The Seduction by TV and Movies : Screen deals raise hopes for instant fame,big money

The power a standup comedian possesses is a luxury most people only dream about. Apparently so do many of the comics who attended the Second Annual Comedy Convention.

Imagine being the star of your own one-act play in which the subject is your life and experience. Nobody else’s thumb gets in your autobiographical manuscript. Your story isn’t strewn on a cutting room floor.

You hold center stage and an audience’s attention for as long as you want. You share your brightest observations. Your opinions go uncontested. You vent your hostilities and air your perplexities. Think of the pleasure you get when you can make another person laugh and multiply it by 100, or 300, or 2000, or a national TV audience of millions.

That’s power money can’t buy. And if one of your jokes zips through the collective psyche of the culture, you’ve made a bit of history a regiment of flacks couldn’t concoct for you. That’s power too.

It was surprising and saddening then to discover that few of the comedians who showed up at the Second Annual Comedy Convention saw standup that way, or seemed to realize that standup comedy and acting are two radically different disciplines.

All those mall jokes and airline jokes and Southern Goober jokes, all the standardized patter and kiddie dirt, showed us where the comedy zeitgeist was plugged in. Judging by the interest and the nature of the questions the comics posed to the seminar panelists, finding a marketable context for self-expression and one’s point-of-view wasn’t the goal; getting a part in a sitcom was.

That’s understandable of course, as the audience was reminded of how profitably TV and the movies have stood on the efforts of Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Michael Keaton, numerous Second City and “Saturday Night Live” alumni, and most recently, Roseanne Barr and Richard Lewis. And that’s not to mention how much earlier television, and radio, benefited from a score of vaudeville-trained talents, such as Fred Allen and Jack Benny. And there are some talents, such as George Burns, Jonathan Winters and Bob Hope, who’ve transcended decades of change.

The convention’s casting and sitcom directors were quick to point out that the comedian’s personality, and his (or her) ability to control an audience were distinct advantages in those likability quotients whose official existence everyone denies. Lost in the rush to be the new Roseanne, that is, to have a show dropped around you like a tent, was the cautionary note of ABC-TV’s Robin Nassif: “An actor will usually get chosen over a comedian.”

Various panelists disagreed on how much training a comedian needs (TV director Howard Storm said that some people shouldn’t study at all: “If Woody Allen had studied acting, he wouldn’t have done things his way”). Some suggested that knowledge of scene-study and cold-reading techniques might be enough. One thing was certain; if a comedian bombs onstage, he can come back the next night (or even drive to another club). But if he bombs at a casting audition, it may be years before he’ll be seen again.

John Bowab was the most emphatic about preparation, perhaps because he comes from a theater background. (He was associate producer of “Mame” and “Sweet Charity” on Broadway, and has worked with Morton DaCosta, Cyril Ritchard, George Abbott, Gene Saks and Bob Fosse. He’s director of the production of “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” with Debbi Reynolds and Harvey Presnell, which is currently on tour.) He’s directed numerous sitcoms, including episodes of “Soap,” “Benson,” “It’s a Living” and “The Facts of Life,” among others.

In the seminar “From Standup to Sitcom” he despaired of “the comic who wants to act but can’t use his body” by way of recommending dancing, fencing, karate--anything that lured the performer away from the false security of playing it safe.

Later, after the convention was over, he said, “If someone says ‘I want to be an actor,’ or ‘I want to be a comic actor,’ I have no problem with that. But if someone says, ‘I want a sitcom,’ they’re looking at acting as a quick way to fame and fortune. Even if they get a sitcom, they’re looking at a short career. It should not be the end of ambition.

“I’m concerned that standup is becoming

diminished,” he added. “It is an art form, the most challenging thing you can do. I think that performers who look at it just as a stepping stone are failing themselves. But if acting is going to be the choice, you have to understand that there is no short route, even though everything today seems capsulized and most people think there is. You have to learn how to learn, how to enlarge your technical ability and your ability to communicate.”

Bowab understands the impulse to jump from standup comedy to sitcoms as a career move. “The competition is fierce; if 40 million people see you on television, it certainly means a lot when you face future audiences in the clubs.” Also, “Newhart and Cosby have done phenomenally well in sitcoms because both were able to play characters not far from themselves. The same with Roseanne.”

But he’s unsympathetic to the comedian’s lament that too much time is spent on the road, and that a sitcom part represents the easy way out.

“Don’t you think theater people go through the same thing?” he said. “I know people who’ve been in the theater 30 years and are still on the road a lot. It’s a lonely life too, where you can be out for a year or a year and a half, where your life is the plane, the city, the theater, the hotel.”

Noting that Billy Crystal is a theater devotee, and that Robin Williams was a Juilliard student, Bowab added, “I say, ‘Don’t let a day go by without doing something. If all you do is wait for an 11 o’clock spot at the Improv, you won’t make it.” Even if one does get lucky, “once you’ve been chewed up and spit out of a sitcom, you’re not necessarily going to get another one next season. And if you haven’t developed as an actor, where are you?”