Stand-Up Comedy On a Roll

By Richard Zoglin

It was a typical Sunday-night amateur show at the Improvisation comedy club in Los Angeles. Five minutes onstage for a blond dwarf who joked about her "white evening gowns made by Fruit of the Loom." Another five minutes for a purported Indian mystic called Ramogosh, who closed his act with a Sinatra- style rendition of I Did It Buddha's Way. After a parade of two dozen such neophytes, the audience of 200 was ready for some professional comedy -- and ecstatic when, at a quarter to 11, Jay Leno bounded onto the stage.

Leno, the lantern-jawed king of the stand-up circuit, had dropped by to try out some new material. Dressed in a silk shirt, faded jeans and Western boots, he barreled through 20 minutes of jokes, some of them written only that day and jotted down on note cards. On the Iran-contra hearings: "Senator Inouye . . . now there's a strict-looking guy. He's the principal of the United States of America." On Fawn Hall, Jessica Hahn and Donna Rice: "I love the way they describe these women as part-time models. I brush my teeth every morning -- does that make me a part-time dentist?" On Princess Di: "With twelve bodyguards around her all the time, how could she possibly have an affair? 'Where are you going, honey?' 'Just out to christen a battleship, dear.' "

An unexpected 20 minutes from the hottest stand-up comedian in America -- not bad for a Sunday-night club outing. But not that surprising either. Stand-up comics are suddenly everywhere. On TV they get nightly exposure on such talk shows as Tonight and Late Night with David Letterman, as well as on | their own specials for cable networks like HBO and Showtime. Jackie Mason, a veteran stand-up performer from the '50s and '60s, made a smash comeback by turning his comedy routines into the current hit Broadway show The World According to Me. And Steve Martin is just one of a long and stellar list of former stand-up comics who have parlayed their punch lines into successful TV and movie careers.

Comedy stars of the future are being nurtured in a rapidly growing nationwide network of comedy clubs. A few big-city night spots, like New York's Improvisation (sister club of the Los Angeles version) and Los Angeles' Comedy Store, have for years served as a proving ground for young comics, helping launch the careers of Robin Williams, Joe Piscopo, David Letterman and dozens more. Now clubs with names like the Punch Line, Laff Stop and Funny Bone are spreading the yuks everywhere from Kalamazoo, Mich., to Ozark, Ala. At least 260 full-time comedy clubs -- ranging from posh nighteries like New York's Caroline's to converted Chinese restaurants -- are currently in operation, according to Barry Weintraub, publisher of a magazine called Comedy U.S.A.; two-thirds of them were launched within the past five years.

Stand-up comedy has been a staple of American entertainment since the heyday of the Borscht Belt. But the current boom is something new. TV has clearly played a major role, giving comedians national exposure and drawing on them for starring roles in sitcoms and Saturday Night Live. The intimacy between comic and audience, moreover, may be especially appealing in an age of high-tech movies and supersize rock concerts. Or it may simply be that the instant gratification of one-liners is perfectly suited to the short attention span of the TV-educated '80s audience. "If you go to a comedy play, a certain amount of time is lost setting up the plot or characters," notes Bert Haas, general manager of Zanies, a Chicago-based comedy-club chain. "In the stand- up comedy room, you get three or four laughs in one minute. It's like a shot of adrenaline."

In contrast to a decade ago, when offbeat comics like Martin, Albert Brooks and Andy Kaufman were redefining the stand-up genre, the current crop is relatively traditional. Except for a few intriguing eccentrics, such as Bob Goldthwait and Emo Philips, most of today's comics present themselves as regular folks, directing barbs at familiar subjects, from TV commercials to dating. Their lineage can be traced directly to two influential comics of the 1960s and '70s, George Carlin and Robert Klein. Both rooted their material in the commonplace concerns and shared memories of the baby-boom generation (especially TV) and perfected a lithe, fast-paced style that combined one- liners with a free-flowing melange of characters and scenes.

Like Carlin and Klein, Leno has a sharp eye for the idiocies of everyday life. In an agitated, high-pitched voice that could pierce the din of the loudest bar, he takes off after everything from convenience stores (where "$20,000 worth of cameras protect $20 worth of Twinkies") to slasher movies ("Woman opens the refrigerator, gets hit in the face with an ax. There's a common household accident, huh?"). Leno's P.G.-rated material is witty, accessible and firmly anchored in bedrock middle America. "I'm hopelessly American," he confesses. "If something doesn't come in a Styrofoam box with a lid on it, I'm lost."

