COVER STORY : The Big Payoff : It isn’t easy to get up onstage to do stand-up comedy. But with studio and network executives trolling clubs to find the next Jim Carrey, comics are suddenly center stage. Pretty funny, huh?

It’s a long trek, economically at least, from the comedy clubs to a hit TV series.

Ask Paul Reiser. “You started at nothing, coming to the city, then you’d work your way up to $5 a night, $20 a weekend, $50 for a gig here and there,” he recalls. “With luck, you could put that together and you’d get enough to pay the rent.”

About 15 years later, of course, rent money is the least of Reiser’s concerns. “Mad About You,” the situation comedy he co-created and stars in, ranked No. 11 overall this last season, and he also found time along the way to write a No. 1 best-selling book (“Couplehood”) and to make a recent foray into film (“Bye Bye, Love”).

Still, he says, perhaps a little disingenuously: “Certainly, no one goes into comedy for the money. You can’t make money.”

Sure you can’t. Maybe the clubs will give you only $50 or $100 for a night’s work these days, but consider:

* Jim Carrey, after a three-for-three 1994 (his films combined to gross more than $300 million, and his latest, “Batman Forever,” blew past $100 million in a mere 10 days), recently signed a $20-million deal; his salary is more than half the movie’s entire budget .

* Jerry Seinfeld, after leading his sitcom to the top of the ratings for the 1994-95 season, signed a very lucrative deal for one final season, the details of which he has elected to keep secret.

* Ellen DeGeneres, on the strength of her own hit sitcom on ABC, will receive $2 million--a sum out of reach to even many veteran film actresses--for her movie debut for Disney.

* Martin Lawrence’s stock escalated faster than the bullets he fired in the spring theatrical hit “Bad Boys”; he is now making his directorial debut with “A Thin Line Between Love and Hate.”

* This fall, 28 of the 42 series premiering on the four major networks and two mini-networks will be comedies; a third of those will star stand-ups, as did almost half of last season’s 13 top-rated shows.

“Comedians explode almost faster than anyone in our society,” says Michael Fuchs, chairman and chief executive officer of HBO, which co-sponsored a comedy arts festival in Aspen, Colo., in March to give the industry a chance to scout new talent. “This country likes to laugh at itself--it’s how we get through. When something happens, like the O.J. case, everyone wants to hear the first jokes out about it. That’s very inherent in the personality of this country.

“When [HBO] started 20 years ago, there were about seven comedy clubs,” Fuchs says. “And stand-ups were people who made their living doing stand-up and rarely had series built around them.”

Now, whether for sitcoms, talk shows or even game shows, networks can’t grab stand-up comics fast enough. The same industry folks who hit Aspen are now in Montreal, where the 13th annual Just for Laughs Comedy Festival, the world’s largest comedy festival, is running until next Sunday. Andy Nulman, CEO of the festival, lists Tim Allen, Jerry Seinfeld and Brett Butler as comics whose careers took off after Montreal appearances.

“There definitely is a feeding frenzy,” Nulman says. “I only really noticed it [recently]. . . . People were there saying, ‘We’ve signed you to this deal, drop your next show.’ They were worried that someone was going to come along and say, ‘Although you signed with this person, there’s a way to break it, we’re gonna give you more money.’ I remember backstage at one small club people climbing over one another screaming, ‘Speak to me before you make a deal!’ Business cards flying--it was almost surreal. That’s when I started thinking, ‘Things are getting a little weird.’ ”

Comedy writer and actor Albert Brooks ponders the comedy boom, which certainly could have rescued him from his early days as an opening act at rock concerts for less-than-appreciative audiences.

“I’ve heard theories,” he says. “One is that as the world gets crazier, this profession gets more needed. If we are heading toward the Apocalypse, then every place is going to be a comedy club.”

In the early days of TV, established comic performers from movies and radio--Jack Benny, George Burns, Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason--moved to the new art form, often doing little more than replicating their radio work for TV cameras. Comics like Don Rickles, Johnny Carson and Joey Bishop, uninterested in doing any acting per se, hosted variety and talk shows in the ‘60s; and in the ‘70s, Redd Foxx, Gabe Kaplan, Freddie Prinze, Billy Crystal and Robin Williams were among the few stand-ups on sitcoms.

