COMEDY REVIEW : Alan Havey: Stand-Up Who Wades In, Finds a Home With Audience

Alan Havey struck a near-perfect balance between performing material and talking with the crowd Wednesday at the Improvisation in Irvine.

There are two schools of thought in stand-up about interacting with an audience. One school holds that it’s a bad move, because it often reflects a less-developed performer who’s low on material and can’t do enough time without the generic what’s-your-name-where-you-from shtick. There’s also the risk of inviting too much crowd participation; pretty soon the hecklers can be running the asylum.

The other camp, though, contends that one thing that makes stand-up great is the sense that the performance is very live, that anything can happen--and that an audience not only can be part of the show, but can have a hand in shaping it.

Many top-notch performers with substantial material believe it’s adventurous and exhilarating to slightly reinvent and customize their act each night by initiating some dialogue with the crowd. Among them: Alan Havey.

Havey really excels when he takes ideas that emerge from his chats with the crowd and fastens them seamlessly to various well-written parts of his act. It takes enormous confidence and a wealth of fine material to know you can move from anything an audience member says to a funny bit. Havey has both in spades. And largely because his mind obviously operates at remarkably high speed, he’s masterful at connecting these verbal dots.

Early in his set, while talking with a woman near the stage, the word yuppie came up. The woman claimed that “yuppie was out.” Havey instantly responded: “Oh, you read Newsweek. Yuppies are out. ‘The new year--greed is out.’ Lady, it’s back, it’s here, it’s right now--in Irvine, it’s alive and well.”

From there, he segued into a brief fixture of his act: “By yuppie, I don’t mean young urban professional. By yuppie, I mean ‘Wanna make money, wanna get ahead . . . ?’ Yup !”

And then, he launched into his classic piece on a day in the life of those pursuing the stressful, hurried yup-scale existence, sketching the scenario with the kind of speed and verbal agility that would impress Chick Hearn. The last part involved a reference to lovemaking--to which someone else in the audience responded that sex isn’t automatically part of that life style, what with the threat of disease.

Without missing even half a beat, Havey chided her: “Disease? Disease? Oh, come on, you wimp. . .When I’m in bed with somebody new, the possibility that I could get a terminal disease gives it that extra edge.”

And so it went for most of the evening, with Havey’s antennae particularly attuned to crowd comments and attitudes that could serve as points for jumping off, or jumping in .

Whether advancing particular themes (he ties a lot of things to the ideas of change and pressure ) or hitting a hodgepodge of other subjects (in addressing several aspects of capital punishment, he said, “I wonder: Before they inject these guys, do they wipe their arm with alcohol?”), Havey consistently constructed sharp, inventive segments of observational material.

He tends to frame these segments from the standpoint of someone who’s very amused or, more often, pretty annoyed. And he’s well in control of that anger--we’re not talking the blast-furnace intensity of Sam Kinison here--which helps make those observations more incisive and commanding.

Clearly, his stuff has been scrupulously honed over the years--as has his ability to react to a situation and rewrite certain jokes on the spot. In yet another exchange with some people near the stage, he mistook a woman for a man. A split-second later, she climbed on stage, removed her shoe and held it up; Havey appeared temporarily nonplussed, both that she joined him on stage and chose that way to document her gender.

But he quickly recovered (“What is that--the universal sign of woman?”) and turned the incident into a callback without directing attention to what he was doing or how cleverly he was doing it. Later in the set--without telegraphing at all where he was headed--he acknowledged that his girlfriend had recently dumped him: “She just walked up to me, took off her shoe and waved goodby.”

Then, in closing with a long anecdote about his disorienting, unnerving experience as a lad with an older seductress, he somehow turned the shoe callback into the very final punch line. And it absolutely killed.

Given his flexibility, skill and material, it’s easy to see why Havey is quickly racking up credits. He has been on “Late Night With David Letterman” a few times in the last year or so, he makes his first appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” next month, he starred in “The 11th Annual HBO Young Comedians Special” (taped last August at the Irvine Improv) and he’ll be co-hosting a forthcoming edition of “Friday Night Videos.”

Ironically, while these accomplishments reflect a career that’s clicking, none adequately represents his gift for working with an audience. Even when he does a spot at the Hollywood Improv, in fact, he doesn’t play off the crowd as much or as well as he did Wednesday. Go see him.

Headlining a very strong bill including Jann Karam (it’s rare that a middle act has a “Tonight Show” credit, but Karam does) and Romie Angelich, Havey continues at the Irvine Improv through Sunday.

The Improvisation Comedy Club and Restaurant is at 4255 Campus Drive, Irvine. Show times 8:30 and and 10:30 p.m. Friday, 8 and 10:30 p.m. Saturday, 8 p.m. Sunday. Admission $6-8. Information: (714) 854-5455.