BEYOND FINE FORM : WITH `NANNY,' PIVOTAL ROLE IN `JACK,' BEST SELLER AND MORE, DRESCHER HAS A LOT TO LAUGH ABOUT.

Byline: Jonathan Storm Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

The laugh is inhuman, the noise of a nasal goose careening toward the horizon, its insane honk gradually winding down in volume and frequency.

A HA. HA. HA.. Ha.. Ha... ha... ha.... ha.

Who can write it?

But if you watch TV much, you've heard it. Fran Drescher's laugh is unique.

Francis Ford Coppola doesn't watch TV much. He didn't have a clue about Drescher or ``The Nanny.'' But he did catch Drescher on ``Late Night With Conan O'Brien,'' and, the story goes, he set out to get her in his movie ``Jack,'' starring Robin Williams. It opens Friday.

``She's a very pretty brunette,'' Drescher says Coppola told the casting people, and she says it without an iota of self-consciousness. She ``is'' a very pretty brunette. Everybody knows it. That's that.

``She's a very pretty brunette who's funny, with a weird voice, and she laughs like this: `Ahhh.' ''

Drescher cannot quote her own laugh. She's actually a little perplexed by it. ``When I laugh my laugh, it always seems to get a laugh,'' says the actress, the picture of eccentric chic in lavender capris, a chartreuse ribbed top, white leather jacket and multicolored flowered sneakers.

Drescher has been A HA. Ha. ha-ing all the way to the bank with her ``Nanny'' series on CBS and her autobiography, ``Enter Whining,'' a best seller last winter. She's in the middle of producing and starring in a feature for Paramount called ``The Beautician and the Beast,'' and another film - ``Schlepped Away'' - is scheduled to shoot for TriStar next year.

Now she comes with a small, but pivotal - and surprising - role in ``Jack,'' about a 10-year-old (Williams) in the body of a 40-year-old.

She does nothing lightly, this budding mogul, even if it sounds like she's some schlep from Queens who maybe got lucky because her uncle, the bagel man, knew Michael Eisner's - such a polite boy - mother, and the king of Hollywood helped her get a little part in Disney's newest movie.

``It was just the kind of project, and just the kind of part that I really needed,'' said Drescher, 38. She says ``prahh-ject'' and ``paaawt'' and ``reaaaly.''

``With the series becoming successful and the book being on the best-seller list, to be able to be part of a Coppola film for Disney is just a lovely little cherry on top.''

It all fits into a plan, a plan Drescher and her husband, high-school honey Peter Jacobson, devised in 1974, when they met in Flushing and started studying sitcoms together, when they weren't doing the usual things high school honeys do.

The plan even included attending New York's Ultissima Beauty Institute, in case show-biz didn't work out.

But it has. Her first TV series, ``Princesses,'' in 1991 was a bust; her second series is ``The Nanny.'' Drescher, the show's star, is up for an Emmy. She and Jacobson are also the series' creators and executive producers. When ``The Nanny'' goes into syndication, it could well sell for nine figures, and Drescher and Jacobson will be very, very rich. This windfall will be added to the money the couple earns from its Loaf 'n' Kisses Gourmet Crouton business, which grosses more than $1 million a year. (``One day we hope to bring it to a major company, like Pepperidge Farm,'' she says.)

``After `Princesses' failed,'' Drescher recalls, ``I said to Peter, `You know, either we get our ass on the inside within the next five years, or I'm getting out of this business,' because it's really debilitating remaining infantile in an industry where you have no control over your own destiny.''

Fran Drescher is just as smart as Fran Fine, the Nanny, though a little more direct.

``If I wait until somebody comes up with something that's going to fit me hand in glove, I could wait my life away.''

She didn't wait. The legend of her pitch to then-CBS programming chief Jeff Sagansky - they happened to be on the same plane to Paris, and she talked his ear off for eight hours - is in the Hollywood pantheon right up there with the tale of the burning sweater.

