The Wacky World According to Chris Elliott

NEW YORK —  A fair warning from the stage--”OK. We’re going to blow Eleanor’s head off one more time.”--and the small audience dutifully sticks fingers in ears.

Blam! “Eleanor’s” dummy head is blown apart, and Chris Elliott as Franklin Delano Roosevelt rushes across the stage to her side, sobbing. It’s just part of the attack on the White House that launched World War II, according to Elliott and co-writer Matt Wickline’s harebrained history.

Elliott’s second Cinemax Comedy Experiment, “Chris Elliott’s FDR,” a 30-minute, nonstop melange of one-man shows, premieres on Cinemax cable Saturday at 11:30 p.m. It was filmed in a theater in the village of Irvington, N.Y., just up the Hudson from New York City.

“I can’t put my finger on it, but I remember seeing Hal Holbrook’s ‘Mark Twain Tonight,’ and ‘Give ‘Em Hell, Harry,’ and the Will Rogers one-man show, and being sort of amused by the guys talking to nobody when nobody’s there, or changing the scene, turning around and he’s 10 years older, and I thought there was enough there to sort of poke fun at,” Elliott said. He spoke in Manhattan, in his comfortably messy office at “Late Night with David Letterman” where he is a writer.

Elliott, 27, is making a career out of poking fun.

On “Late Night,” where he landed a writing job when he impressed Letterman by cracking wise as an NBC gofer, he became The Guy Under the Seats, then The Fugitive Guy. He’s spoofed “Late Night” regulars Jay Leno and sportscaster Marv Albert. When “Late Night” went to Las Vegas, Elliott became Skylark, an obnoxious, generic Vegas lounge lizard. He now appears regularly as an overweight, scatterbrained Marlon Brando.

His first Cinemax special, “Action Family,” took on hard-bitten cop shows and warm-hearted family sitcoms in one swoop.

As “Action Family” was to TV, “FDR” is to one-man shows. Elliott’s FDR tells jokes and does rope tricks from his wicker wheelchair: “A man once asked me how many strings a banjo had. I fired back at the man, ‘Five too many!’ Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh.”

Why FDR?

“He’s really just like an innocent victim chosen out of thin air,” Elliott said, concerned that some viewers might take the show to be some kind of political satire.

Albert appears as an eye-darting emcee.

“Marv doesn’t look like he’s reading cue cards at any point, does he?” Elliott asked with mock-urgency. “I don’t think so. That was a concern of ours.”

Stagehands in black leotards rush around supposedly unseen in the background changing props and scenery, but one takes a second to whisper to Elliott, “The audience hates you!”

“Action Family” and “FDR” feature cameos by Elliott’s father, comedian Bob Elliott of Bob and Ray. He plays a makeup man who gives Elliott a touch-up during the intermission--with a wicked visual punch line.

Wickline, a co-writer at “Late Night,” makes his directing debut, and Elliott’s own production company, Elliottland, produced the show.

Elliott plans to continue writing for “Late Night,” but mostly just his own characters.