Focus : Laughing in the Face of Horror

On the stage of the Wiltern Theatre a small and sad-eyed woman, Ninotchka Rosca, stepped into a spotlight to tell her story, how she’d been imprisoned for six months at a military detention camp in the Philippines and how the work of groups such as Amnesty International had hastened her release.

The crowd jammed into the Atlas Bar & Grill, 30 feet away from the Wiltern’s backstage door, could not hear a word she said. Those who cared to look could see her image on a pair of television monitors near the bar, but the sound of the party drowned out her speech. As she spoke about torture, about prisons, about Amnesty’s “conspiracy of hope,” the only audible words in the restaurant came from a waiter, making his way through the room with a platter full of food.

“No, go ahead, have one,” you could hear him say, even as Rosca’s silent video image flickered a few feet away. “Try them. They’re good. They’re sauteed !”

It had been that sort of evening, filled with contradictions and incongruous images. But how could it have been otherwise? The night’s premise was irony incarnate--a two-hour comedy and music concert being taped for Lifetime called “Free to Laugh,” meant to benefit Amnesty International and focus on international human rights abuses against women.

Asked if he found it awkward to be telling jokes on the same stage where women were reliving the nightmares of being a political prisoner, comedian Jeff Altman showed just how awkward it could be.

“Hey, comedy and torture,” he said, doing his best to make light of it all. “What could make for a happier night?”

The Atlas had been turned into a combination media center and reception area, a place where the show’s featured performers--including Color Me Badd, Daryl Hannah, Lily Tomlin, Woody Harrelson, Vanessa Williams, Sinbad, Indigo Girls (with Jackson Browne and David Crosby sitting in) as well as hosts Tom and Roseanne Arnold--could meet the press.

“I think comedy can make a change,” Roseanne was saying, explaining why she saw no conflict between the evening’s informational and entertainment agendas. “It’s like the last free-speech art form. “Sometimes when you laugh at stuff you don’t wanna laugh at, then that lets you go on and be OK with it,” she said. “After you laugh at something, it’s not so scary.”

“The first step in any kind of recovery,” Tom Arnold broke in, as he is prone to do when sharing a stage with his wife, “is being able to laugh at the horror of it all.”

Which was pretty much what Jack Healey, executive director of Amnesty International USA, had in mind when he accepted Lifetime’s offer to stage “Free to Laugh” as a tribute to International Women’s Day. Healey, instrumental in bringing rock artists such as U2, Bruce Springsteen and Sting to the Amnesty cause in the 1980s, was looking for an entertainment event to spotlight Amnesty’s interest in women’s issues. Since Lifetime, a cable network specializing in female-oriented programming, was looking for a marquee special event, the deal was made.

“We were really struggling to find something that would emphasize women and nothing else,” said Healey, who admitted that, at first, Amnesty thought of the show more as a musical event than as a forum for comedians. It was Lifetime network executives (along with show producer Bob Meyrowitz) who suggested throwing comics into the mix, an idea that Healey, after some initial reluctance, endorsed.

“I worked for Dick Gregory for three years, from 1973 to 1976,” Healey said, “and what I saw with him was that humor is really a weapon, a way to make fun of people in such a way that it unites them.”

Healey, who admits he’s never heard of most of the comedians who performed on the show, was a little worried about whether the evening’s grim topic would lend itself to joke-telling. “You’ve always got to worry about when something crosses the line and isn’t funny anymore,” he said.

At that very moment, Roseanne was on the Wiltern stage, stretching the line to its limits. “Throughout the world, women are second-class citizens,” she was saying, in her trademark monotone whine. “Imagine being a second-class citizen in a third-world country. I mean, do the math. These babes are (expletive).”

She went on. “Beach Barbie. Malibu Barbie, Really Really Really White Barbie. That (expletive) does not prepare you for the true horror of a real woman’s life. Now, if they had Single Abused Trailer Park Barbie

The show, from a production standpoint, was dragging into an all-night disaster. Some of the advertised acts had not shown up and technical problems frequently left the stage empty, sometimes for 30 minutes or longer. Tom and Roseanne, committed to catch a chartered flight to their Iowa farm, had to leave early, so they did all of their introductions at once--asking the paying customers to applaud for acts that wouldn’t perform until hours later. Through the magic of videotape editing, no one at home will ever know the difference. The last act didn’t finish performing until 1:30 a.m.

By then the waiters were gone, along with the platters of food. The TV news crews had departed and so had most of the stars. But Jack Healey stayed, long past the point where anyone would have blamed him for leaving.

“Are you kidding?” he said, asked if he ever got tired. “When you meet people who have struggled to survive, you get serious about this business. If you get an opportunity to reach someone, no matter what it is, you use it.”

“Free to Laugh: A Comedy and Music Special for Amnesty International” airs Tuesday at 9 p.m. on Lifetime.