Comedy College : Professional comics, club impresarios and UCLA Extension create class to teach the craft--and therapy--of stand-up

Did you hear the one about the university that offers a certificate in comedy?

That’s not a joke. It’s a new program being offered by UCLA Extension.

Starting in the spring, students will be able to get formal recognition of their ability to create hilarity, just as their peers do for mastering archeology and aerospace engineering. Ronnie Rubin, head of UCLA Extension’s Division of Performing and Integrated Arts, says, “We wanted to give students an opportunity to authenticate their study in this area and to gain industry recognition.” As far as she can determine, the program is the first of its kind in the country.

Although the certificate in comedy will not be offered until the spring, the curriculum is already in place, the product of collaboration between extension staff and professional comics and comedy impresarios who have devised a course of study in stand-up and related arts and crafts.

Budd Friedman, owner of the nation’s 12 Improvs and one of the creators of the stand-up phenomenon, helped design the course. As he points out, long before comedy was taught on campus, comedians bent on realizing their talent often created their own college of comedy. He cites Robert Klein, who first appeared at the original Improv in New York in 1965. Klein, Friedman says, was the first comic he ever saw use a tape recorder. Klein would schlep an enormous reel-to-reel Wollensak into the club and record his performances to analyze later. When a young David Brenner asked how he could become the next Robert Klein, Friedman advised Brenner to record and study his performances.

Last quarter, as usually happens, the stand-up course on the UCLA campus was sold out. Twenty-five would-be funny people--including an inordinate number of attorneys, a woman who used to make her living drawing Smurfs and a rabbi--signed up for a 10-week course taught by comedian Taylor Negron. Born in Glendale, Negron, 32, plays the singing chef in the Richard Lewis/Jamie Lee Curtis TV series, “Anything But Love.” But he is probably best known for his carpet salesman routine in the movie “Punchline,” the punch line of which is an unforgettable rendition of the phrase “area rug.”

Negron, who perfected his own comic skills before stand-up went to college, says he set out to help each of his students develop a distinctive comic personality based on their own identity.

“You have to find out who you are and then create that guy,” Negron says. Successful comedy, he says, grows out of experience and conviction. “If you want to get my respect, you have to tell jokes about things you don’t want people to know about.”

Negron was amazed at how well educated most of the students were. “Half of them went to Harvard and Yale,” he says. “I went to UCLA--for lunch.” Despite their degrees, the students were hungry to make it as comics. Classes were intense, even weird, he recalls. “Every time I opened the door, it was like going into the snake pit. I would say, ‘Let the games begin.’ ”

At first, Negron says, many of the students had trouble identifying a self to reveal on-stage. “You saw a lot of people who didn’t know what their life was about.”

Richard Rothenstein, a 32-year-old publicist who took the course, says Negron was “our Annie Sullivan, leading around 25 neurotic Helen Kellers saying, ‘Am I funny, Taylor, am I funny?’ ” Convinced--most of the time--that comedy can be taught (“it’s a craft, like glass blowing or nursing”), Negron insisted that the students do five minutes of original material every week. “You have to practice,” he says. “You have to write. You have to do it.” If a student hadn’t come up with a new routine, Negron made him or her get up and do old material.

By the time the students graduated--an event marked by their performing on-stage at the Santa Monica Improv--each had created a comic alter ego of some degree of success.

Psychotherapist Mary Marin told psychology jokes. “I failed Catharsis 101,” she confessed. “My timing was off. I would cathart really loudly in all the wrong spots.” Stephanie Boggs joked about the kind of men she attracts. “I’ve started sending Polaroids of all of my dates to ‘America’s Most Wanted.’ ” She also counseled the audience to be alert to such warning signs as a date who says, “Get really dressed up. Tonight is Santeria New Year.”

Daniel Schwartz got a laugh by introducing himself. “Hi,” he said, “my name is Daniel Schwartz, but not the one you went to high school with.” And Rabbi Steven Baars elicited laughter as soon as the audience saw his yarmulke and realized he was really, as the emcee had said, a rabbi. “Are all the rabbis who come up here funny?” Baars ad-libbed.

