for the right). $20.

Basile: 7 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, The Greek at the Harbor. $25-$50.

Michael Yo & Friends: 10 p.m. Saturday, Ventura Harbor Village Lawn Tent. $20.

Dirty Dozen: 10 p.m. Saturday, Andres Wine & Tapas Bar, 1575 Spinnaker Drive. With Aldo Juliano, Andre McSween, Carrie Gravenson, Claire Brosseau, Jeff Capri, Lisa-Gay Tremblay and others. $15.

Roundtable Comedic Debate: 5 p.m. Sunday, Ventura Harbor Comedy Club. With Evan Sayet. $20.

Ventura's Funniest Person Contest: 7 p.m. Sunday, Ventura Harbor Comedy Club. $15.