Bill Cosby starred in one of the most popular sitcoms of the ‘80s, but he had much earlier proved his acting credentials; “Roseanne” was one of the first series of the recent wave to be built upon a stand-up’s onstage persona. After the successes of “In Living Color,” “Seinfeld” and “Home Improvement,” though, recruiting comics became among the networks’ highest priorities (although the success this past season of “Friends” has raised the stock of the ensemble comedy).

Harland Williams came to Los Angeles less than three years ago; his sitcom “Simon” premieres on the new WB network in the fall. Interest in his act began the first time he set foot on an L.A. stage.

“That first night, [comedy manager] Rick Messina saw me,” Williams says. “Afterward, he asked me if I would do the show ‘Comedy on the Road.’ It started immediately, my very first gig, and I was offered a national TV show. It’s been going ever since.”

A year ago, Williams, 32, made his first appearance on “The Late Show With David Letterman.” “After that,” he says, “all the studios expressed an interest in creating a show with me or doing something.

“They’re understanding that we’re more versatile than they gave us credit for,” addsWilliams, who also had a cameo in “Dumb and Dumber.” “Some of us are capable at serious dramatic acting, doing cartoon voices, churning butter. They’re learning to capitalize on our talents, whereas before we weren’t taken all that seriously, because of the nature of what we do.”

*

Reiser is proof--he took a circuitous route to his current success, appearing in roles that required more than quick quipping in “Diner” and “Alien,” although he says those weren’t strategic career moves.

“I don’t think many of us have it all charted out,” he says. “We have a wish list, but along the way we have to deal realistically with what our options are. I didn’t say to my agent, ‘Go get me a dramatic role.’ I was just going up for different stuff, and this was a great opportunity for me to prove that I was capable of doing something different.

“But I don’t have the anti-comedy view some people sometimes have--’Next, I need to do “Death of a Salesman.” ’ I think being able to do comedy is an equal virtue.”

Says Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada: “There’s a frenzy going among the studios and production companies. They all want the first look at all the comedians. Everyone is desperately trying to find the next Seinfeld or Tim Allen or Roseanne.

“It used to be that the talent coordinator was the person who would come to scout. Now, producers, directors, comedy development people come in. Forty percent of my audience is made up of industry people.”

The desperate hunt to secure new talent can reach absurd heights, Masada says.

“One production company invited me to look at a tape of a Chicago comic that they were planning to sign,” he recalls. “I saw the tape, and the whole thing was sweetened with canned laughter. But they didn’t notice that. They weren’t listening to the comic, they didn’t hear what he was saying, they didn’t notice he had no point of view or persona. They just were after whatever gets a big laugh.”

George Lopez, who has spent nearly a decade touring the nation’s clubs and has a development deal with Disney, also thinks comics need to be examined with more scrutiny.

“I don’t think comedians work as hard today,” he says. “They watch Comedy Central with a pen and note pad and write safe, conventional material and put together five to seven minutes. I’ve seen people get deals with eight minutes.”

Paul Provenza, who abandoned stand-up to appear this past season on “Northern Exposure,” agrees:

“It’s really frustrating, not only as a performer, but also as an audience member. That talent doesn’t get a chance to season. I had a talk show on Comedy Central, and the performers that were pushed on us, we’d see their work and they’d literally have 10 minutes and that was it. Stand-up has diminished greatly in the past decade. We need to focus in on what the art and the craft is all about and not on the quick buck.”

But Reiser isn’t as quick to judge: “If somebody’s funny and they only have eight minutes, but you put them together with a good producer-writer who finds their unique qualities, then you’ve lost nothing there. There are plenty of non-comedians who have shows--Kelsey Grammer [star of “Frasier”] didn’t have three minutes of stand-up when he got that show.

“But you do need a strong sense of yourself, however you get there. For a comic, it’s to your advantage to take time and develop--and not rush for the grand prize.”

*

Kim Fleary, vice president for comedy series development at ABC Entertainment, says that to score big, what a comic needs most is “a point of view and an infectious personality, but it varies widely. For example, seven years ago, I saw a comic, Mark Curry. Then, Mark’s stand-up had no point of view, but his personality was so infectious, and he was so accessible, he just seemed like someone who could translate to the format of half-hours easily.”

