Stand-up, acting go together for Garrett

Brad Garrett (with Joely Fisher) is heading into his third season as the star of the sitcom " 'Til Death." (GREG GAYNE/FOX)

Is Brad Garrett a stand-up comedian who acts or an actor who does stand-up? That's a tougher question for Garrett than for many other performers who used stand-up to break into acting or vice versa. He's been doing both almost all of his life, starting stand-up at 15, when he hosted a talent show at his high school.

"Instead of bringing out all the acts, I was roasting all the teachers in the front row," remembers Garrett, who plays the South Shore Music Circus tonight and the Cape Cod Melody Tent tomorrow. "It didn't make for a great year for me, scholastically, but I ended up saying, 'Oh, my gosh, this is really what I do.' But as much as I knew stand-up was my thing, I always knew acting would be a part of it."

Garrett went from high school to the legendary Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute when he was 18, with a six-week layover at UCLA. Now, he has his own show, " 'Til Death," a lucrative career acting and doing voice-overs in films like the upcoming sequels to "Night at the Museum" and "Hoodwinked!," following his nine-year run as Robert on "Everybody Loves Raymond."

Stand-up comedy, to Garrett, is a natural extension of acting, with origins that can be traced as far back as Shakespearian monologues. It's hard for him to separate the two, especially when things aren't going well.

"There are nights when you're up there and you sure don't feel funny," he says. "There are nights you're up there and your dad's in the hospital or you've had a terrible fight. So there's a lot of acting going into stand-up. And the key is to make it look conversational."

Of course, standing roughly 6-foot-8, Garrett had a tough time avoiding typecasting. He remembers being up for a role in "Analyze This," losing the part after several auditions when he met star Robert De Niro. "I knocked on Mr. De Niro's door, and he looked at me," Garrett says. "[He] was one of my heroes, and he goes, 'You're a lil' big,' and he closed the door. I thought I was going to die."

Now, Garrett is heading into the third season of " 'Til Death," which moves to Wednesdays starting Sept. 10. There were offers to reprise his "Raymond" role, and Garrett came close to doing it, but the deal fell through, he said, when CBS declined to hire the writers from "Raymond" Garrett felt were essential to make the project work.

Next up, Garrett will also star in a Web-based reality show called "Dating Brad Garrett," which debuts in September on crackle.com. Each week, the site will air two and a half minutes of footage from Garrett's date with a different woman. He sees it as an antidote to highly scripted, so-called reality shows like "The Bachelor."

"Am I going to find the love of my life?" he says. "Of course, not. It's about having a window into what it's like to be middle-aged and out on the streets. It's scary and funny and sometimes cool."

Let us not forget . . .

They are the backbone of just about every film and TV show you see. They are the red shirts in "Star Trek." The storm troopers on the Death Star. The goons that James Bond battles. They are the henchmen, and for the next eight weeks, ImprovBoston will give them their due, starting with tonight's tribute to Quentin Tarantino and film noir. The show, appropriately titled "Henchmen," will follow the careers of three sidekicks for hire and the different heroes and villains they work for.

Director Kevin Harrington found inspiration to create the show in everything from Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" to a conversation about Death Star contractors in "Clerks." The point, he says, is "celebrating these usually forgettable people and giving them some depth. It's fun, but also, there's some interesting things to exploit. Like, why the hell would anyone choose to work for a guy who's trying to destroy the Earth with a magnifying glass?"

Around town

Kevin Knox is at Dick's Beantown Comedy Vault tonight with Flaming Improv. . . . Improv Jones is back at the Arsenal Center for the Arts tonight. . . . Ira Proctor, Jeff Dye, J.J. Leslie, Dan Crohn, and others will be at the Comedy Studio tonight and tomorrow.