Actors get plenty of laughs in ‘Christmas With the Kranks’

It happened to Tim Allen when he was about 8 years old and headed to the breakfast table for some cereal.

Jamie Lee Curtis credits the late John Ritter with breaking the news to her while she was taping a pilot for the television series “Anything but Love.”

And “Saturday Night Live” alumnus Dan Aykroyd can go back even further in memory to pinpoint his first time. He was only 3.

“My mother gets credit for making me realize I was funny,” says Allen, who co-stars with Curtis and Aykroyd in the new family comedy “Christmas With the Kranks.”

“I came down to breakfast and my zipper was down and whenever something like that happened, my mother would say, ‘You forgot something.’ But on this particular morning when she said it, I didn’t miss a step and just blurted out, ‘I like a little breeze in the morning.’ And it got a laugh.”

Aykroyd, who plays a blustery neighbor to Allen’s bah-humbug no-Christmas-for-me guy in the movie, remembers doing imitations for his father when he was just a toddler in Canada.

“I knew I was funny when I made my parents laugh,” he recalls. “My father cut off the top of a hockey stick and stuck something on the top to make it look like a microphone and said, ‘This is what you need.’ “

It took a lot longer for Curtis, daughter of movie stars Tony Curtis and the late Janet Leigh, to come to the conclusion that she could make people laugh. But you wouldn’t know that from the way she cuts up as Allen’s Christmas-happy wife in “Kranks.”

She was a star in her own right when Ritter, who was executive producer, watched her do a rehearsal scene for “Anything but Love.” She had already made the comedy “A Fish Called Wanda,” but it wasn’t yet released.

“I had made ‘Trading Places,’ hosted ‘Saturday Night Live’ – terribly – and was light on my feet, but figured I was a straight person,” she says.

” ‘Anything but Love’ was supposed to be about a romantic triangle involving a woman and two men and I had to do this scene where one of the men backed me up against a table to make a pass. When it was over, Ritter came over to me and whispered in my ear, ‘You’re really funny. And you have really funny legs.’ “

All three performers exercise their ability to get laughs in “Christmas With the Kranks,” which is the film version of author John Grisham’s “Skipping Christmas.”

It’s about a man (Allen) who decides to skip Christmas and take his wife (Curtis) on a cruise when their daughter joins the Peace Corps and is out of town for the holiday. His decision disturbs his neighbors, who thrive on decorating their homes. He ends up having to change his mind when his daughter decides to come home after all.

Directed by Joe Roth and produced by Chris Columbus, it’s peopled by a host of comic actors in both major and supporting roles, among them Tom Poston, Austin Pendleton, Cheech Marin and David Lander.

Aykroyd remembers a time when his own father decided the family had had enough of Christmas and canceled it for three years. But as Aykroyd and his brother started dating and bringing girls home, their father relented and reinstated the tradition.

“I still think Christmas is a big, fat, comical hoax – until that morning,” Aykroyd barks in mock disdain. “Then my cardigan comes off and I put on a Sinatra record and get in the mood like everyone else.”

Allen, who’s carved a niche for himself in movies playing Santa Claus, says he took the role in “Kranks” when a two-month window opened in his schedule.

Allen, long separated from his wife, says he feels lonely at Christmas if his daughter isn’t with him. Curtis gets a lot of her Christmas preparations out of the way as early as September. Aykroyd, who says he plays a “Frosty (the snowman) Fascist” in “Christmas With the Kranks,” has his own plans for the upcoming holiday season.

“I’m going to the Far East on Christmas,” he says in his most theatrical voice.

And, for once, he isn’t kidding. He’s taking his family to Thailand, he explains, to get away from the yuletide overload in Western civilization.