Cable Comedy’s War: Who’ll Laugh Last? : HA! comes on line today, but is the cable world big enough for two laugh channels?

It seems only appropriate to launch a TV comedy service on April Fool’s Day. That’s exactly what Viacom--the company that already brings you MTV, Nickelodeon and VH-1--is doing. Starting today at 4 p.m., some cable subscribers will be able to catch the debut of HA!, a new 24-hour-a-day, basic-cable comedy network.

Viacom hopes that the timing is more ironic than prophetic for the chances of survival of TV’s second all-comedy channel. “We could be for comedy what CNN is for news, or ESPN for sports,” says Ed Bennett, president of HA!

Perhaps. But questions about the venture abound. For one, it might be asked, how many more whacks on its funny bone can the country endure?

If you don’t care to watch an unending roster of comics stand and deliver in any one of 350 comedy clubs nationwide, or to go to the movies, there’s plenty of opportunity to find amusement in front of the TV at home by watching A&E;’s “Evening at the Improv” and “Caroline’s Comedy Hour,” the syndicated “Comic Strip Live” and “The Laugh Factory,” HBO’s “One-Night Stand” and “Women of the Night,” MTV stand-up spots, “The Tonight Show,” “The Arsenio Hall Show,” “Late Night With David Letterman” and the odd, fraught-with-peril comedic appearance on the syndicated “Showtime at the Apollo.”

This does not include “I Love Lucy,” “Leave It to Beaver,” Andy Griffith, Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore reruns. Or Nick at Nite. Not to mention regular prime-time network comedy programming.

To the outside observer, it would appear that that portion of the ozone layer covering the continental United States has mysteriously transmuted into laughing gas.

Too, there’s the parlous fate of that other comedy channel called, imaginatively enough, the Comedy Channnel, which was spun into orbit by HBO last November and instantly plunged into a trough of public indifference, critical disdain and cable inaccessibility, where it remains mired hemorrhaging, by one trade press account, $1 million a month (though HBO claims that figure is exaggerated). HBO says major rescue plans are being drawn up for the programming, but the problem of getting cable operators to carry it remains. HA! is having the same difficulty in finding room on already crowded cable systems. (See accompanying story, this page.).

Then there’s the matter of HA!’s programming. Though original production is planned, HA!’s initial schedule resembles an expanded version of Nick at Nite--virtually nonstop reruns of old sitcoms.

“Given that there’s an oversaturation of stand-up comedy, we hope to move on to the next level by developing variety and comedy shows that’ll work and survive,” said Bennett, who also is president of VH-1, MTV’s sister music-video service. But HA!--whose startup budget is $100 million--intends to build up to such fare by going first with the older, more conventional TV shows--”proven shows,” Bennett said, “with characters and stories that create a sense of warm, familiar, comfortable programming with which we can build an audience.”

Thus the lineup includes “Car 54, Where Are You?,” “McHale’s Navy,” “CPO Sharkey,” “TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes,” “Candid Camera,” “Rhoda,” “That Girl,” “The Best of Groucho,” “The Lucy Show,” “Phyllis,” “SCTV” and the “Saturday Night Live” years that featured Billy Crystal and Eddie Murphy. A classic variety showcase will offer “Your Show of Shows” and “The Red Skelton Show.” An afternoon block, put together by former NBC, CBS and ABC programmer Fred Silverman, features shows that dropped out of sight before anyone could miss them; they include “The Associates,” “Working Stiffs” and “Occasional Wife.”

Original programming will begin in May, according to Viacom, and will offer such shows as “The Storytellers,” in which film directors such as Gary Weis catch celebs telling tales; “Clash,” a game show pitting unlikely contestants against each other (such as taxidermists versus the Audubon Society); “London Underground,” a co-production with the BBC in which British and American comedy and music acts get together, and “The Big Room,” in which established comedians and monologuists are filmed in action by noted movie directors (Mort Sahl and Nicolas Roeg are teamed in the first installment, which airs at 7:30 tonight).

HA! has also signed series development deals with MTM Enterprises and Imagine Films Entertainment, where the Second City Repertory Company is working on new material.

On the matter of finding cable outlets, Viacom has taken steps to break down cable operators’ resistance towards adding another channel. It will distribute its programming on a satellite transponder that nearly every cable operator can get, ensuring that the operators can monitor the material even if they’re not relaying it to their subscribers. Also, it’s offering to let operators substitute HA! for VH-1 12 hours a day if they agree to carry both channels in full a year from now. But HA! concedes that at the outset its potential audience will only be between 5 million and 10 million homes. HBO says the Comedy Channel currently reaches 6 million homes. Analysts say from 25 million to 30 million are needed to break even.

Like the Comedy Channel, HA! is hoping to hang on until more cable systems are built and others increase their channel capacity or decide to shuffle their offerings. Bennett talks of eventually breaking through some of the programming redundancy--such as shopping channels--that cable companies have aired in order to fill up their spectrum. Too, he says, “There are cable operators looking to drop distant signals, and there are multiple services an operator may not want. When contracts come up for renewal, changes can be made.”

