SMILE! : Engaging comedians to do corporate comedy is on the upswing--thanks in part to the economic downturn. And it’s not strictly for laughs. Managers are discovering that it can help motivate their employees, too.
This was the scenario: Big company takes over little company, putting the fear of God in the regional sales managers who worried that they might be laid off.
A call was placed to Bonnie Beaux.
“My job,” says Beaux, “was to make the vice president in charge of operations, who was taking over, look good--to humanize him and make him look like a leader with a sense of humor.”
And so, as the new vice president was making his welcome-to-the-family speech in a San Francisco hotel ballroom, he was interrupted by an unannounced guest:
Beaux as the obnoxious Hosanne Hosannadanna from Santa Ana.
“Hey, listen, I gotta catch a plane,” the bewigged Beaux snapped to the “startled” vice president. “You left your sock in my room. Do you want it back?”
Hosanne is one of several characters Beaux, who owns Act-cetera Entertainment of Irvine, has portrayed to punch up business meetings, seminars, conferences, banquets and dinners. (There’s also Vanity White, a dizzy blonde; Dolly and her Partners, a robust blonde with a Southern flair; and Ophelia Touchy, renowned psychotic).
But the flamboyant Beaux, who has been hired by such well-known firms as the Irvine Co. and Pacific Mutual Life Insurance, is not the only comic plying the boardroom beat.
Corporate comedy, an offshoot of the flourishing comedy-club scene of the ‘80s, is booming in the ‘90s.
“It’s been kind of tip-of-the-iceberg the last five years or so, but it’s becoming very prevalent, and there are comics that are beginning to specialize in it,” said Anne Fox of San Francisco-based Fox Productions, a booking agency that also publishes Just for Laughs, a monthly newspaper distributed to more than 320 comedy clubs.
Fox said she has booked stand-up comics for everything from black-tie banquets to “brown-baggers” in corporate parking lots. A developer wanting to lure potential home buyers to a new housing project in San Jose even booked a comedian to entertain in a tent set up with 200 folding chairs.
Beaux, in fact, has found that tough economic times are a boon to corporate comedians.
“When a recession comes, my business increases--mainly because I make them laugh about how bad it is,” said Beaux, who is just out of her busiest season of the year. “All during the month of December, I was Rudolph the Unemployed Reindeer for company parties. And because the recession is starting to hit, I was very popular.”
Beaux said many businesses that previously had their year-end parties in restaurants were instead having them in their offices or at employees’ homes. “So I’d walk in and say, ‘Man, this is a cheap party!’ ”
Fox said corporate belt-tightening has played a role in the corporate comedy trend.
“It’s really an inexpensive way for corporations to entertain,” she said. Hiring a comedian “is less expensive than putting on huge shows and having carved iced swans--your ludicrous things that never really went over that well anyway.”
There’s more to corporate comedy than mere entertainment, however. Many of the bookings call for someone to liven up a corporate meeting.
According to Fox, more businesses “are realizing that laughter is a very motivating tool--laughing makes you feel better--and they’re realizing more and more the benefits of humor in productivity.”
Says comedian Dick Hardwick of Fullerton, who spent nearly a decade as the homespun comic in the Golden Horseshoe Revue at Disneyland and is a corporate favorite: “It transmits, hopefully, a good feeling of camaraderie. If you can laugh together as a group, it does something magical to the people.”
“I think what they’re finding more than anything else is that dry sales presentations and just constantly drumming the party line into them does not work anymore,” said comedian Warren Spottswood of San Francisco, a popular corporate character comedian who recently finished a two-week tour of Del Monte Foods’ regional offices.
In that gig, he posed as a “renowned management and sales consultant.” Spottswood said Del Monte not only wanted him to be as funny, but also “to get certain points across to the sales forces about the company’s commitment to them and to the new product line.
“I think that corporations are coming to more and more rely on a sense of humor. Humor puts things in a positive light, sort of the ultimate pep talk with a twist.”
When Restaurant Enterprises Group wanted to announce its new Coco’s restaurant pie promotion to its managers during a conference in Anaheim last spring, the Irvine company enlisted Hosanne Hosannadanna, who was introduced as the “product development manager” from a rival restaurant chain.
