A funny thing happened on the way to law school

NEW YORK -- Two years ago people knew Aisha Tyler as the wacky host of E!'s compendium of talk-show clips, "Talk Soup." These days she's seeping into every corner of the entertainment world.

If you haven't heard her voice urging rapper Kanye West to "Do it faster, baby/Do it faster" on the ironic ode to vintage R&B "Slow Jamz," then you might have seen her in the heavily rotated video. Last year she broke into mainstream consciousness with an extended guest appearance on "Friends." Now she's working on her own sitcom for CBS that will be produced by newfound friend Lisa Kudrow. Her current venture? A nonfiction book released last month called "Swerve: Reckless Observations of a Postmodern Girl" that sits comfortably in the feminist or comic sections of bookstores.

Not bad for a Dartmouth College graduate who began her comedy career 10 years ago touring colleges in a smelly van. This San Francisco native gets audiences laughing by talking about her discomfort straddling the worlds of her white private school and her black neighborhood.

"I just never was a Def Comedy Jam comic, and I'm not afraid to admit that, you know what I mean?" Tyler says. "That's just not my voice, and I wanted to be honest about that, because as a kid I was made to feel bad about it. Made me feel bad about the way I dressed. Made me feel bad that I was going to a white school. Black people from my neighborhood teased me and tried to beat me up because, you know, I was different. Now I really try to embrace the fact that I'm different."

Fans are embracing that difference as well. The two-year stint on "Talk Soup" raised her profile so much that she hosted the syndicated dating show "The 5th Wheel" and got bit parts in HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and the film "The Santa Clause 2." Now she's a favorite of the Maxim/Esquire crowd, ranking No. 74 on the former's Hot 100 list and garnering a mention in the latter's "Women We Love" issue.

Tyler maintains her profile by playing the Hollywood starlet game. Her face is photographed at all the right parties. She recently made the scene at the Sundance Film Festival, where she promoted her film "Meet Market" and broke her right elbow snowboarding. When she settles into her midtown hotel room for a chat and photo session with a reporter and photographer, she's accompanied by her husband and publicist, who observe the proceedings.

In these celebrity-obsessed times, Tyler has learned to keep the things closest to her heart off-limits. No more doling out the names of her husband, mother, and father. No more telling her age, either.

"There's so much cannibalism of relationships right now," she says after her husband, a lawyer, declines to give his name. "It's awful, you know. Couples just get devoured."

Her mother once liberally sent clippings about Tyler to friends, but now she just wants the public to leave her alone. "Everybody knows I'm your mother. There's no peace," Tyler's mother tells her.

As for the age question, Tyler says, "You can find it. I encourage you to look." Getting the answer is as easy as typing www.imdb.com, which lists her birth date as Sept. 18, 1970.

Even as she swats away personal questions, Tyler remains warm, friendly, and self-deprecating. That generosity of spirit is what made her so appealing to Dan Bucatinsky, coproducer of Tyler's yet-to-be-named CBS pilot.

"She was the most unlikely person, seeing her across the room at a party, that I would imagine becoming one of my close friends, and yet the minute we started talking we hit it off," he says. "I just find her amazingly relatable, down to earth, and inclusive. . . . A lot of times you'll meet a comedian who feels in their gut this sense of competition. They have to be the funniest person in the room. Aisha will be making you laugh and just as easily laugh hysterically at something you said."

Words seem to rush out of her mouth. The terms she's particularly enamored of are "like" and "you know." As she talks, her body moves back and forth like a slowly undulating wave. In comedian mode, she leans forward, her voice crescendoing, her uninjured arm animated. When the story's over, she leans back, her voice returns to normal, and she thoughtfully runs her fingers through her hair.

She's in hair-stroking mode as she remembers the explosive effect of seeing her first comedy show in college. It was at the campus pub Eleazar's Dungeon, and a comedian -- Tyler doesn't remember his name -- was riffing on Tyrannosaurus Rex. He joked about how it must have been a sexually frustrated animal, and that's why it became extinct.

