Ghosts in the Smoke

Every time I drop by a comedy club to see what’s going on I get flashes of a nightmare. I see a nice little guy on stage telling jokes in a room about half as big as a warehouse and colder than a tomb in winter. There are only four people in the audience and none of them think the kid is funny. Even his girlfriend just stares.

I am there because the guy invited me specifically to check out his act. He is maybe 26 years old, small in stature and diffident in manner, the kind of person you’d expect to see working in a shoe store.

He plays directly to me, the newspaper columnist, giving it everything he’s got, which is nothing at all. I try so hard to force laughter that my jaws ache. I clap so enthusiastically for no reason that my palms burn.

I am, in effect, an audience of one, because no one else in the room is even listening to the guy. Afterward, he comes up and says, “Well, what do you think?”

I stare.

It was no nightmare. This really took place during a rainy, open-mike night at a club in Encino called the L.A. Cabaret. I don’t remember the kid’s name, but I wouldn’t use it if I did. That’s the most I can do for him.

When he asked what I thought I should have used the old show biz rejoinder and said, “Don’t quit your day job.” Instead I said oh, er, um, gee, uh, polish up the old act blahblahblah. . . .

If you’re looking for a punch line, forget it. The guy didn’t turn out to be Steve Martin or Jay Leno. He turned out to be Mr. Nobody on a rainy night in the Valley.

I mention him because I’ve been checking the funny-circuit again, and he keeps haunting me, like a ghost hovering in the smoke. The most unfunny comic I’ve ever known, and I’ve known a lot of them over the years.

They’re all different kinds, these people, some so manic and depressed in real life they can’t tie their shoelaces without a standing ovation.

Others, like Steve Allen, are quiet and intellectual off-stage. Woody Allen mumbles and looks at his knees when he talks to you. Bob Hope seems perpetually bewildered. Shelley Berman can’t say hello without making me fall down laughing.

Anyhow, I stopped by a club called At My Place in Santa Monica not long ago to hear a Jewish cowboy singer-comic named Kinky Friedman. He’s kind of a manure-kicking Tom Lehrer, singing about things you hate to remember but don’t dare forget.

Lehrer, for those who’ve never heard of him, was the best satirist who ever put words to music, but gave it up halfway through a song because nothing seemed funny anymore.

I make the comparison because one of Friedman’s ballads is a piece called “Ride ‘Em Jewboy.” The room is bouncing along to it when suddenly everyone realizes it’s about the Holocaust, and the club gets as quiet as a hayride in Hell. The impact is devastating.

Then he sings, “They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” and you laugh so hard you almost gag on your Scotch, until he pauses for effect, twangs a note and says softly, “We don’t turn the other cheek the way we did before,” and the laughter dies in your heart.

Hey, I didn’t mean to go serious on you. I was just leading up to an evening spent in America’s oldest comedy club, the Ice House in Pasadena.

The club is celebrating its 30th anniversary, which is why I was there, talking to owner Bob Fisher about humor and things.

People like Robin Williams have played there and Lily Tomlin and the Smothers Brothers and so many others I’d need two days to list them.

The reason the Ice House has lasted all these years is because there’s a kind of magic to the room, a combination of warmth and proximity that turns a hard day mellow.

Also, Bob Fisher is a smart son-of-a-gun, and books all the acts himself.

Humor, he was saying the other night, is less intellectual than it used to be, but that’s because the audience is too. They aren’t the 1960s people digging Mort Sahl in the days before he canonized himself.

They want prop comics now and guys who hit you with 10 jokes a minutes.

“It’s an age of MTV and sound-byte politics,” Fisher said. “The comics do it less with wit today than personality and energy.”

Maybe so, but a couple of guys I’d never heard of, Ron Pearson and Jack Thomas, had the room vibrating when I was there. I laughed so hard my jaws ached. I clapped so enthusiastically my palms burned.

And I kept thinking of another unknown, Mr. Nobody on a rainy night in the Valley, punching away to the hard, cold sound of one man clapping, and I kept wondering what he’s doing now.

Selling shoes, I guess, and hustling dreams.