“Our managers still talk about that as the most memorable conference we ever had,” said marketing director Laurie Katapski, who credits Beaux with grabbing and holding their attention: “They didn’t know what was going to happen next.”
For comedians who specialize in corporate work, according to Fox, “it can be extremely lucrative. I know people in the Bay Area who make as much as $10,000 a night doing this.”
That’s the high end. For most, corporate work is a chance to make more in one night than they do working an entire week in a comedy club. Corporate fees typically range from $500 for 20 minutes to $1,500 or more--plus expenses--for an evening’s work. And if custom writing is required, Fox said, the fee can rise to $5,000.
“On a per-show basis, it’s the best money in comedy,” said comedian Carl Wolfson, who is best known for his “News Update,” a slide show in which he skewers current events and news makers with his doctored slide pictures. “Usually when I do a corporate show, I do a “News Update,” but I incorporate their people into the news items.”
Los Angeles comedian Rick Rockwell said his first corporate gig in December paid so well that he plans to line up more.
Rockwell was hired to masquerade as a national service consultant for the Sports Club Co., which owns health clubs throughout Southern California. Rockwell said he did a lot of research to prepare his hourlong “seminar,” which was conducted at a Palm Springs hotel at the end of the company’s four-day managers’ conference.
“I had them in stitches, but I had enough of a message there,” he said, adding that just as he would “go off the wall and do three K mart jokes,” he would say something that at least appeared to be meaningful. “People were taking notes up to the end. Literally. I came up with catch phrases like ‘A fake smile is better than a real frown.’ ”
“It was hilarious,” said Dave Nelson, operations manager for the Sports Club--LA., who hired Rockwell. “Most high-paid motivational speakers put a lot of humor in anyway, so throughout the entire program they never really knew if it was a real program or not.”
As Nelson sees it, Rockwell’s comical charade had a number of benefits: “When you have any sort of intensive couple of days of workshops, you need something to break it up. I think it also showed the company has a sense of humor and that you can never take anything too seriously.”
It went over so well, in fact, that the Sports Club Co. hired Rockwell to repeat his performance in January. This time, masquerading as a “nationally known sales consultant,” he spoke to the company’s sales force.
Not every comedian, however, is suited for corporate work. As Fox says: “It takes a personality that can cross over from the smoke-filled nightclub world to a corporate setting. You have to be very versatile, to submerge the old ego and, to a certain extent, glad-hand--to be a person who can go into a pre-cocktail party and not stick out like a sore thumb socially.”
Fox said businesses that call to book a comedian usually insist on one thing: “They’ll say: ‘It has to be clean--the bosses are going to be there.’ It can’t be dirty, but they have to have enough edge to make adults laugh.”
Says Hardwick, who has a reputation as a comedian who can be trusted to be clean: “I try to feel out the client and see how far they want to push it. Some people say, ‘What’s the most unique thing about your act?’ I say, ‘I can do a whole 30-minute show without saying the F or S word.’ ”
Unlike Beaux, who dons wigs and costumes for her appearances, Spottswood, with his silvery hair and Brooks Brothers suit, fits right into a corporate setting.
Spottswood--who was a 1990 finalist in the San Francisco International Stand-Up Comedy Competition and who performs regularly at the Punchline comedy club in San Francisco--was recently hired by a Bay Area furniture company to appear at a banquet honoring its top sales people at an exclusive San Francisco restaurant. His assignment: to masquerade as a brand-new salesman who will become so drunkenly obnoxious that everyone thinks his first day on the job will be his last.
As he sat at a table drinking wine and talking, Spottswood became increasingly loud and “drunk” as the evening progressed.
He continued talking even when the company president rose to speak, prompting the president (who was in on the joke) to say that as long as Spottswood was going to continue interrupting his table he might as well interrupt the entire gathering.
Which Spottswood did, launching into a routine about having just moved to California from Atlanta and talking about how “crazy” San Francisco is.
Spottswood was a hit, but the experience proved that, for a corporate “character” comedian, it doesn’t pay to be too recognizable.
A diner sitting in an alcove overlooking the corporate party recognized Spottswood and yelled: “Hey, I know you! . . . I’ve seen you at the Punchline.”