The High Stakes of Stand-Up Comedy: The Seduction by TV and Movies : Four days in Vegas add up to a huge gamble for everyone involved

For most of the gamblers posted grimly at the tables and the slot machines, the future lay in the instant. But for the nearly 300 comedians and entertainment industry reps who convened for the Second Annual American Comedy Convention, the gamble lay in the future itself.

The event, organized by Budd Friedman (owner of the Improv) and his partner Eddie Kritzer (and underwritten by Seagram’s Distillers and Laughtrack magazine), consisted of four days of seminars, showcases, demonstrations, ancillary parties and all-purpose general schmoozing in which comics, club owners, agents, managers, publicists and network casting directors sniffed over each other in a mating dance that could spawn fame and big bucks for the right connection.

The comedians came from all over the country, from Venice Beach to New England. One came from Liberia. One came on a bicycle bearing all his belongings. One brought his partner, an English sheep dog named Winston. An improbable character named Gay Boy Ric (Ricardo Hunter Garcia), as lank and slender as a noodle and wearing plastic knee guards and carrying a huge red Crayon, spent his time passing out self-promotional materials (he never performed). There was one Nazi-style comic (“Take my vife, I command you!”).

In another era most of the industry types would’ve viewed this pack of eccentrics with derision. But comedy holds the table right now in the ratings and revenues crap shoot. Look at “Ghostbusters” I and II. Look at Bill Cosby and Eddie Murphy, two of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in the entertainment industry.

If everyone knows that it took Jay Leno 20 years to get to the top, everyone also knows (as was discussed in the convention) that Howie Mandel’s sudden career launch began with an impromptu five-minute routine at the Comedy Store--the first time he’d ever stepped before an American audience.

The runaway success of the “Roseanne” show was uppermost in everyone’s mind. Three years ago, Roseanne Barr was an overweight pot-walloping Hausfrau grinding through married life in a Denver trailer court and easing the slow skid into a dead-end existence with wisecracks, which she culled into a stand-up routine.

Today she rules over the second-highest-rated show on television and shares the mysterious tabloid immortality accorded Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor. You may think she can’t act. You may think her smart mouth is no substitute for a real character. But she’s up there in the megabuck ozone, the modern American pantheon where the rest of these visiting comedians would like to be--and where handlers would like to offer them a leg up for a piece of the action.

“I know I’ll find a comic here,” said Shana Landsburg. “I know there’ll be at least one person I can follow and send out for next pilot season.”

Landsburg, a wry woman in her early ‘30s, is manager of casting at NBC and one of three network casting directors who were on hand for the convention (the other two were Chris Gorman of CBS and ABC’s Robin Nassif).

“I think this convention accomplishes a real meshing of the entertainment community,” she said. “I know this sounds naive, but things can change so quickly that all you really have to rely on is people you can trust, relationships you can build on. I’m optimistic.”

Budd Friedman hosted a keynote breakfast for club owners and comics, after which Jim McCawley, a former talent coordinator and now co-producer of NBC’s “The Tonight Show,” spoke on “Getting Ready for Late-Night TV.”

More than anything, six minutes in front of Johnny Carson and the nation represents the Big Shot for most aspiring comics, who can thereafter call for hefty club salaries and maneuver themselves closer to the ultimate payoff of movies and television. McCawley, the man behind the scene, the potential link, was therefore viewed with more than the usual curiosity, and he knew it.

Out there, in the audience, were some people he may already have rejected, and people he was sure to hear from now with phone calls, written pleas, press packets, videotapes. Many of them wouldn’t know how to present themselves, or weren’t funny, or ready, or tasteful enough for Johnny, or were in stand-up for the wrong reasons.

McCawley slouched at the lectern with the gloomy nervousness of a honky-tonk piano player who’d heard too many gunfights erupt behind his back. But he had some hard truths to impart, and in retrospect, during a week in which the term “art form” was freely tossed around, he was the only one to address the comedian as principally an artist.

He spoke of comedy as a form of truth-telling. How do you find those truths? “If you have things that amuse you, things that are important and you like to tell your friends about, that’s what should make up your material. You should ask yourself, ‘Will this still be funny a thousand years from now?’ Chances are it will be funny if it’s true to the human condition. I still find Aristophanes funny.”

