Weirdness rewarded

“I was a weird kid,” says Brad Garrett, then adds, in a tone of rueful satisfaction: “It’s easier to be a weird adult.”

More rewarding, too. Garrett scored nine seasons on “Everybody Loves Raymond” as Ray Romano’s hulking, hangdog brother.

And now, on the Fox sitcom ” ‘Til Death,” he’s a hulking, hangdog hubby butting heads with Joely Fisher as his mate of nearly 9,000 days.

“It was all part of my scheme,” Garrett quips in his mournful baritone, “to one day have my own show where I’m getting beat by Telemundo.”

Since premiering last fall, ” ‘Til Death” has not exactly been a ratings powerhouse. But in its new 9:30 p.m. Wednesday time slot – right after “American Idol” – lots of new viewers are likely to discover the factious world of high-school history teacher Eddie Stark and his not-so-joyous wife, Joy.

Theirs is a marriage where any issue is worth bickering about.

On one episode, Joy says you save electricity by unplugging the toaster oven when it’s not being used. Eddie says you don’t.

And he can’t rest until he proves Joy wrong.

“I never feel more alive in my life than when I’m showing the woman I love how wrong she is,” he tells fellow teacher Jeff (Eddie Kaye Thomas), a young newlywed whose marriage to Steph (Kat Foster) is, so far, all hearts-and-flowers.

You can take these two couples as an exhibit of marriage’s natural evolution: a before-and-after display. Or maybe they represent the extremes (love and war) that coexist within a typical marriage at any given time.

Whatever, viewers may find that ” ‘Til Death” has a bitterly funny ring of truth.

It did for Garrett when he read the pilot script and decided to sign on.

“I’m a lot like this guy,” he says, taking care to draw distinctions between Eddie and Robert, his Emmy-winning character on “Raymond”:

“Robert is a ho-hum, downtrodden guy who kind of goes with whatever somebody is putting in front of him at the moment. Eddie is more of a trailblazer, more outspoken.

“That’s what attracted me to him: He’s very outspoken. And couldn’t be more wrong most of the time!”

Eddie is reminiscent of battle-scarred married man Ralph Kramden, TV’s eternal archetype of matrimonial strife. And Kramden is a chap Garrett knows well, having portrayed Jackie Gleason in a TV biopic in 2002.

“It’s hard to play a loud married couple trying to get through life without going back to ‘The Honeymooners,’ ” he says.

Garrett, who turns 47 next month, won TV stardom only after years as a stand-up comedian, his entry point into show business when he was in his teens. Comedy seemed like a good career option for a youngster who always had been ripe for ridicule.

Now a towering 6-feet-8 1/2 , Garrett even at 12 stood a foot taller than anyone his age, with a voice already so deep he sounded like an older kid who had been held back two or three grades. And to make matters worse, his athletic prowess was nonexistent.

“So I said, ‘I’ll start making fun of myself and beat everybody to it. It will ease the sting of them doing it,’ ” he says.

He found he was good at making them laugh. Example: Once he cut off the elastic waist band from his BVDs and wore it as a head band.

“So I’m at a pickup game at the playground, wearing that,” Garrett recalls. “And now … I’m here. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t take those hits then.”

Not that he hasn’t been taking some painful hits of late. Like his marriage coming apart.

“The timing was weird,” says Garrett, whose wife of seven years, Jill Diven, filed for divorce last July.

“I was playing a divorced guy in ‘Music and Lyrics’ (the recent Hugh Grant-Drew Barrymore comedy), which was filming last summer. Before that, I was playing a divorced guy in ‘The Odd Couple’ on Broadway.”

Garrett’s real-life marital woes “helped motivate my characters,” he allows. “But I learned that sometimes it’s too soon to bring that kind of stuff to a character. You almost have to be over it to use it.”

He remains a devoted dad to daughter Hope, 7, and 8-year-old Max, who, he says, have given him a second crack at childhood: “You get to see it through healthy eyes.”

Meanwhile, his relationship with Jill is good.

“She’s an extraordinary mother and a great friend,” he says. “So someone might wonder, ‘What’s your problem?’

“I guess it’s me. I hate to say it, but I think marriage is a very unrealistic longtime compatibility formula.”