Comic Hits His Stride in ‘Tonight Show’ Triumph : Former Jazz Musician Changes His Tune to Comedy and Receives Johnny Carson’s Seal of Approval in Process

Jeff Cesario breezes up the stairs to the back door of his Studio City apartment with a bounce only slightly less pronounced than your average happiest man in the world and apologizes profusely to a visitor for being late.

Wearing a white cotton shirt, blue denim jeans and sneakers, the 34-year old stand-up comedian looks more like one of the college students he just finished entertaining in Long Beach than a nationally road-tested comedy club veteran.

He opens the door, untucks his shirt, pops a tape into the VCR and plops down to watch the most recent highlight of his escalating career.

“This happened at a good time for me,” said Cesario, sipping a Coke and watching himself emerge from the multicolored curtain of “The Tonight Show” set. “I really think some things in the act have really started to jell in terms of pacing and things like that; I think it was really evident on this shot.”

So did a grinning Johnny Carson, who thanked Cesario amid the din of applause that followed his 5-minute routine, and then pronounced to a national television audience, “Jeff Cesario’s his name. He’ll be back.”

The Carson seal of approval, perhaps the most important endorsement a young comedian can gain, was bestowed upon Cesario after his first “Tonight Show” appearance in November. It was a performance pinnacle for the former jazz musician turned sports writer turned stand-up comic from Kenosha, Wis., who moved to the San Fernando Valley in 1983.

“You emulate the people who are your mentors, and then, at some point, just through the creative process, you begin to unfold as yourself,” Cesario said. “That’s what the Carson shot was all about. That was the first time I really began to creep through.”

Comedian Jerry Seinfeldt, who once counseled Cesario on the importance of focus, said Cesario’s performance marked the beginning of a new phase in his career.

“ ‘The Tonight Show’ is the end of the beginning of your career,” Seinfeldt observed.

Cesario’s observational comedy covers a wide range of topics, from relationships (“Dear John letters should be international boarding passes for airline travel”) to potato skins (“Five years ago we called them table scraps”). He is known best, however, for his musings about sports.

Cesario’s most attention-getting conclusion was that violent, televised hockey games were the chief source of prison riots in the United States.

“Think about it,” Cesario said. “You’re a convict, sitting in your cell at the federal penitentiary, watching a hockey player on TV get a 2-minute penalty. You’re serving 17 years for the same offense.”

That comment was made during an appearance on “The Morning Program” on CBS, and it was duly recorded in Sports Illustrated magazine and newspapers across the country. Almost overnight, Cesario was recognized as a kind of light-hearted Socrates of a sports-crazed society.

“The sports thing comes from a very natural point, in that I used to write it and grew up loving it,” said Cesario, who is one of the featured performers in “An Evening of Comedy With Jimmy Walker and Friends” playing this month on Showtime on cable television. “I just think sports are funny and that people take them too seriously. That’s my perspective.

“But I don’t want to be America’s sports comic. I’d rather be remembered as a guy who had something funny to say about sports, but that’s not the only thing he talks about.”

Cesario, who is single, doesn’t perform so much as wax philosophical among friends. He strolls the stage, shrugs his shoulders, raises his thick eyebrows, and occasionally runs a hand through his wavy black hair before delivering a wry comment that breaks up the audience.

“He’s one of the few that knows how to work out a set,” said Robert Morton, the producer of “Late Night with David Letterman,” on which Cesario has appeared three times. “He’s funny, and he knows how to trim and craft his material. Not enough people know how to do that.”

Cesario said insecurity made him a wise-cracking, “lippy” kid while growing up in Kenosha, an industrial town about 50 miles north of Chicago. He was the youngest of three sons born to Italian parents. “My family was very funny,” he said. “My dad had a great sense of humor, and my mom was kind of goofy, which is a good combination.”

Cesario listened to Bill Cosby records and discovered that making people laugh by saying something funny was an easy way to get attention. He became a class cutup in high school and took his first stab at stand-up comedy during an open-mike night at the Comedy Store in Hollywood during a vacation in 1977.

“I think I got about two laughs in five minutes,” he said. “To call what I did ‘material’ is about the broadest definition you could use. But the idea was that I had lived through it.”

It would be two years before a serious comedy urge struck Cesario again.

He returned to Wisconsin and worked as a sportswriter. When his paper folded in 1979, Cesario played the drums professionally and free-lanced stories for Chicago magazine before performing another stand-up routine in Chicago that same year.

The Chicago comedy scene was crowded, so in 1980, Cesario moved to Minneapolis, where the cost of living was lower and the opportunities to craft his performance were greater. Within a year, he was one of the four-member Minneapolis Comedy All-Stars. The quartet, which included another promising young comedian named Louis Anderson, worked at the same club four nights a week for 18 months, allowing each member almost 2 1/2 hours of stage time a week.

“I did a lot of sports stuff and a lot of other things based on pretty mundane premises, I’m sure,” Cesario said. “But it was exciting because I was learning to write for myself. I wasn’t all that well-focused, but the more you do it, the more you’re going to focus in on who you are.”

By 1983, Cesario was approaching headliner level. Anderson had moved to Los Angeles, and Cesario felt it was time for him to do the same. He arrived in Studio City that year and quickly found that getting steady work in Southern California wasn’t easy.

He got some valuable feedback from Seinfeldt when they worked together in Oklahoma City.

Seinfeldt believes comedians must figure out what instrument they’re going to play on stage. “Jay Leno is like a trumpet, very loud and very clear,” Seinfeldt said. “If you’re a violin, you shouldn’t be doing a tuba piece,” he said. “Jeff needed to find out what he was going to play.”

On the “Tonight Show,” Cesario orchestrated his best performance to date. Leno, who once received a tape from Cesario asking for an evaluation and advice, saw the spot and sent him a congratulatory telegram.

“Jeff was always good, but his act wasn’t as tight as it could be,” Leno said. “On that show, it came together. Every joke stood alone.”

Since that appearance, the comedic life of Jeff Cesario has continued to flower. He is booked solid through March with club dates in Boston, New York and Minneapolis and will resume work at the Improvisation in West Hollywood and Valley Improv in Sherman Oaks when he returns.

“I always thought comedy was the best way for me to communicate whatever the hell it was I thought I had to say,” Cesario said. “I’m beginning to see now it’s really a common sense . . . attitude,” one of “let’s just calm down, and I think we’ll get into the next century.

“I think that’s a pretty good message to have at the core.”