By Michael Horowitz

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

When she was in the middle of her high school experience in New Jersey, comedienne Janeane Garofalo's parents moved to Houston and she moved with them. She spent the next year commuting on an achingly long bus ride with no friends and no happiness.

Then she went off to Providence College in Rhode Island.

"I went to college and had no friends for the first year," she recalls. "I was just Joe Loser, could not have bought a friend, and then I gained 60 pounds on top of everything else."

At 5 feet 1 inch, Garofalo weighed 160 pounds, and she took to wearing "goth-ware." "Remember the way Boy George used to dress in Culture Club?" she asks. "Picture that in all dark colors and billowy and horrible. I did look like somewhat of a freak."

"So, I had four friends and lived in fear of drunk frat guys. I would spend the weekends dodging guy-groups who were drunk late at night, because they would verbally assault me."

Ah. This experience must have given her the self-deprecating dead-pan sense of humor that made her cool enough and ultimately too cool for Saturday Night Live, the comedic touch that powered the Ben Stiller show and adds to the Larry Sanders show.

"A sense of humor?" she laughs. "No, if anything, that bred the glass-is-half-empty credo I carry with me in my heart today."

Meet Janeane Garofalo, star of the upcoming "The Truth About Cats and Dogs." Costar Ben Chaplin says she's "not like an actress ­ she's very real, down to earth." Garofalo is honest to the point of destructive, and a fair portion of her humor is aimed at herself. If she does, by accident, make herself sound important during a humorous rant, she's sure to throw in a disclaimer like "I hope you don't think I'm trying to be the cool guy at all ­ because I'm so uncool."

Predictably, she's hesitant to declare her successful Hollywood career a triumph over the verbal abusers that ruined her college experience.

"First of all, I'm sure they have no idea of what my name was," she says. "The people who were making fun of me, they just knew I was a fat girl."

"Secondly, they don't watch Larry Sanders," Garofalo continues. "If you're like a big, dumb frat guy, if you accidentally stumble across Sanders, you are not going to tune in again. It's not like that is going to hit your funny bone, you can go watch The Jerky Boys' movie or something. The type of frat guy that would have made fun of me would find me terribly unfunny now.

"If he stumbled across me doing my HBO comedy special or something, he wouldn't know it was me," she adds. "He'd still say 'who's that fat girl doing stand-up and I don't think it's funny and I don't get it!' And I'm not saying I'm smarty-pants, I'm just saying that you can kind of predict the ebbs and flows of the fraternal mind."

Garofalo goes on to illustrate why she'd still be unknown, even as she appears on billboards and commercials nationwide. "To be famous, you have to saturate our culture," she stresses. "There are people who you would assume everybody knows who they are, but you ask John Q. Public and they have no idea what you're talking about or who you're talking about. You know that great actor James LeGros who's in every great indie film? You would have to explain for the next hour who James LeGros is. It would take the most popular thing he's ever done for someone to say 'oh, that guy.'

"These guys who made fun of me will never know who I am ­ because I'll never saturate culture enough for their thick heads to absorb that," Garofalo concludes.

Perhaps her saturation hasn't reached those levels, but "Cats and Dogs" represents a large step for Garofalo. A veteran of smaller parts from last year's "Bye Bye, Love" to "Reality Bites," she's never been called on to "carry" a film before. While she's quick to minimize the pressure ("I don't feel like I'm carrying it. It's a three-way carry."), she's also overjoyed at the size of her role.

"It's the biggest part I've ever had, and probably the only time that will ever happen," she says. "I was shocked, shocked to be offered a leading role in a film and have since gone back to supporting roles. It caused me a great amount of anxiety and teeth-grinding to imagine the critics saying 'less is more' and 'we enjoy her when she just comes in and makes a statement and exits quietly' as character actors are wont to do. I'm not looking forward to reading bad reviews, if that happens."

In "Cats and Dogs," Garofalo plays a radio talk show host who solves people's pet problems. When her friendly voice guides a photographer (Ben Chaplin) through a canine crisis, he's eager to see what the rest of her is like. Her next door neighbor happens to be a model (Uma Thurman), and Cyrano hijinks are afoot.

Cyrano changes from derivation to derivation, but the characters remain pretty much the same. There's a handsome or gorgeous but vacuous suitor and an intelligent, wonderful romantic, correspondingly less handsome or gorgeous. Uma Thurman did not play the latter role.

"I have never been one to turn a head," says Garofalo, "and I'm not saying that in a 'poor me' way, or self-deprecating way."