A onetime auto mechanic who grew up in Andover, Mass., Leno began his comedy career playing strip clubs in Boston. Among his earliest gigs were a bordello in Dorchester, Mass., and a club called the Mineshaft, where audience members wore miner's hats with flashlights on top ("Performing there was like being interrogated by the police," he recalls). Leno eventually graduated to the big time, and in recent years has played a grueling 300 road dates a year, besides making frequent guest appearances with Letterman.

Starting in September Leno will be a once-a-week substitute host for Johnny Carson and will star in a prime-time special for NBC. He just completed a movie called Collision Course, in which he co-stars with Pat Morita. Nonetheless, Leno (who lives in the Hollywood Hills with his wife Mavis and a collection of 15 motorcycles) insists that he has no plans to abandon touring. "Some people run from 6 to 8 every morning; I go onstage every night between 9 and 10," he says. "I'd never abandon it. This is my job."

Leno is the best at his job right now, but several other young comics are also making their mark on the club and concert circuit. Among the standouts:

-- Jerry Seinfeld, 33, who grew up in the Long Island town of Massapequa ("an Indian name which means 'by the mall' "), might be Leno's suburban-preppie cousin. The two are similar in style and subject matter, although Seinfeld has a softer edge. Talking about movie refreshment stands, he complains about overpriced candy housed in jewelry cases ("I'd like to see something in a Milk Dud, please") and popcorn that comes in huge buckets ("I don't need that much roofing insulation"). His musings on childhood are especially evocative, whether conveying a five-year-old's restlessness at being dragged along to the bank by his mother or joy at finding an empty refrigerator carton. "When you're a kid," says Seinfeld, "that's the closest you're gonna come to havin' your own apartment."

-- Steven Wright, 31, is one of the few young comics to depart from the Carlin-Klein-Leno style of observational humor. His offbeat, cerebral routines are a string of absurdist one-liners, delivered in a deadpan monotone. Examples: "I was once arrested for walking in someone else's sleep." "When I die, I'm going to leave my body to science fiction." "I was walking through a forest and a tree fell right in front of me, and I didn't hear it." Like many comedians with a shtick, Wright (who grew up near Leno in Massachusetts and also got his start in Boston clubs) seems in danger of boxing himself into a performing corner. But he has branched out into movies, with roles in Desperately Seeking Susan and the upcoming Stars and Bars.

-- Judy Tenuta, 31, at least has no problem differentiating herself from a gaggle of rising young female comics. She arrives onstage toting an accordion and wearing a tatty Grecian-style gown -- a fairy-tale princess dressed by Woolworth's. Her monologues alternate between airy twittering (she refers to herself as the "goddess" and the "petite flower") and truck-stop sarcasm. To the guy who comes on to her in a punk-rock bar, she growls, "I was lookin' for someone a little closer to the top of the food chain." Feminist frustration is mixed with existential nuttiness: "You know what scares me? When you have to be nice to some paranoid schizophrenic . . . just because she lives in your body." Redeeming all this from idle perversity are hints of a disillusioned romantic buried underneath.

Some familiar elements are missing from the stand-up scene. Despite a flurry of jabs at news events like the Iran-contra testimony, committed political satire is rare. So is X-rated material, with a few notable exceptions like screaming Sam Kinnison's. "The networks want comedians to work clean," says Richard Fields, owner of Catch a Rising Star, a Manhattan comedy club. Indeed, many young comics regard stand-up comedy less as a goal than as a stepping stone. "People today are not just shooting to be * headliners," says Dennis Perrin, a New York-based comic and writer. "They want the big payoff -- a movie or TV series."

A more immediate problem is oversaturation of the market. Like baseball expansion, the proliferation of comics has led to a diffusion of talent. "The quality is getting thinner," admits Silver Friedman, co-founder (with her ex- husband Budd) of the Improvisation club in New York. So far, however, the ranks are not dwindling. "The competition is unbelievable," says Comic Wright. "Every year I think it will level off, but it doesn't." Meantime, happy audiences seem willing to endure wisecracking dwarfs and Indian mystics in hopes that another Wright or Leno will be just beyond the next punch line.

With reporting by Kathleen Brady/New York and Elaine Dutka/Los Angeles