By STEVE TILLEY -- Edmonton Sun

Do you think Janeane Garofalo is cute?

That question, as trivial as it may be, nicely sums up what makes Garofalo unique in the eyes of Hollywood. And, in the eyes of Garofalo, it nicely sums up everything that is wrong about her profession.

I think Janeane Garofalo is cute, and I tell her so in a recent phone conversation. Or rather, I suggest that there is a component of the male population for whom she represents a sort of idealized sex symbol.

She laughs. Hard.

"I have never met these people," she says through the guffaws. "Obviously, in my real life, this is not so. Believe me, there is NEVER anybody indicating that this is the case in my real life."

Talking with Garofalo is the closest thing I've come to having a real conversation with a celebrity, a stark contrast to the usual bloodless exchange of niceties.

Just the fact that she willingly agreed to do a phone interview with a reporter from a Canadian city she's never heard of indicates she's not cut from the same cloth as your Sharon Stones or your Demi Moores. But then, that's the point, isn't it? Janeane Garofalo is no Sharon or Demi. She's not even a demi-Demi. She's short, dark and ... come on, let's be honest here ... kinda frumpy. She's a good actress and a good stand-up comedian, to be sure, and has appeared in more than 15 movie or TV roles in the last four years alone.

Her HBO stand-up specials aired recently on the Comedy Network, the same place where she can be seen in reruns of The Larry Sanders Show. She's been in two movies this year - Clay Pigeons, with Vince Vaughn, and Permanent Midnight, with longtime pal Ben Stiller.

Right now, among other things, she's working on a biopic about '60s counter-culture author and radical Abbie Hoffman, playing his wife, Anita.

And yet she denies she's busy. Well, I suppose it must be true if she's talking to the likes of me.

So we mix it up a little on the topic of chicks in flicks, as I roughly segue into Ally McBeal by saying it seems to get compared a lot to Felicity, for which Garofalo does the end-of-show voice of Felicity's former French tutor, Sally.

"It's a rather lazy comparison, but one which I can't see at all," she says flatly. "If anything I would compare it to My So Called Life," the pre-Dawson's Creek teen angst series that starred Claire Danes.

So I grab the wheel and steer it towards the precipice: What does Garofalo think of rail-thin Ally star Calista Flockhart, who has been splashed across the cover of posh women's magazines and trashy supermarket tabloids alike?

"I personally don't think it's a very good thing when the anorexic are held up as an ideal," she says. "I don't know if she is anorexic or not, but if you're going to say the show Ally McBeal is empowering to women, it fundamentally is not, in that she's too thin and her skirts are too short. To me that screams that a man wrote and produced the show," she said, speaking of series creator David E. Kelley. "It doesn't empower me at all. It doesn't speak to me. I find it empowering that someone like Camryn Manheim on The Practice is allowed to be a fully realized character."

And yet The Practice is also written by David E. Kelley, right?

"Mm-hm, but you don't see Camryn Manheim on the cover of anything. There's the problem."

But she was on the cover of several magazines when she won the best supporting actress Emmy, was she not?

"But that's just pictures of the Emmy," counters Garofalo. "There still aren't people saying, 'We'd really like you on the cover of Spin or Vogue.' "

Point taken, because Garofalo knows of what she speaks. One of her best-known roles was in the romantic comedy The Truth About Cats and Dogs, where she was the smart but plain-looking friend to the gorgeous-but-dumb character played by Uma Thurman. "Basically that movie was a very modernized reworking of Cyrano," says Garofalo. "So what the movie was saying, and what I was asked to play, was somebody that is akin to Cyrano's big nose. I'm as much of an eyesore as that."

She's getting fired up, and I don't like where this is going. The car has plummeted off the edge of the cliff.

"So basically that's why that script was given to me. Who, visually, according to Hollywood, could play this part? 'Oh, I know, Janeane Garofalo.' For Hollywood's purpose you can't, if you're a woman, genuinely be really unappealing. But the idea, though, is that I'm believably unappealing. Maybe I'm even worse-looking than I think, and that I've been moderately successful is a triumph of massive proportions."

I limp out of the metaphorical wreck and scuttle off in a different direction, asking about the self-help tome Garofalo and Stiller have just written, tentatively titled Feel This Book.

"It's a fake self-help thing. Not a straight-on parody ... we're coming at it from a supposedly completely earnest place. But we, like most of those people that write those books, are clearly unqualified to give advice."

So if I get this book and live my life by it ...

"You'll do very well," she laughs. "You'll have a development deal at Fox in no time."

That would be cool. Maybe I could write a show about a smart-yet-cynical, tough-yet-kind, self-deprecating-yet-strong-willed actress who recognizes the contradictions in the Hollywood movie machine while allowing herself to play along with it.

And I'd cast Janeane Garofalo in the lead role. Because, after all, she is pretty cute.