He deplored talking dirty as “. . . far too easy and not to Johnny’s taste. It’ll prevent you from getting to the top of your profession.” He warned against using regionalisms, such as New York looking down on the South. He advised against talking to the audience: “Most of the time it’s playing around and trying to get something, except in the case of Jimmy Brogan.” He added pointedly, “If you showcase for me, don’t spend a lot of time asking me ‘Where you from?’ ”

He told the audience that the “Tonight Show” introduced six new comedians each year, and that “the goal is to go through the roof, which makes it easier for your second appearance. By your third, you’ll have two movies and a series.”

McCawley’s was nearly the first address, and it turned out to be the most eloquent of the entire convention because it dealt with principle over the practical rigors of job-hunting.

“The whole point is that the comedian sees the world through his own eyes with a vision that’s a little skewed,” he said. “The comedian’s art is the shock of discovery. You’ll begin to talk about something and at the end come up with something that isn’t what the audience expected. But it seems right just the same, and it’s yours.”

Someone asked him if America weren’t on the verge of being “comedy’d out.” “That’s a philosophical question,” he replied. “I do know that when I was growing up, folk-singing was big. Now . . . “ he shrugged.

“There’s always comedy and tragedy. You don’t see any tragedy clubs.”

He received a generous applause, to which Winston added his bark.

In a seminar called “Casting at the Network Level,” Landsburg, Gorman and Nassif introduced themselves briefly before opening up the floor to questions, which sometimes led to amusing and even contentious results.

To the query “What do you wanna see on tape?” Landsburg replied, “I’d follow the Rob Lowe approach. If you have acting that’s really good, I’d like to see it.”

“I wanna see whatever you’re proud of,” added Gorman, momentarily unaware that this ingenuous remark concealed a double entendre. The audience erupted in laughter.

“I’m afraid not to see a tape,” he said, his face reddening. “A comic can happen so fast that he can come out of nowhere and be the talk of the town.”

“If they’re a good comic, we’ll push that,” said Landsburg, referring to the talent she and her colleagues steer toward development teams, pilots, and network shows in search of new faces. “If it’s dramatic acting, we’ll push that. Sometimes it’s just the presence of the personality that sells.”

“Is a character pigeonholed, like Roseanne,” someone asked, “or do they get to play something else?”

“Roseanne has a strong persona,” Nassif replied. “Some people say she’s not a good actor, but she’s laughing all the way to the bank.”

“A character that’s extreme can be a liability,” Gorman said.

“How do you put Bob Goldthwait in a series?” Nassif asked rhetorically. “He’s such an extreme, a large personality.”

“You use sub-titles,” Landsburg quipped.

A young woman rose to say that a number of her female colleagues had been excluded from the upcoming showcase schedule. If she could get them together, would the casting people see them perform? “We’ll see you,” Landsburg said, looking at the others for confirmation.

A young Southerner stood up to ask why NBC “took the cheap way out” in its casting of “The Heat of the Night” by not using Southerners in secondary roles. “Hey, that’s NBC,” Landsburg replied. “Most of the casting is done in Los Angeles. If Carroll O’Connor will show up week after week is a bigger issue than if the accents are real or fake. Don’t print that! “ she yelled at whatever press was in the room.

“Do you wanna be real or fake?” the young man persisted.

“Fake, OK?” she retorted angrily. “Is this to do with the comedy convention or is it a personal vendetta?”

“Calm down,” someone cried.

“I’m a Southern actor from Africa . . .” began another questioner. The audience laughed. “How do I develop?” he added, now serious. Learn scene study, cold reading.

“Should we pay to see a casting person?”

“No!” Nassif said sharply. “That person is the slime of the universe.”

Many of the same points on acting skill and preparation were made in the next seminar, “How to Go From Standup to Sitcom,” in which TV directors John Bowab, Ellen Falcon and Howard Storm said that while it was important not to be intimidated by the system, it was also important to be ready.

“You don’t want to go to that first meeting and have the word passed around, ‘Can’t act,’ ” Bowab said. “Sometimes you can pay the price of one bad showcase for two or three years.” (See adjacent story.)

Later in the afternoon, the three-day showcase sessions began. Aside from career tips from seminar panelists, this is what the comedians were waiting for--the chance to strut their stuff before industry pros and move themselves one step closer to the big time. It also gave the “buyers”--the catch-all term for anyone in a position to sign up talent--a chance to see what was going on in flyover country; that is, any of the dark terrain that rolled unseen beneath the New-York-to-Los-Angeles redeye.

To showcase, a comic had to be a headliner somewhere, or else he had to be recommended by two club owners, or else he had to recommend himself to Friedman and Kritzer through a videotape.

