Taking a Hard Road

It didn’t take comic Tommy Davidson long to figure out why he couldn’t break into L.A. comedy clubs.

“It was a degree of racism,” he says. “If you can go into a club and see white guys not as good as you working the clubs, the reason must be more than talent. Because if it is talent, shouldn’t I be working? It’s like a process of deduction.”

Though Davidson is a regular on the Fox hip comedy series “In Living Color” and headlines his first Showtime special, “Tommy Davidson: Takin’ It to D.C.,” tonight at 10, it took him two years before he got a break.

“The L.A. Cabaret was the only one who would give me steady work,” he says. “That’s the nature of the beast here. If you are a comic trying to break in, you are going to get a lot of ‘no’s’. But if you have people standing and clapping and hollering and then the club owner says you are not what we are looking for, then something is really wrong.”

The Washington native began doing stand-up in a strip joint in the nation’s capital. Within months, he was the opening act for such performers as Kenny G and Patti LaBelle. His manager brought him to Los Angeles three years ago. “I wanted to do film and TV,” he says. “He thought D.C. or New York wasn’t the right place for me.”

Perseverance is paying off. Davidson is about to embark on a club tour of several cities before taping begins for the new season of “In Living Color” and has a two-year option with Showtime for more specials. “I would like movies to be my next step. I would like to write my own movies. When I came to California, I used to look at the newspapers and read about all the comics. Now I am one of those comics. I’m the new kid on the block and I feel real excited about it.”