"I'm being very pragmatic and realistic about that. I'm not the kind of person that people are going to turn around and look at in a restaurant unless you say 'Look, she has a tattoo.'"

Hence, her second fiddle roles to Winona Ryder and Uma Thurman.

"Hollywood has very stringent rules for the ladies," she says. "It's not that way for the guys. Romantic leads can be anywhere from Danny DeVito to John Goodman for a male. They will not allow us the same thing. 'Frankie and Johnny' ­ Michelle Pfeiffer is Frankie? Or Johnny? Or whoever? It's galling to me what they expect you to accept as the imagery of the plain person."

"Now, I'm being realistic," she explains. "You put me next to Uma, yes, I am the plain one, that's true. If your average red-blooded American or British man is going to come into a room and immediately be asked to make an aesthetic decision, they're going to pick Uma. There's no way you can get around that. But it is annoying that Hollywood likes to make those divisions and perpetuate those stereotypes, and I am as guilty as everyone for having done that."

Garofalo's mea culpa comes in part due to her recent successful diet. She explains that her now trim figure is a source of great disappointment.

"I went on a diet in September," she says. "But I have been jousting with windmills to no avail at 140 pounds since I started, when I was 20, doing stand-up. I made the commitment not to do anything cosmetic or change. I was like 160 when I was in college. I'm 5' 1," so that's a formidable density."

"I moved here at 140, kept auditioning," she says. "Did not give in, did not. And you know what? It doesn't work. It doesn't work. You can only go so far."

"You can fight the good fight as long as you want," she explains, "but at the end of the day, when you purchase your co-op, you're broke."

Her dwindling bank account was one factor. "Flirting With Disaster" was another. Garofalo yearned for the part that Patricia Arquette eventually got, but heard indirectly that she was a little too "dowdy" even to play a woman who's just been pregnant. "I was supposed to be playing a somewhat overweight woman that had just had a baby," she explains. "They still thought I was too much of that."

Despite her feeling that Patricia deserved the role, the reasons for her exclusion crushed her crusade. "I would like to work as much as the next guy and gal," she says. "And it just wasn't happening. I wasn't making a difference. There might be five 14-year-olds who were glad that I weighed 140."

"But I feel I did my part, I really do," she maintains. "I did 'Bye Bye, Love' at 140, I did 'Reality Bites,' they forced me to lose weight for that, but I cheated ... but I accidentally lost weight because they made me have a trainer. I accidentally got down to, by the end of 'Reality Bites,' 115. Then I shot up immediately."

Garofalo was at around 130 pounds when she filmed "Cats and Dogs." "I didn't want to be thin and pretending to be dowdy," she says. "So being dowdy was the right thing. If 'dowdy' is a word."

She was happy to be dowdy, but she hated the clothes the studio insisted upon. Yes, her character was supposed to be plain, but her character's fashion ranged from conservatively banal to downright appalling. "Here's how I justify that," she starts, laughing. "She was so enlightened, she transcended even thinking about fashion. She'd wear everything on the floor. She was that cool."

As for the studio's whims? "I think they were just so afraid I would dress the way I normally dress," Garofalo offers. "They're just so afraid of grunge or alternative or any other lame label you want, that they wanted to make sure none of Janeane Garofalo was going to come through ­ because it frightens them. And I don't mean that to make me sound cool or edgy."

Predictably, she had a gripe about the sizes as well as the styles. "For whatever reason, if you're not anorexic, wardrobe doesn't have stuff to fit you," she says. "They do not accommodate anyone who's not a size 5. I don't know what it is, but if you go in for fittings, they've got sample sizes for people with skeletal frames with skin on them. That's it."

While Garofalo insists she doesn't throw "diva fits," she's got two sore subjects on set. She needs her Starbucks coffee hot, and she hates it when wardrobe refers to "the big problem" of finding clothes in her size. Any attacks she wages are immediately apologized for.

"There's nothing to be ashamed of about pursuing show business," she says, "but there are many aspects that are shameful or that are embarrassing to me. It is embarrassing when you see somebody throwing a diva fit, or getting their ass kissed, or when I'm in a bad mood and people let me. I'm embarrassed for myself and them for letting me."

"It's a business that encourages and caters to bad behavior," she explains. "The squeaky wheel definitely gets the grease, as opposed to being replaced. And that's a problem."

So she's resolved to keeping herself "under her thumb" and as self-deprecating as possible. She calls it being "pragmatic."

One wonders if she'll lighten up on herself after a few more leading roles and winning character spots?

"Lighten up on me?" she asks incredulously. "I hope not, because then I'd be a dick!"