WESTSIDE / VALLEY : Trio Works as a Team for Laughs

When people think of comedy today, they usually think of stand-up comics. Their minds don’t automatically go to comedy teams-- as they might have when the reigning laugh-makers were The Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, The Three Stooges.

That may be changing with the growing influence of three self-styled dysfunctional types who have been growing in popularity over the last seven years. They call themselves The Poster Boys, and their current mayhem, “Bang! I Love You,” is opening this weekend at West Hollywood’s Tiffany Theater.

The trio, Paul Parducci, Russ Reiley and Jim Giordano, cut their teeth on New York’s improv scene. That performing community is relatively small, so they frequently collided and eventually started working together.

“We all had the same sort of ideas comedically,” Parducci exclaimed, “so we decided to team up. We ended up going into these certain very dysfunctional areas of comedy. Well, people called us ‘dysfunctional,’ and we grabbed on to that. We’re three people who are trapped together in life, three idiots who can’t get out of their own way. That’s what the comedy comes out of, that concept of comedy that’s totally character-driven.”

The idea, an old one whose time has come again, is a little more than that. To begin with, The Poster Boys don’t do improv, even though they emerged from that world. What they do is scripted and painstakingly rehearsed. A recent four-hour rehearsal concerned itself with just a couple of small moments in their show.

This is the way the classic teams worked, spending years developing style, timing, character and that mysterious ingredient, chemistry.

Parducci says: “You hear the term ‘chemistry’ a lot when actors are working together for six weeks. A certain level of chemistry might be present. But really, after seven years, I’m personally just starting to learn the meaning of the word. It comes from all those hard times together. There’s a level of ESP going on. We know that down the road, 10 years later, we’re going to be even better, because this stuff seems to improve with each passing year.”

This “stuff,” the character-driven material that bonds the trio, that guides its form, has a simple basis.

“We’re the kind of kids,” Reiley explained, “that people knew in high school, in a sense. Paul is kind of like the leader of this inept gang that was always kind of hanging out in the back of the class. They cut classes and went down to the boiler room all day. He’s got all these sort of elaborate and wonderful plans, and stuff like that. I’m sort of like his trusted lieutenant, and Jim is like this wholly innocent guy who’s there because we told him to be there.”

Jim Giordano looked wanly at his friends: “I’m there basically because these are the only two guys who’ll hang out with me.”

Reiley added, “We’re the only ones who’ll tolerate each other in any event.”

“There you have it in a nutshell,” Parducci said. “This repetitive, dismal stupidity.”

“It’s difficult to quantify the show,” Parducci continued, “because we’re really not just three comic actors doing sketches. That’s why people are constantly comparing us to teams that are long dead. It’s not that we’re like them, but we have these three definite characters we always are. Like Laurel and Hardy, they were always those same two guys. We’re a comedy team trying to present a comedy show, and we present certain situations with us acting in them, but it’s always us as ourselves. And when things go wrong, it’s always things going wrong with ourselves.”

They know that comedy teams that only work together are now rare, but they’re committed to the format. To them, it is a specific art form, and they hope they are the forerunners for others.

“It’s difficult,” Parducci said. “You have to make this timing between the three characters look like it’s just occurring at that moment. Just from a technical level, we’re very committed to doing that extremely well, because we know the great comedy teams of the past--and it’s got to be almost a dead art--had this seamless communication. It looked like this constant conflict and chaos was going on. It was seamless.”

It seems to be working. The Poster Boys are frequently seen as hosts and doing promos on cable’s “Comedy Central.” They’ve appeared at Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre in New York. For a couple of years, they did David Steinberg-directed commercials for Barq’s Root Beer. And now under development at Hanna-Barbera is an animated program called “The Poster Babies.”

In the meantime, Parducci will still have exotic, wonderful ideas, Giordano will continue to mess things up, and Reiley will be the bemused and amused devil’s advocate who doesn’t take sides. It’s a three-ring marriage that seems to be working out.

Or, as Reiley puts it, “It’s like a macaroni and cheese dinner that took a really long time to make.”

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“Bang! I Love You,” at the Tiffany Theater, 8532 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. 8 p.m. Thursdays; 10 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays; 7:30 p.m. Sundays. Ends July 25. Tickets $22-$24; (310) 289-2999.