What Tyler loved, she says, was the physical effects the jokes had on the audience -- "how people are laughing uncontrollably, you know. Like your stomach hurts and your cheeks hurt and you're punching your neighbor, you're almost crying, and you've got that kind of laugh where you feel like air is barely squeaking out of your throat. . . . I left feeling so elated, and I thought this was the coolest thing I'd ever seen."

Not that she considered making a career of it. Her mother was an art teacher with a master's degree in fine arts; her father is a photographer. Tyler describes her family as "hell-bent on academics," and her sole goal was to get a law degree.

The arts was something she did on the side. In high school she'd cut class to take the school's improv course with her now-famous peers Margaret Cho and Sam Rockwell. She spent time between Dartmouth classes performing skits and singing in the a cappella group Rockapella.

After graduating with a government major from Dartmouth in 1992, Tyler went the traditional route and got a job. But toiling in client services at a San Francisco advertising agency didn't fulfill her.

"I was depressed," she says, softly and distinctly. "I didn't know why. I didn't know why. I didn't know why. And I thought maybe it's because I was not doing anything creative."

So Tyler tried comedy. She paid $3 to climb onstage at San Francisco's now-defunct Holy City Zoo comedy club, which Tyler describes as "this 20-seat dive" with church pew seating. It was a comedy mecca where Robin Williams, Ellen DeGeneres, and Rob Schneider had performed.

The response was positive enough to convince Tyler to pursue it as a career. In 1994, she quit her job, got married, and embarked on a four-month national tour in a van with two other comedians. They performed in lunch rooms and dorms to an often impassive audience.

"It was great for a comedian," she says. "You don't really learn until you go through something like that."

Three years later, she and her husband moved to Los Angeles. In the intervening years, Tyler the comedian began to evolve.

"When I first started in stand-up, I really did a lot to mask my femininity," she says. "I never wore makeup. I wore my hair in a ponytail. I used to wear this man's shirt, this shroud, because I just didn't want people to look at me. . . . I was just very concerned that people weren't going to hear what I had to say. If they think you're attractive, they think you are dumb."

So it's not surprising that "Swerve" offers comedy with a feminist twist. In one chapter, she details her frustration as a child with being called "sassy" for speaking her mind, while talkative boys got no such label. In another, she describes how celebrity culture makes women lust for skinny bodies that are unattainable even to people in the entertainment industry. Tyler will bluntly tell you it takes hours of makeup and wardrobe plus a touch of Photoshop to look the way she does in magazines.

She grabs "Swerve" and flips to the section about the feminist audience that hissed at her when she joked about bulimia. "I was so upset that I was a woman and I was not allowed to own bulimia," she says. "I think that's the frustration a lot of young women have with feminism: It's so dogmatic. It's so rigid."

Tyler can embrace the ideology yet still pose in her underwear for the Maxim photo shoot (she addresses that issue in another chapter). That's probably why men find her comedic voice palatable even though it's strongly female. "I think of myself as living feminism everyday," she says. "I should feel free to laugh at dirty jokes, and I should be able to feel free to go to the strip clubs -- whatever it is! That's part of what it means to be a feminist."

Tyler considers her work a success when people tell her she didn't fit their preconceived notions. She's been doing the unexpected for decades.

"Sadly, when I was a kid," she says, "and I was the only black kid in school, people assumed that I liked this kind of music, I ate this kind of food, I dressed this way, I talked this way. And I didn't. I was a kid who -- if I'm going to be the only black kid, I'm going to be the crazy black girl. I was the snowboarder. I was the rock climber."

That spirit also informs the pilot she's working on. The workplace comedy centers around a woman who had her life mapped out in her 20s but finds herself nowhere near those objectives when she reaches her 30s.

"The Mary Tyler Moore Show" inspires this program, not urban sitcoms. The writers are Bill Martin and Mike Schiff, creators of the family comedy "Grounded for Life." The goal is to do "a sophisticated show," says Tyler, a smart comedy on the level of a "Will & Grace," "Frasier," or "Seinfeld."

Unexpected, perhaps, but Tyler's used to being different.