In the meantime, HBO’s Comedy Channel is attempting to rebound from what New York Magazine recently termed “the biggest cable flop in years.” Its initial format consisted of a small group of comedians hosting programs filled with comedy clips from past and current films, classic TV shows, stand-up performances and theater, as well as original comedy supplied by Allan Havey, Rachel Sweet, Tommy Sledge (the Stand-Up Detective) and the Higgins Boys & Gruber--unknowns when they started who’ve managed to retain their status. No one seemed to know what he or she was doing, the live segments were gripped in a mausoleum pall, and rather than inspired bits of comedic nonsense, the out-of-context clips spilled out like ghastly video debris.

“I don’t get a sense of identity from the Comedy Channel,” observes comedy historian and documentary filmmaker Bob Weide, whose most recent production, “Mort Sahl: The Loyal Opposition,” aired on PBS. “The performance attitude was the same, based on what they (the producers and executives) know, which is the comedy clubs. If you’re going to program comedy and you haven’t seen W.C. Fields’ ‘It’s a Gift,’ the Marx Brothers’ ‘Duck Soup,’ Buster Keaton’s ‘The General,’ Chaplin’s ‘City Lights’ and Laurel and Hardy’s ‘Sons of the Desert,’ you have no business trying. I’m not saying you have to do these movies over or try to emulate them, but if you don’t know the difference between W.C. Fields and Dan Aykroyd, don’t put comedy on TV. The country’s gotta be getting sick of these smug, self-satisfied, smarmy comics. Where’s the wit and cleverness? Who’d watch a political show hosted by Richard Belzer?”

As for HA!, Weide says, “That someone would go to Mort Sahl, the patriarch of modern comedy, and team him up with a Nicolas Roeg indicates a level of creative thinking I haven’t seen on the Comedy Channel. At least MTV has a style. Just looking at the promos and trailers, you can see that what they’re doing is stylistically related and has production values.”

HBO Chairman Michael J. Fuchs was the driving force behind the Comedy Channel before it went up and, despite its heavy losses, he’s staying with it.

“We did come out too early for what we had,” he told a gathering of the trade press in New York recently. “This channel, in a year or two, will be 100% different from what it is now. . . . In the long run, the Comedy Channel has to exist on its own original programming. We’re not going to get in the race and spend billions of dollars for old sitcoms. It’s going to take a long time to shake this baby out.”

Larry Divney, HBO senior vice president for advertising and sales, acknowledged in an interview: “There was a lack of glue. We had no continuity. There was no road map.We’ve dropped some clips and added others. We’ve improved the on-air promos.

“There’s no question that our scheduling was schizophrenic, but I kept pushing for us to get up and in there first. It was important to get a jump on the competition. HA!’s competition is the other networks. It’s the same old stuff. We’re after the 18- to 34-year-old; they program for 12- to 54 year-olds.”

If you’ve detected the subtle thunk of corporate mortar-shelling in Fuchs’ and Divney’s comments, you’re right. “Theirs is a deal channel,” Fuchs has said. “We have a comedy channel.” Tom Freston, chairman of MTV Networks, is quoted as criticizing the Comedy Channel for “being so hip they hip themselves right out of the mainstream.” “I don’t see them as competition,” says Bennett.

But in fact they are. Cable analysts observe that all the Comedy Channel and HA! can do is draw blood from each other in what looms as one of the bitterest struggles in cable history. The modern drama and tension surrounding those media entities that inhabit a corporate megalopolis isn’t in finding ways to locate the nerves of truth of American experience. It’s in the acquisition of money and prestige. According to industry analyst Larry Gerbrandt of Carmel-based Paul Kagan Associates, a successful comedy channel could eventually realize half a billion dollars in asset values.

“The question is to what degree two fairly identical channels will have in finding an audience, even though the short-form programming of the Comedy Channel differs from the long-form programming of HA!,” Gerbrandt says. “I think their real competition isn’t so much with each other as much as it is with everything else that’s out there. There is indeed much bitterness between them. They have a long history of rivalry. Many employees of one network have gone over to the other.”

Indeed, Frank Biondi, president and chief executive of Viacom, was once Michael Fuchs’ boss and confidant at HBO, and is now regarded as an adversary. (In May, 1989, Viacom filed a $2.4-billion antitrust suit against HBO and its parent company, Time Inc.)

Only time will tell whether the Comedy Channel can right itself and infuse its audience with a degree of new perspectives--not to mention offering first-rate entertainment. Or whether HA!, with its hefty roster of old but not always classic comedies, can locate enough diehard TV junkies out there to retrieve those odd objects of video immortality that float in space like lost, indestructible satellites. And then bring them face to face with important new artists.

“Both these networks have programming muscle and deep pockets,” Gerbrandt notes. “I really think the issue will be decided by the people who should decide--the viewers and critics.”