Laff Stop Stages Fright Night for Six Budding Cutups

It’s about 15 minutes before show time, cry time, do it or die time.

“I’ll have a Long Island tea,” Leonor Del-Llano tells the waitress. “I’m desperate.”

Alan Mollick orders a tequila with a Bud. Right about now it doesn’t much matter what’s chasing what in the race down his hatch.

“You guys must be the performers,” the waitress opines. Bingo, she’s right on target. But maybe her grin is letting on just a tad too much.

The room here at the Laff Stop in Newport Beach is black-walled dark. Smoke swirls under track lighting, beams of white and red.

People have paid to be here, $3 a pop on a Tuesday night. The room is about, oh, maybe half full. Not everybody knows what’s coming next.

Leonor, Alan and the four other opening night rookies are twittering with laughter, rubbing their palms together, pacing the floor. Tonight’s the end of the line in their six-session, non-credit Orange Coast College class on the basics of standing up and making people laugh.

Soon their teacher, comic Maggi Bass-Jackson, arrives and tries to calm a few nerves. She reminds her students that, for them, drinks are only $1 by the glass.

Sure, they’d all love to break a leg, but maybe that’s asking a bit much for tonight. Only one member of the group, Jeff Doss, is thinking that stand-up comedy might be what he’d like to do with the rest of his life.

The others are talking about good old-fashioned survival with, please, oh please, some of their egos left intact.

“Hubba, hubba!” one of Jeff’s buddies yells by way of some last minute support. “Hey, Doss is great !” the guy says. “I’m telling ya. He’s funny as hell!”

The music starts. It’s about that time. A drum roll please and . . . one by one, the rookies put themselves on the line.

Brad Howell. Why, who would have thought? This mild-mannered chiropractor from Santa Ana says that in between all those joints he twists, he’s had enough time to read his TV Guide. Now he’s letting us know what’s inside.

“Everybody knows ‘Father Knows Best’ ” Brad says. “Well, he doesn’t know diddley. Bo knows diddley. . . . And you know there’s a show called ‘Welcome to Pooh Corner.’ It’s a messy place.”

OK, Leonor, a vocational rehabilitation counselor in Orange, is up next. She’s 36 and single, and says that’s about as depressing as it gets.

“I saw this Marine ad and it said, ‘Looking for a Few Good Men.’ And I thought, ‘Well, no (kidding). So am I!’ ”

Alan Mollick, the aerospace engineer from Huntington Beach, takes a different tack--down and dirty and plenty obscene. But Alan says he’s been to Texas lately, and wants to tell us what was on his mind.

“They ought to have a rule down there,” he says. “Never wear a belt buckle bigger than your head.”

Next Jimmy Faris takes his blowup doll, Polly Ethel Lean, up on the stage. He talks to her, and about her, in terms that would make many of us turn a pale shade of green.

“I know she’s just a glorified shower curtain,” Jimmy says. “But she’s mine.”

Pat Lay Wilson, following in Jimmy’s wake, tells us about a recent night in the neighborhood, when she saw what looked like legions of helicopters spraying lots of sticky stuff down from the sky.

“I think it’s called methadone,” she says. “What’s that you say, ‘It’s called malathion?’ No, I live in downtown Santa Ana. It’s methadone .”

Finally, the Doss man makes his way to the stage. His rooting section is making its presence known.

“Shut up,” are the first words out of Jeff’s mouth. Then he tells us about his job, at Disneyland, as the skipper on the Jungle Cruise ride.

“Japanese tour groups,” Jeff says. “We have 300 in our party. . . . One boat, please.”

Then, of course, there’s Jeff’s leisure time. It seems that he’s spent some time on the links.

“I’m the only one out there who’s getting lapped by the other golfers.”

Sand traps really don’t bother Jeff, though. “But for the life of me, I cannot hit it out of the water.”

And with that, and some good-hearted applause, fright night is over for these six budding cutups. No one died and some even got a couple of good laughs. Maggi Bass-Jackson says they all passed her class.

So after their hearts came down from overdrive, the group kicks back and watches four class alumni show the audience what they’ve learned after school.

“I’ll tell you the same thing that I tell my school kids,” says alumna Clare Ryan, an elementary school teacher in Costa Mesa, at the end of her routine. “It’s better to aim for the moon and miss than to aim for the gutter and hit it.”

Dianne Klein’s column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.