By Cecily Feltham

Daily Bruin Contributor

When actress Janeane Garofalo was in college she was voted the "Funniest Person in Rhode Island." But as popular as she was in America's smallest state, the rest of the country hasn't necessarily clued in to the comedienne's talents.

"A lot of people would go, 'Well, what movies have you been in?' 'cause most people think I've been in one movie," says Garofalo, the queen of comic self-deprecation. "Actually, I've been in 12 or 13, but you wouldn't know that."

Most people do know that she was in "The Truth About Cats and Dogs," in which she starred as Abby, the quick-witted animal talk show host thwarted by low self-esteem.

Now Garofalo is on the big screen again, this time with slightly bigger co-stars. She plays an elephant specialist with Bill Murray in the upcoming "Larger than Life." For her work on the small screen, she has recently received an Emmy nomination for Paula, the cranky, wise-cracking talent booker on HBO's "The Larry Sanders Show."

The thing is, she doesn't even consider herself funny. "No one would ever describe me as a particularly funny person," she explains. "The only thing I have going for me, I would have to say, is that I get it. Like, I see that 'Spinal Tap' is funny. I am attracted to funny people and funny things and repelled by not funny things, even though I've participated in many of them."

Maybe that's why she was so attracted to the prospect of working with Bill Murray, a man who unquestionably falls into the universally funny category and the only reason she agreed to do "Larger Than Life." Note that this is an elephant movie, starring the same pachyderm, Tai, who spearheaded the cast of "Operation Dumbo Drop." Also note that elephant movies wouldn't normally rank with "Annie Hall," one of Garofalo's personal favorites, when it comes to what's funny. But acting with Murray was an opportunity not to be missed for Garofalo, who says that the elephants weren't all that much of a deterrent. "What the hell ­ I was dressed in khaki," she says with a shrug.

Garofalo has been a Murray fan for over a decade. As a freshman at Providence College in 1982, she named him the person she most admired ­ she filled an entire blue book on the genius of comedy that was Bill. What she didn't even imagine at the time was that she would one day meet him, as she did during her infamous stint on "Saturday Night Live."

"I saw him by the craft service table. I was dressed as Dorothy for a horrendously bad Wizard of Oz sketch, and I went and pretended that I had something to do by the coffee machine," recalls Garofalo. "I stood there and stood there and it was like waiting to get into a jump rope game, like, when do you say hi? And then I went up and stood extra near him and then conjured up some question to ask someone near him and said, 'Hello,' and shook his hand."

She's not sure whether it was that incident that got her the elephant gig or not. "I think he was impressed when I quit (SNL), actually, was what it was. He was impressed with the balls it took to quit the show, and that's what made him ask me to do this movie. 'Cause it couldn't have been my work on the show."

As to her hell-raising decision to leave the cast, she says, "I just happened to hit the worst possible time you could go. It just didn't work out. (But) I can actually say, in my life, on my deathbed, 'I was on "Saturday Night Live," the longest-running sketch comedy show in history.' And without it, I wouldn't have met Bill."

One of most thrilling things about Murray for Garofalo is that he's an improviser. "Bill's whole thing, like Garry Shandling's whole thing, is, 'Change it. Throw me a curve ball. Don't say the same thing twice,' and that's what I love. When that happens, it's rare."

She thinks that a lot more sets could use the kind of spontaneity that Murray created for "Larger than Life." "'The Truth About Cats and Dogs,' unfortunately, was not a set that was open to improv, which I think it could have used," she says. "And that is not a slam on Audrey Wells, who I love, who wrote the script. But I think a lot of movies could use that freedom. I think it can make a better scene."

In the end, Garofalo found the final cut of "Cats and Dogs" a little too "soft" for her tastes, which is why she usually avoids seeing her work after it's wrapped.

"It's embarrassing," she says. "I wind up seeing them sometimes, like on a plane or on HBO or something. I just hate my acting when I look at it and I hate the way I look, and all the normal stuff that anybody would hate seeing themselves blown up on a screen.

"You sit there and you look at it and you think, 'That's not what it's supposed to be,' or, 'Why do we have to cater to the lowest common denominator?'"

Control over the end product is one of the reasons that, creatively, Garofalo prefers stand-up.

"Acting, you don't write your material," says Garofalo. "You have to do it the way your director wants you to do it, which can be painful."

But in stand-up comedy she gets to do it all. It was her very first routine, developed in her senior year of college, that won her that title of "Funniest Person in Rhode Island," something she says was not hard to do. She explains that it's not as if the other comedians weren't funny, or that they didn't get it, but that they didn't know how to bring that with them onstage.

"That's the weird thing about a lot of stand-ups," she says. "They are very funny offstage, and they do know why 'Annie Hall' was so funny, and they do know why 'Crimes and Misdemeanors' is the most perfect movie in the world. Yet you put them on the stage and it all flies out the window, because they have the wrong ideas about their persona, and the choices that they make. They are not being themselves. It only gets you in trouble not to be yourself."

Garofalo, by contrast, knows who she is. Raised in Madison, N.J., she wanted to be a secretary like her mom. Even after she'd seen Woody Allen's "Take the Money and Run" at the age of 8, a kind of comic catalyst that made her laugh more than she thought humanly possible, she still planned on going to college and being a businessperson of some sort.

"I didn't know anyone who was involved in show business," she explains, "nor anyone who thought about going into show business." She memorized Cheech and Chong albums, obsessed about Albert Brooks and Monty Python, but didn't even consider professional comedy an option.

When she finally did reach college, though, she realized that it was possible to do what it was that she had loved for so long. Her years at Providence provided her with a lot of the material that she started performing with during her fourth year, including an aborted attempt to snag a 3-foot diameter roll of toilet paper from a Rhode Island McDonald's. "I was in college, and you steal toilet paper in college because then you don't need to buy it," she says. "So my roommate and I saw the huge one that they have at roadside bathrooms, and we thought, 'nirvana.' Of course, we didn't make it, because it's so cumbersome you couldn't really get it out of there. I was so humiliated, although I still continue to pilfer toilet paper every now and again."

Garofalo is currently filming the tentatively titled, "Untitled Irish Love Story." The film's script is one that, for once, she likes without reservation. Already wrapped and ready for release are "Touch," with Bridget Fonda, and "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion." Both were working experiences that Garofalo thoroughly enjoyed. But she says that she can only talk about the on-set experience, because one never knows how the finished product will end up.

"As an actor, a lot of times, unless you're huge, you're a hired gun," says Garofalo. "You take a movie and you're in it and you light a candle and pray to St. Jude that it's not gonna be embarrassing."

FILM: "Larger Than Life" opens Nov. 1.