Negron had told the class how therapeutic comedy can be. Like other writers, comedians can take life’s whammies and spin them, if not into gold, at least into something that touches other people. “If you get applause, you get back at the person who gave you the finger,” Negron says. In this spirit, college speech teacher Mary Versteck told jokes about her battle for tenure. She got it, she said, in spite of objections to her morals. “I slept with the dean,” she said. “Little did they know when they voted against me,” she added, “I would be on the stage of the Improv, trashing them from coast to coast.”

Some of the experience from which the class’s comedy was fashioned was downright painful. Rothenstein had gags about being a “childhood husky, husky, husky.” Among his jokes: “Have you ever gained so much weight that your contacts were tight?” Attorney Gene Feldman joked that he had told his mother, no, he didn’t want an operation to cure his cerebral palsy. It would mean giving up a great parking space.

As a child, he said, he occasionally considered “limping away from home.” And he got a belly laugh when he recalled how he had gone from a special school where students took anticonvulsants and Ritalin to a regular school. “It was very disorienting,” he said. “I had to learn a whole new set of drugs.”

Negron said he tried to be non-censorious in judging his students’ work, encouraging them to do material that was meaningful to them even if he didn’t much like it. When one student pulled an Andrew Dice Clay and told a gay-bashing joke, Negron tried to point out the consequences of offensive humor instead of condemning it. “You can do that, but you have to know you may be physically injured after the act,” he said.

Negron also explained that the person who insists on doing racist or sexist material “will end up playing grade C clubs” and staying in “cinderblock motels.” “You’ll find yourself spending a lot of time in San Antonio, Flagstaff and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho,” he said. Greeted with chilly silence during the routine (“It was like ‘Springtime for Hitler,’ ” Negron recalls), the student dropped the course.

Negron advised the class that however aggressive their stage personalities, they have to win over the audience. “You have to sell the material no matter how abrasive,” he says. To help students achieve the proper frame of mind, he would tell them, “You’re going to seduce the audience, or your girl’s parents, into liking you.”

Negron offered pointers on stagecraft. Be aware of the program as a whole, he said. “Whomever you’re following, you better hear the last note. They have created a certain vibration in the room that you’ve got to connect with.” He also told the class what to do should they experience the on-stage equivalent of a mid-flight power failure. “I said very seriously, ‘In the event of a catastrophic event, when nobody laughs, at least acknowledge it.’ ”

A resident comic and consultant for HBO’s new comedy channel, Negron directs comedy videos. His directorial skills were those most in evidence in the classroom, he says. “You can’t really teach comedy, but you can direct people to be funny, to find a funny moment.”

On the basis of their graduation performances, seven of the students have been asked back to perform at open-mike nights at the Improv, which are, in effect, auditions. Among those who triumphed that night was former husky Rothenstein. While waiting to go on, Rothenstein sold a joke to comic Carrie Snow (“She spent so much time ego-tripping, she got frequent-flyer miles.”). He found an agent. And were that not enough, he had his performance taped and sent it to his mother for Hanukkah.

Rothenstein recalls that he dragged his feet before signing up for the course. “I was waiting for God to come down and say, ‘Richard, do it. Be Jay Leno.’ ” In retrospect, he says, “It was a great class. The best thing about education is that it plants the seed for your next step, for your future.”

Negron doesn’t think the formal teaching of comedy will result in a society in which everybody, not just your rabbi and your attorney, is a comedian. Natural selection will keep many of the graduates of comedy courses from playing any room larger than their living room, he predicts. Comedians have to master three distinct formats, he explains: six minutes for the “Tonight Show,” 20 minutes for the comedy clubs and one hour to headline. The person who makes it to an hour--a plateau he has just reached, Negron says-- really has to know who he is.

Talent aside, not everyone is equipped for the life of a comic. “You have to make a personal and spiritual sacrifice to be a comic,” Negron says, suddenly as serious as he is funny. “It’s a night world,” he explains. “When you’re blow-drying your hair at 12:15 in the morning before you go on, you’re asking yourself, ‘If I’m created in God’s image, is God some kind of club owner or comic?”

Mark Lonow, co-owner of the Improv, will teach the stand-up course for UCLA Extension during the winter quarter, which starts Saturday. For more information, call (213) 825-9064.