Wry: Is it good plain?

New York

IT was Monday morning and “Today” was entering its third hour, when things tend to get a little silly. At this particular moment, Paula Abdul was hitting Matt Lauer.

Perched on a stool in Rockefeller Center’s Studio 1A, the petite pop star playfully pummeled Lauer’s arms and legs, demonstrating how she deals with fellow “American Idol” judge Simon Cowell.

The morning show anchor sat calmly through the assault. “This is enjoyable,” he deadpanned.

Such wryness has become a trademark for Lauer, who applies his self-effacing humor to the varied mix that is morning TV. The “Today” co-host seems to be winking at the audience even while he’s participating in outlandish stunts, whether it’s dressing in drag for Halloween or suiting up for synchronized swimming.

For the last nine years, Lauer’s brand of mild sarcasm has served as a counterpoint to co-host Katie Couric’s gregariousness.

“We can complete each other’s sentences,” he said in an interview last week, seated in his snug dressing room overlooking Rockefeller Plaza. “I know what’s going to poke her a little bit to become effusive about something, and she knows what’s going to get my goat, and I think the audience really responds to it.”

That dynamic will be on full display this month as “Today” broadcasts live from the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. After four Games together, the co-hosts bring a familiar repartee to the coverage. But this year’s Olympics has a different cast: It’s possibly the last they’ll cover together.

After almost 15 years as co-host of “Today,” Couric is contemplating leaving the program for CBS, where executives are hoping she’ll become the next anchor of the network’s evening news broadcast. She’s expected to make a decision in the next few months.

“Clearly, she is someone with options, and she deserves every single one of them,” Lauer said. “I don’t know what her thinking is.... I would imagine challenge is very important to her right now, and clearly she’s being offered some things that present huge challenges.”

The Couric-Lauer team has arguably been the most successful pairing in the history of morning television, helping “Today” extend its winning streak for the last 10 years. Couric’s departure would not only alter the show’s chemistry, but it would also thrust Lauer -- long the straight man of the duo -- front and center.

“It would be a major adjustment,” admitted Lauer, who said he hopes his co-host decides to stay. If not, “the best way to get through that would be to view it as an opportunity ... and say, OK, this gives us an opportunity to bring someone new into the mix and to bring that person’s sensibilities into the show, which will naturally change the dynamic a bit and take us in a different direction. I would embrace it.”

“Today” executive producer Jim Bell sounded a little more anxious when asked how Couric leaving would affect the show.

“It would be hard to just come up with an easy answer to that,” he said. “Clearly, chemistry plays an important role on this show.... If she decides to stay -- which I think we’re all working toward -- it’s a question I won’t even have to answer.”

‘Pinch-me moment’

“TODAY” has regained its wide margin over ABC’s “Good Morning America,” which had made significant gains on the top-ranked show last spring. NBC is now averaging 724,000 more viewers in the morning than ABC so far this season, according to Nielsen Media Research. However, with an average audience of 5.89 million people, “Today’s” viewership is still down slightly, compared to this time last season.

Couric’s exit would represent the biggest upheaval at the show since January 1997, when Lauer -- then the program’s news anchor -- succeeded co-host Bryant Gumbel. At the time, the program had recently climbed back into first place from second, and Lauer was admittedly nervous about taking over. Although his genial personality was viewed as a better fit with Couric’s than Gumbel’s gruffer nature had been, Lauer faced some skepticism about whether he had the news chops for the role.

“I was scared to death that I was going to be the guy who single-handedly killed the ‘Today’ show,” he recalled.

And now?

“I still worry that I’m going to be the guy who single-handedly kills the ‘Today’ show,” he said dryly.

Producers at rival programs say there’s not much chance of that.

“He is at the top of his game,” said Michael Bass, senior executive producer of CBS’ “The Early Show,” who served as the senior broadcast producer at “Today” in the late 1990s. “His connection to the audience is so strong.”

Lauer, 48, was not always so comfortable in front of the camera. After studying communications at Ohio University, he first sought a career as a television producer. But months into his first job -- producing a noon newscast in Huntington, W.Va. -- he grew bored and persuaded the news director to let him report a story.

Lauer quickly landed a succession of anchoring jobs on local newscasts and East Coast-based syndicated talk shows, human interest programs “that really forced you to think on your feet.”

But his luck turned in the early 1990s, when he lost a job hosting a national midday talk show after refusing to do live commercials. He had just applied for a tree-trimming job to pay the bills when he got a call from New York affiliate WNBC to anchor the early-morning broadcast.

Before long, “Today” producers spotted him and made him the program’s news anchor.

Lauer called it “just the biggest pinch-me moment I could ever imagine.”

“I still feel that for my particular set of skills, whatever they may be, I don’t think there’s a more perfect match,” he said.

He and Couric had instant chemistry, a dynamic Lauer noted has matured over the years. Once an almost “mock courtship,” their exchanges have evolved into teasing rooted in a deep familiarity with each other’s vulnerabilities, he said. Last Monday, when Couric -- doing the show from Rome -- cracked a joke about Lauer’s receding hairline, he replied sarcastically, “The whole studio here broke up in laughter, Katie.”

“It’s a marriage, in some ways,” Lauer said later. “And tell me a marriage that over the course of seven to 10 years hasn’t had little moments where you look at each other in the morning and say, ‘I’d rather not be sitting next to you this morning.’ But overall on a scale of one to 10, if 10 is a great relationship and one is the Hatfields and the McCoys, I’d say we’ve been an eight or a nine throughout the course of these 10 years, and I think that’s extraordinary.”

For her part, Couric -- who was traveling in Italy last week and unavailable for an interview -- said in a statement that the two have great rapport, adding: “The key to our relationship is mutual respect.”

As the new co-host, Lauer quickly proved himself an able interviewer, garnering attention for a live one-on-one in 1998 with then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in which she blamed the Monica Lewinsky scandal on a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” More recently, he generated buzz in June when he challenged Tom Cruise over the actor’s opposition to antidepressants, prompting the angry movie star to dismiss him as “glib.”

Lauer said hard news is still what gets him “out of bed in the morning.” He and Couric sometimes balk when “Today” veers too much into entertainment, a matter they regularly take up with producers, he said.

“There are some cross-promotional requirements of a job like this,” he said. “I don’t think you can do a job if you go into it being naive about something like that.”

In fact, Lauer seems at ease with many of the program’s light segments and has little compunction about looking foolish on camera.

“I have always been more comfortable with people who laughed at themselves,” said the married father of two -- 4 1/2 - year-old Jack and 2 1/2 -year-old Romy. “People who are supremely confident always freaked me out a little bit.”

Jeff Zucker, who produced “Today” in the 1990s before eventually rising to chief executive of the NBC Universal Television Group, said Lauer is a natural for morning television because he doesn’t “overdo the shtick.”

“He has a very good barometer of what’s appropriate,” Zucker said.

Lauer said he tries to keep in mind how he watches television programs at home: by offering a running commentary about the most implausible moments.

“I look at a host sometimes who’s in the middle of some lunatic segment, and I say, ‘You must be dying on the inside,’ ” he said. To avoid that disconnect, Lauer said he tries to emulate the late “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson’s approach to on-air missteps -- pointing them out.

“I think it’s really important to do that, just so that people don’t think you’re just the cheerleader,” Lauer said. “You can’t be.”