In an incident that would fit ``The Nanny'' as sweetly as one of its star's spandex dresses, Drescher is said to have caught fire over a stove when Sagansky's then-boss - CBS president Howard Stringer, noted for his gallantry - was over to dinner. And he was there to pat the fire out and observe the curvaceous Drescher when the sweater came off.

In ``Jack,'' Drescher plays Dolores Durante, cocktail waitress, divorcee and would-be significant other to Williams' character, Jack Powell, who she thinks is an administrator at her 10-year-old son's school.

In reality, however, Jack is her son's classmate, a kid whose cells reproduce four times faster than everybody else's. Of course, poor Jack hasn't a clue about Dolores' intentions. So the boy who looks middle-age acts, in Drescher's terms, ``a little quirky'' in response to her advances.

The movie, too, is a little quirky. Not even the gushiest in a squad of show-biz writers at the plush hotel where Drescher and the ``Jack'' cast are holding court in various rooms could say it is Williams' or Coppola's best work.

But Drescher brings a little finesse to the film, which spends way too much time on flatulence jokes that 10-year-olds might think are funny and leaves Bill Cosby sitting - thwack! - on his keister after a treehouse collapses under the weight of the slightly paunchy Coz, the oversized Jack and a few other 10-year-olds.

Cosby plays Jack's tutor, and why a bunch of Penthouse-hungry, methane-crazed fifth graders would allow a teacher in their treehouse is anybody's guess. It's not so hard to guess why Dolores would go for Jack.

``I think he's the principal of the school,'' says the doll-like actress, who is, in fact, marketing a Nanny doll. ``He's attractive. He's the right age. My son likes him. I'm a little desperate. I've been alone and hardworking for too long, and, you know, it wouldn't be the worst thing.''

When she kisses Jack, however, ``he'' thinks it's the worst thing.

Eeewwww.

``I don't know I'm kissing a 10-year-old,'' protests Drescher, whose real-life ``child'' is her beloved Pomeranian, Chester Drescher, who appeared with her in ``Cadillac Man.'' (``He got a grand a week, and, bless his heart, he gave it to us to remodel the bathroom.'')

``I can't allow myself into my own consciousness when I'm working, when I'm actually being my character.''

Drescher has done a passel of movies, breaking into show biz with a small, but memorable, part in ``Saturday Night Fever.'' She asked John Travolta if he was as good in bed as he was on the dance floor.

``Jack'' is a bit of a reunion pic. Drescher appeared as one of Williams' girlfriends in ``Cadillac Man.'' She was also in the cult fave ``This Is Spinal Tap'' with Michael McKean, who plays a lonely guy in a bar who befriends Jack. (Don Novello, known best to ``Saturday Night Live'' fans as Father Guido Sarducci, plays the bartender.)

Drescher also turned up in ``American Hot Wax,'' ``Ragtime'' and ``Dr. Detroit,'' to name a few.

``They never captured her essence,'' husband Peter Jacobson told Redbook magazine. ``She was almost always written to completely accentuate the loud, pushy, Queens side because that's the obvious thing. The warm, sweet vulnerable side of Fran that those of us close to her know got ignored.''

It's not ignored in ``Jack,'' and the credit goes to Drescher and Coppola.

``He's very open to discussion,'' Drescher explained. ``The character of Dolores was very fleshed out by me. ... Everything about the fabric of her being, that makes you feel like you got to know a human being, was what I brought into it.

``Francis is a very generous, magnanimous kind of a man. He likes to take a pass where we do the text, and then he likes to let us do whatever we want and still get the scene across. And that's really what got used. It's a very full experience working with him.''

But not so full that Drescher would leave Fran Fine behind.

``She can remain healthy and good for another three years, and then we'll see what happens.''

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Photo: ``If I wait until somebody comes up with something t hat's going to fit me hand in glove, I could wait my life away,'' says Fran Drescher.