Laughter Where the Boys Aren’t

After 25 years on the road as a rock drummer, back-up singer and “Star Search” comic, Jenny Jones is ready to be a somebody. And if Jones hasn’t yet become a household name, eight weeks of spotty controversy surrounding her Girls’ Night Out comedy show has put her into the Rolodexes of the people who book the rich and famous.

Connie Chung has called. Producers offering to do TV specials. Magazines sniffing out cover stories.

During Girls’ Night Out, so the handbills boast, there are “No Men Allowed.”

And that fact has sold out 10 consecutive shows for Jenny Jones, gotten snippets of her routine onto ABC’s “20/20” and nearly landed her in trouble with the law in two cities in the last two months.

In fact, the “No Men Allowed” part of her slogan has of late become a moot point, at least at Pasadena’s Ice House, where the box office acknowledges that it is against the law to discriminate against men who want to buy tickets. Jones’ Monday show has sold out--”We don’t have reservations specified by men and women, but it’s mostly women”--and the Sunday show added to accommodate the overflow is not turning men away.

Nonetheless, Jones insists that the show will not go on if men are in the audience, and she also insists that what she calls her “separatist policy” is not a gimmick.

“God, I hate that word,” she winced. “It makes me a little uncomfortable because it didn’t start out to be that. I would rather replace that word with ‘good idea.’ ”

Jones’ “good idea” started in October in London, Ontario, the town where Jones grew up as Jenny Stronski. Back home to visit and play the local comedy club, she convinced the manager to open on a Sunday for a women-only show, so she could use the stack of jokes that always bombed with men.

He agreed.

“We turned away 1,000 women that night,” she said. “They were scalping tickets.”

She launched the evening with gags about stretch marks and PMS and, needing to fill a little time, opened the floor for what was to become the show’s highlight: women’s pet peeves. By January, Jones had designed a logo (the international “No” sign with a shapely leg crossing out a male’s silhouette), and she was on tour with Girls’ Night Out. A man protested the discriminatory ticket policy in Boston, but a legal stand-off was averted because the show was already sold out to women. In Denver, security guards were hired because of threatening phone calls to the box office. No trouble materialized. In Los Angeles, Ticket Master refused to sell tickets to her Feb. 20 show at Igby’s until she removed the “No Men Allowed” banner from her signs. (No men showed up.)

Jones said that without men, the show developed into a “pajama party”-type atmosphere. “It’s not an anti-male show,” she said. “We’re just trying to let our hair down and talk about personal things that men don’t get.”

She believes women wouldn’t feel comfortable unless assured that there were no men in the audience. To do that, Jones conducts a “hairy knuckle” check at the beginning of each of her shows.

“I just think the guys that try to cause the trouble are being very petty,” she said. “We aren’t the same, we are different. I think discrimination laws have gone way too far, with girls suing to be in the Boy Scouts and men suing to go to some women’s gym.”

Jones balks at a question about whether she is a feminist--”I hate labels”--but said she thinks that issues such as whether women should be admitted to private mens’ clubs have taken away from the unresolved objective of equal pay for equal work.

She won’t say exactly what she will do if men are sitting in the audience come Sunday at the Ice House. She’s joked that she would perform in the ladies’ room, and speculated during an interview that she might refund everyone’s money and cancel the show.

For all of her years on the fringes of show business, Jenny Jones at 43 still can seem like a 15-year-old harvest queen candidate who sees her big chance and doesn’t want to blow it.

“Am I OK? Too much? Too shiny?” she nervously frets after prepping for the photographer. And when the photographer packs his equipment to leave, she implores, “Pick one where my hair doesn’t blend in the background. Where I look real pretty and intelligent.”

In fact, Jones is pretty, and she does seem intelligent, not just in pictures. What she wasn’t, for the longest time, was funny, she now admits.

The “Star Search” victory opened doors, but she didn’t get calls from People magazine, Time, “Inside Edition” and the Regis Philbin show until she barred the show’s doors to men, she said.

Now, her phone won’t stop ringing, and she’s handling it all without an agent or a manager, since she “cut them loose” when she decided to try her experiment with an all-female audience.

“I tend to be influenced more than I should be,” she explained. “This time, I just really wanted to go with my instincts.”

With one exception.

Jones admits that she relies on the advice of fiance Denis McCallion, a film location manager, who offers an occasional joke for the show he’s never seen.

“I’m sure he’d like to be there,” she said, “but I’m the boss and I say he can’t come in.”