Howell Stands-Up by Her Man : Baseball: Kelly, wife of Jack Howell, says being a comedian helps family cope with the Angel third baseman’s worst season.

It is almost a joke in itself: Jack Howell--somber-faced, earnest, cordial-but-decidedly-serious Jack Howell--married to a comedian.

“I used to pray he would hit a home run,” Kelly Howell said. “Then I hoped for a single. Now I just hope he’ll get hit by a pitch, so he can remember what it feels like to be on first base.”

“Have you ever seen his nose? It’s huge. The doctor said I had to have our kids (by) Caesarean (section) because of that nose.”

“With his baseball, it kind of helps when I joke, especially this season,” Kelly said. “What else can you do when the guy’s batting .217 (actually .226)? He’s given me a lot of material.”

The Angel third baseman is in the final days of the worst season of his career. Entering the season’s final series against the Athletics in Oakland, Jack is hitting .226 with seven home runs

and 30 runs batted in, all career lows since 1987, his first full season with the Angels. He has committed 16 errors, a career high.

“I tell her that when I don’t laugh, that means it’s funny,” deadpanned Jack.

Surely a wry and dry wit lurks beneath that stoic surface. Or does it? He can’t be completely humorless.

“He will argue till the day he dies,” she said. “The bottom line, you heard it from me, is he has no sense of humor.”

Kelly might have drawn on Jack’s dismal season to flesh out her routine. Strains of Stand-up by Your Man?

Instead, she put her own fledgling career on hold when Jack was sent to the minor leagues July 28 for a month.

Kelly, 26, began her career as a comic three years ago, when she started going to open-mike nights at comedy clubs. Later, she got some stand-up work at Laffs, a Tucson comedy club. And just

before Jack was sent down to triple-A Edmonton, she auditioned for the Orange County Crazies, a local comedy troupe, and made it.

The Howells weren’t sure when Jack would make it back to Anaheim, and with the school year drawing near, Kelly took their children, Joshua, 6, and Dallas, almost 3, home to Tucson.

“I wasn’t going to have my family spread out all across the country,” she said.

But now, with Jack back with the Angels and a live-in baby-sitter in Tucson, Kelly has joined an improvisation troupe, Group Therapy, that works occasional nights in front of the college

crowd at Laffs.

“Being a baseball player’s wife helped me get my foot in the door,” Kelly said. “But since I’ve been with this group, nobody in the audience knows who the heck I am. It’s kind of nice,

because they like me without knowing about Jack.”

Then again, after this season . . . “Now you say you’re Jack Howell’s wife, and people say, ‘So what?’ ”

Kelly, who admires such comics as Louie Anderson, Paula Poundstone and Bette Midler, says her goal is to be on a sitcom.

“That would be absolutely wonderful,” she said. “But then I think, ‘You’re in Tucson. ‘ “

“ If they’re well-written and humorous,” she said. “Some of them, come on, let’s face it. . . . ‘Come on over to City of Cars?’ But you can’t say, ‘I’m just too big for this now.’ Really,

just doing what I’m doing, I love it. I’m not super goal-oriented with the kids the age they are.”

Kelly and Jack started dating when she was a freshman and he was a senior at Palo Verde High School in Tucson.

Kelly says she was “like a pork chop.” And what did she see in Jack?

“Potential,” she cracked. “What can you say? He was 5-7, 130 pounds, with braces and a permanent in his hair.”

“No way,” Kelly said. “This guy, he was terrible. He would play the last couple of innings. He was never a great baseball player in high school. At Arizona, he led the team in errors,

all-time, ever-ever.”

Jack committed 25 errors at Arizona in 1983, but did not set a record for errors in a season.

But he improved, and eventually made a major league baseball player’s wife out of Kelly. Sort of.

“A baseball player’s wife who does something other than shop,” Kelly said.

Kelly thinks the world of some of them as individuals. But as a group, baseball wives are fodder, just like Jack.

“They’re soooo perfect!” Kelly said. “Their clothes, their hair. The first time I went to a game I asked one of the wives where they were going out afterward.”

“I’m sitting there in jeans and a T-shirt with mustard on it.”

“I like to sit behind them,” Kelly said. “At Anaheim Stadium I sat behind some girls who were commenting on the players. Jack gets up and they say, ‘Ooooh, look at his arms!’ ”

Jack is about to get a welcome respite from baseball after a miserable year. And Kelly will keep plugging at her career, in this club or that.

“There’s this other place,” she said. “Tequila Mockingbird.”

“Jack went through the minors, and I have to start with this.”