ALL SMILES AGAIN AFTER KIDNEY TRANSPLANT, GEORGE LOPEZ HAS RENEWED ENERGY AND A NEW MOVIE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

For most people, suddenly feeling better than you have in years would be a cause for unadulterated celebration.

For George Lopez, who's made a career out of turning painful life experiences into side-splitting comic fodder, it's not quite that simple.

``The doctors said, 'You won't realize how bad you feel until you feel good,' '' says Lopez, 44, whose genetic kidney disease was cured with a transplant from his wife, Ann, in April. ``I almost feel guilty that I feel so good! This is the way normal people feel when they're healthy, and the way I grew up, guilt creeps in, believe it or not. It's bizarre.''

If you're waiting for the zinger punch line, as you would following a dramatic revelation on his acclaimed ABC sitcom, ``George Lopez,'' forget about it. Lopez, sporting a zippy goatee and with an ever-present golf club close at hand, isn't joking around about this.

Earlier in the day, the Mission Hills-raised comedian cracked wise while promoting his new movie, ``The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D,'' in theaters today.

Addressing the fact that director Robert Rodriguez based the movie on dreams, drawings and concepts of his 7-year-old son, Racer, Lopez said of his own 9-year-old daughter, Mayan: ``Mine? I'd love to just leave her in a room with some blank paper and Crayons. 'You come out here with a movie or else! Or else you're gonna lose that pony.' ''

But the operation that probably saved his life - that inarguably made it worth living - is still too awesome an experience for Lopez to take lightly.

``I credit my wife with literally saving my life,'' he says. ``Without her being a match, I would have gone from deterioration to deterioration with practically no option. She never wavered. It's really unbelievable. Like she said, we had done this for richer or poorer, and now we were into the in sickness and in health.''

Although Lopez and a few sworn-to-secrecy intimates had known that he would need a new kidney as long as seven years ago, it was only within the past year that his condition grew critical. The Cedars-Sinai Medical Center transplant team discovered last October that Ann would make an excellent donor candidate. But Lopez was determined to shoot ``Sharkboy'' - in which he plays multiple roles, including the main villain - and finish out the fourth season of the sitcom before the operation.

``Within the last year, I took a dramatic turn for the worse,'' he says. ``I asked the doctors if I could make it to April 2005. They said maybe, maybe not, but it was worth a try. I literally just made it to the end of the season.''

He got through that season - not to mention the ones before it and the stand-up act that earned him a Grammy nomination in 2004 - by sheer willpower.

``This is how I felt,'' Lopez says of his constantly fatigued state. ``If, after you've had the longest day, you finally got home and all you wanted to do was get in bed and go to sleep, well, I felt like that every morning when I got up. The only way I could make it through the day was to convince myself that I was performing. I didn't want anybody to see that I was down. There were times when I was grumpy, and it manifested itself through humor and joking around at certain people's expense. It was funny and people laughed, but I was just trying to make it through, one day at a time.''

While its combative edge has always been one of the things that's kept Lopez's comedy fresh and exciting, Rodriguez saw something in it that seemed appropriate for his family action fantasy.

``He has this off-the-cuff inventiveness and a very clean humor, too, which I've always admired,'' says the filmmaker, no prude himself (``Sin City,'' ``Once Upon a Time in Mexico'') when he's not making kids' movies. ``He doesn't go for the shock value; he makes people laugh with situations and characters. I've always appreciated that more because it's a lot harder to do.''

But Lopez admits that, due to his illness, he felt completely left behind around the creatively energetic Rodriguez. Fortunately, much of the work he did on ``Sharkboy'' mainly involved making faces in front of a blank greenscreen. The rest of his villain character, Mr. Electric, was computer animated in post-production.

Still, even the most experienced film actors might be thrown by the very precise movements required when acting for a 3-D camera. Somehow, though, it fit Lopez's talents like a glove.

``They were just pieces of tape in the lens of the camera,'' he says of his digital ``co-stars.'' ``And the camera was so close, you had to be very precise which piece of tape to look at, even which eye to use. But I live from the neck up; everything good that's ever happened to me has happened because of the head. So it's great that Mr. Electric is just a face. It wasn't much of a challenge - Robert just let me loose (to) mug and twist and turn and roar into this camera. It was great.''

Lopez is really looking forward to operating at his full creative powers, though.

``I worked all those years at a not-healthy level, so I'm interested in seeing what the next five years hold, making healthy decisions and having my mind be clear and creative.''

And while he isn't joking about it now, expect the humor of his condition to come out on ``George Lopez'' next season.

``We've always come from a place of honesty,'' he says. ``So there'll be a lot of what's going on with my kidney in the show, but it'll come out as the son. He'll go through what I went through as a kid. Prevention is the cure, so we're gonna go through that old-school, he's-OK attitude. My wife's gonna be, 'No, we're gonna go get him checked,' and I'm gonna be, 'A lot of kids wet the bed; it means nothing.' That still exists in a lot of people's homes, and I think we can make that funny.''

Lopez was abandoned as a child, and was raised by his grandmother and grandfather. He has indeed based a lot of his comedy on his unhappy youth. Tough-to-love Benny, his mother character on the show, is a barely veiled version of Lopez's actual grandma.

His grandparents were an example of guardians who wouldn't recognize the signs of illness in a child, Lopez says.

``If they had spent half the time on prevention as they did on ridicule, I might have found out I had a problem. But to them, it was just an annoyance every time I wet the bed. I was sick then; I was sick my whole life.''

Lopez also hopes to work a deeper reaction to his recent experiences into his stand-up act, and a (hopefully) Grammy-worthy CD recording of it.

``None of it is written in joke form, it's written in an almost therapeutic sense,'' he says of his new material. ``One of the things that I'll talk about is what a hindrance pride can be, our inability to ask for help because it's perceived as a weakness. You can go on for hours about that. The next album is gonna have a lot about regrets, and decisions that were made hastily and affected people's lives. It's not about Taco Bell's latest taco. It's about what's in the heart and drives people. It's good stuff.''

Though his view of human nature is understandably jaundiced, at this point in his life, George Lopez could not be more appreciative of the selfless gift that, against mighty odds, his wife was able to give him.

``I don't think they even keep statistics because it's so rare,'' he says of a spouse-to-spouse organ transplant. ``It's the single most important, best break I've ever received in my life. Especially in a life I often thought nothing was going my way and I had to grind to get every little bit of goodness out of it. It's the best reward for all the hard work and hard times.''

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

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3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) ELECTRIFIED

With a new kidney, George Lopez has more zip and is buzzing about his new film, `Sharkboy and Lavagirl'

(2) George Lopez with Taylor Lautner, left, and Taylor Dooley, his co-stars in ``The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D.''

Vince Bucci/Getty Images

(3) Dooley as Lavagirl, Lautner as Sharkboy and Cayden Boyd as Max in a scene from the new film