They should call it comedians’ traffic school.

Despite truth-in-labeling laws, the Funny Traffic School isn’t so very.

That is the first lesson of the day in what is only euphemistically a “school.”

Despite the current trend for appealingly jolly names, traffic schools remain basically what they always were: a combination of a high-school home room on the last day of the term, a military instruction session in something like saluting technique, and Sunday afternoon in a minimum-security prison.

By definition, everyone is present to placate an irresistible force. And everyone knows that if they just hang in there, nothing too stressful will happen in this genteel jail and that This Too Shall Pass.

The boom in traffic schools parallels the mutation of the insurance business into a quasi-penal institution, whose iron financial fists impose greater fines and exact more arbitrary punishments than the mere law could get away with for traffic misdemeanors.

The deal with the state is: Go to traffic school for $23, and we’ll hide one traffic ticket from the insurance companies. In an auto-dependent society, this is like owning an interferon franchise in a cancer hospice.

Instructor Lester Barrie welcomed a group of 13 women and 10 men to the banquet room of Mama Lucia’s Italian Restaurant in Granada Hills.

“Funny Traffic School--that makes it sound like you’re going to laugh all day,” he said. “That’s not exactly accurate. They should call it comedians’ traffic school. That just means comedians teach it.”

Barrie is a sympathetic turnkey-for-the-day, a high school English teacher and amateur comedian.

Barrie’s first lecture was on the perils of unpunctuality. The Department of Motor Vehicles, AKA The Thing Who Must Be Obeyed, is very strict. Students would be denied credit if they were even three minutes late returning from breaks or lunch, he warned.

A student pointed out that Barrie himself was 15 minutes late.

Barrie, who masters disciplinary challenges as only a man who teaches in an all-boys’ Catholic high school can, shrugged that off. He knew there was no DMV monitor in the class, he said, because they are inevitably old women and unspeakably ugly, none of the students being sufficiently repulsive to qualify.

He told of a member of another class, who returned late from a break and pointed out that Barrie had been late to class. “What about a little blackmail?” she asked.

“I am a little black male,” Barrie replied, an accurate pun which got his first good laugh.

A small, graying restaurant worker in a white apron told Barrie he would have to vacate the room 15 minutes early that afternoon. Cheers from the class, which dubbed the herald of freedom “Papa Lucia.”

Forty minutes could be killed just having members of the class introduce themselves and describe the offense that brought them there.

Maria noted that she had revenge of sorts. She wound up on the same bowling team as the officer who gave her the ticket, made a side bet against him and won enough to cover the traffic school fee.

Betty, a grandmotherly looking woman, asked Barrie with a sweet smile if he was going to show movies “of burning babies and bodies all stiff and things like that”--a “scared straight” practice for which traffic schools were once notorious.

Barrie stared at her. “Boy, appearances are deceiving,” he said.

The next two women said they were mental therapists.

“Would you two come up here and sit beside Betty?” he asked.

A woman entered and introduced herself as a DMV monitor.

“You don’t look that ugly,” a student reacted. She barely flinched.

Barrie started a discussion on talking police out of giving a ticket. Women get out of them by crying, he suggested. Some of the women took offense. One conceded she got out of a ticket “by acting stupid.”

Phil said he once worked for a medical laboratory. When he was stopped for speeding, he had a cooler labeled “human blood” on his rear seat “so I told the cop I had a baby’s heart in it for an emergency transplant--that worked.”

The class groaned, more in envy than disgust.

Katie complained that everything happens to her. She has already had three tickets this year, following a string of “six or seven” in the previous 10 years. “I’m like some kind of magnet for cops. I just go out on the street and bang, they’re all over me. I know I’m not a good driver, but I’m really not this bad,” she said.

Barrie later asked if anyone was familiar with the DMV program to revoke the licenses of habitual offenders.

“I’m afraid I am,” Katie groaned.

Barrie brought up jaywalking.

“I got one of those, too,” Katie sighed.

Barrie moved on to equipment violations.

“The brakes just failed without warning. It wasn’t my fault,” Katie wailed.

Barrie asked her to stay behind after class “and give the rest of us a 10-minute head start.”

The videotapes showed crash experiments with seat belts. “Prisoners in West Germany volunteered to crash these cars to lighten their sentences,” Barrie said. The belted live prisoners were battered, but clearly fared better than unbelted dummies.

The seven-hour 45-minute day came to an end without burning babies.

Papa Lucia stood by the door with a broom as the students filed out.

“Next-a time,” he laughed, “don’t get-a caught.”