It was hard to believe that many, if not most, of these comedians could headline anywhere. One Southern comedian named Killer Beaz spent much of his act talking about tobacco chaws and spitting. Another comic opened with a line about what it felt like to sneeze into a tissue that someone else had sneezed in first. Said one comic: “Jackie O can take out a half dollar and say, ‘Yeah, I slept with that guy.’ How many women can say that?”

Outside, Landsburg looked grim. “They’re so much like actors--just like children,” she said. “It’s all pee-pee jokes.”

Nine comedians performed in the afternoon session and 16 played that night, during which similar patterns of style, rhythm, subject matter and references quickly began to emerge. Sometimes you heard the same joke (“Honey, is my butt gettin’ big?”) from different comedians. There were a lot of jokes about being from the South (“You really make it with farm animals?” one comic said was a frequently asked question).

Many had poise and physical assurance; few had memorable material, or an original point of view (the club scene has clearly become an insular sub-culture that feeds on itself). Some forgot where they were on stage and fumbled painfully through their routines. Others breezed through their 12 minutes.

Lahai Fahnbulleh, the Liberian, wore his dashiki and gold vai (his tribal hat) and said things like “I told the barber to give me a real African look. I woke up with a bone in my nose,” and “We used to ship in rednecks from Alabama, but they were so bad we decided to do the work ourselves.”

“Just think what he could be talking about,” moaned one observer. “What a world of contrasts he has at his fingertips, what a unique experience! And what does he do? He tells African Yakov Smirnoff jokes.”

“What’s the story with Uncle Ben’s converted Rice?” asked one comedian. “What was it converted from?”

Friedman came on stage at 10 o’clock, read the room, smiled cleverly and said: “Relax, there are only 4,473 comedians to go.”

Later, Fahnbulleh owned up to the criticism. “I have tons and tons of material but my English is not where’d I’d like it to be,” he said. “On stage, the words come slow. I’m beginning to see where I’m going. In time I’d like to highlight the politics of the Third World.” Fahnbulleh, 33, is one of 27 children (his father has four wives) and came to America eight years ago as a student in Seattle, only to lose his green card.

“Life is awful in Liberia right now,” he said. “It’s pretty much in a constant state of emergency where the government can be suspended at any time. I’m totally scared to go back; I could be killed. When I first came here and saw Johnny Carson talk about the president, I was scared for him. I ran into the bedroom to wake up my sister and said: ‘You’ve gotta see this. He’s talking about the president. They’re gonna kill him!’ My father-in-law came in and laughed.”

The day his green card was revoked was one of the lowest in his life. “I was devastated,” he said. “I was walking along the street and this guy in a taxi pulled up and said, ‘How come you so depressed? Do you know any jokes?’ I knew one. ‘At the age of 20, a woman is like Africa,’ I said. ‘Semi-explored. At the age of 30 she’s like India. Warm, cool, mysterious. At 40, she’s like America, technologically developed. At 50, she’s like Europe, a ruin. At 60, she’s like Siberia. Everybody knows where she is, but nobody wants to go.’ ”

As it turns out, the cab driver was a comedian who invited Fahnbulleh to try out at a local club.

“The convention’s been useful to me because there are no other Africans here, and it gives me a chance to show how we’ve been misrepresented by people like Eddie Murphy in ‘Coming to America,’ ” he said. “Africa is not just gorillas and stupid people and savages. The words don’t come easily to me yet, but one day I’ll be able to talk about the hardships, the common ethnicity. My friends think I’m crazy, but if I make it, they’ll be proud.”

The next day’s seminars included career management, the booking of comedy clubs by the larger agencies, and comedy writing. Steve Allen was honored at the Comedy Legends lunch and performed wittily in return, an old pro still on his game. He received two standing ovations. “It ain’t what you do, it’s how you do it,” he said later, in a TV interview. “Watch the reasonably successful people, watch how the masters do it. There’s no such thing as an expert in every field of comedy. Some comedians can make you laugh, but it’s like Chinese food. Someone like Benny could make you laugh, but you still smiled when you went out the door.”

“We need a 12-second answer,” the TV interviewer said. Allen improvised. “You’re such a pro,” the interviewer said.

Landsburg liked the first comedian in the afternoon showcase, a confident young man named Donald McEnery who said, “I’m thirtysomething, which means that every Tuesday night at 11, I cry,” and “After ‘Fatal Attraction,’ if I slept with a woman, I killed her. That’s my idea of safe sex.” She liked a comedian named Chance Langton even more. A burly-looking Bostonian who is also an excellent guitarist, he played the crowd skillfully. “At five I fell in love with Shirley Temple,” he said. “She danced, she sang, she turned me on. At six, I met her in a shopping mall. She was 50.”

The roster went downhill from there. “Relax,” said a tall, very fat comic. “I’ve been fed.” Said another comedian, “So do these Iranians know how to put on a funeral, or what?” Landsburg slumped over the table. “I miss Winston,” she moaned.

Afterwards, over dinner, she said: “In many ways this convention is better than last year’s. Budd has arranged it so that the seminars don’t conflict with the showcases. Overall, it does serve a good purpose. But,” she added, “I am disappointed about the quality of the showcases. The material has been very pedestrian.”

She spoke of one comic who had a good look but stumbled at the beginning of his act and lost control; and of another: “He’s overweight and saying ‘How schlumpy and fat can I make myself look.’ McEnery has fresh material and a good vocal quality. I could see him as a best friend or a crazy ad exec. He knew how to dress, which is important. A lot of comics don’t know how to present themselves.”

Landsburg is somewhat skeptical of the TV star system, which can be even more treacherous than movie stardom; television is more closely associated with the notion of brand identification.

“I have a problem when I hear people say ‘I want somebody to be a star.’ We want somebody to be successful--absolutely. But you have to realize that acting is an art. You don’t have to be a star to be an actor. Sometimes being a star means you don’t work after a show runs its course or is cancelled.”

Although she specializes in comedy, she thinks the run on comedians is bound to slow down. “It’s cyclical,” she said. “I think the comedy high is gonna fall. At some point there’s gonna be something else. If the comedian thinks he can just automatically move over to sitcoms, that isn’t gonna happen. A lot of people knock the quality of TV, but it’s what America accepts and there’s a lot of money in it. That’s another reason I respond to a guy like Langton. He’s taking a chance. He’s not a leading man, not a Jewish type. His humor is esoteric. He talks about people. He gives you something to relate to, instead of telling a bunch of jokes on flipping people off.

“It’s no wonder there are so many people trying to do stand-up now. There’s so much crap out there you say, ‘If they can do that, so can I.’ What works for me is humor that gets me on an emotional level, the thing that makes you say, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve been there.’ ”

The convention began winding down on the fourth day, in which a seminar on Agents and Your Career was held in the morning, and publicists Michael Levine and Glenn Schwartz, through phrases such as “In the ‘40s the medium was the movies; now the medium is the media” and “It’s still all about image” established a self-importance about their roles even more egregious than the self-congratulation that characterized many of the earlier panelists.

It would have been of great interest to entertainment news editors to learn, for example, that Schwartz and Levine consider the majority of them lazy and dependent on publicists for story ideas. “Remember, it’s not called show art,” said Levine in a telling epilogue to the series of addresses idealistically begun by Jim McCawley. “It’s show business .” He added: “Information is power. You could help yourself more by reading.” Reading what? “More books on public relations,” he said.

Landsburg checked out the last batch of comedians before getting ready to drive back to Los Angeles (in the greatest put-on of the showcase, the Nazi turned out to be an impeccably stylish comic from Long Island named Jim Myers). She’d gone to the private women’s showcase, held in a hotel room, and left after the first act.

“I always had a problem with the fact that all the women weren’t allowed to perform,” she said. In other words, women were excluding women. “But that’s not the only reason I left. The first woman I saw was too obvious; she had no material. She’d given up a career as a psychotherapist and she was too much, wearing a little party dress and too much makeup. It was sad. I saw that that’s what this showcase was about--women pushing.”

She shook her head. She acknowledged that the convention served a good purpose (a unanimous opinion of everyone asked on the subject). But: “I don’t believe in actors having to showcase. They pay transportation, room, food. I try to be supportive. Some will make it. A lot more won’t. I have a problem with people having to pay to audition.

“I think there should be more of an effort on the part of the industry too. Or else we should move the convention to Los Angeles. It’s hard to get producers and writers to take four days out of their week to go to Las Vegas. I’m energized by the people I’ve met, and there are a few people I’m excited to bring to NBC. But the greatest need of the majority of these comedians is to look at their material and be clear about what character they are on stage.”

That evening the Fox Television Network hosted a 90-minute gala dinner and comedy show at the Skytop Room of the Riviera Hotel. Landsburg had already packed and was long since gone on her way. She had seen as much has she needed to know.