Curry has since gone on to star for ABC in “Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper.”

“A network’s input is important, but the successful shows have a voice that comes from the talent,” says Bob Crestani, executive vice president and head of television for the William Morris Agency. “ ‘Seinfeld’ is not radically different from what Seinfeld did onstage. Same with Bill Cosby and Roseanne and ‘Mad About You.’ Those sensibilities were there before the cameras were rolling.”

“It’s easier to build a sitcom around a comedy star,” says HBO’s Fuchs. “People who conceptualize [sitcoms] are human--they’re more comfortable with someone they know can make people laugh.” And yet, he adds, “these kids don’t even get to build careers as stand-ups, most of them. . . . They’ve been saying that about television forever: It eats its young.”

I ndeed, comics’ and networks’ expectations can be exasperat ingly at odds. Comics are hired because of their distinctive outlooks and perspectives, but then the networks will sometimes try to shoehorn them into premises antithetical to their nature and saddle them with writers and executive producers who don’t understand their appeal.

“The nature of TV development is that there is this tremendous ambivalence on the part of networks--they want something new and different, yet they feel most comfortable with what’s tried and true,” Reiser says. “Had ‘Seinfeld’ not had the process it had, going through NBC’s late-night division, it never would have gone. They’d have just said, ‘What is this about?’

“It’s such a long, tedious process. If you get 75-80% of what you wanted on the screen in the pilot, you’re very fortunate. In developing [“Mad About You”], they knew me, they understood what I wanted to do. . . . But we needed to make the pilot, we had to see it. To make sure that the sensibility and rhythm you envisioned works, you can’t see until you do it.”

Sometimes, it’s hard to see what the cast and crew were looking for even after they’ve done it.

There was seemingly a revolving-door policy at “Ellen” as DeGeneres’ show continued to seek its sensibility during its second season.

Margaret Cho experienced a double whammy: First came critical barbs from all sides over her ABC series “All-American Girl,” and then, after a vote of confidence in which the network first announced it would revamp her series for its second season, it was canceled outright.

“I had a lot of input in the early development of the show, but during pilot week it changed a lot from what I had in mind,” Cho says now. “It changed into something so different from what we thought we were going to get. They wanted to go for a family sitcom as opposed to a twentysomething-type show, to offset my sensibility. My sensibility is not mainstream, so they thought a family setting might help.”

For comics used to praise instead of criticism--that’s another reason the networks pick them up, after all--the first negative reviews can be devastating.

“It was totally difficult,” Cho says. “Stand-ups are the harshest critics around. They’re self-indulgent, self-obsessed people, they’re little Hitlers, they hate everything --and they love me. So to go from that to having some harsh words thrown at you is really difficult, because you’ve already survived this trial by fire with the other stand-ups and you think this should be a cinch. And it isn’t.”

Her advice to comics: “Be really stubborn. Know as much as you can about what you want, because you’ll be pulled this way and that. . . . Stick to your guns, even though it’s really difficult.”

Provenza concurs: “Some writers have positions in the industry which give them certain attitudes about what they do. Comics should wait until they get powerful enough to have some control over things; it’s their reputation that rises and falls. Writers will go on to the next project, but the performer is saddled with the flop of a show. And when I’m on a plane crashing into a mountain, I’d rather be the guy crashing the plane than one of the guys sitting there and not able to do anything about it.”

On the other hand, Montreal Festival organizer Nulman says: “If it ain’t humiliating, take it, because it could lead to something else. Take a look at Tom Hanks--’Bosom Buddies’ and some of those crummy movies he was in. But he was working, he was out there. What’s too soon? ‘All-American Girl’ was no better or no worse than the majority of the sitcoms out there; it just didn’t get an audience. But somebody’s going to see it and say, ‘Margaret Cho’s got balls, she’s brash, I need her in this new movie.’ Otherwise, what’s she gonna do? Fifteen more ‘Evening at the Improvs’?”

B ut Cho’s experience does illus trate the importance of matching a performer with sympathetic writers and producers.

“I always view putting together a star and a show runner [executive producer] as a marriage,” says Crestani of William Morris. “You don’t marry the first woman you meet. If you’re successful, you’ll probably spend a minimum of seven years with these people. So from a performer’s standpoint, listen to how they perceive you, your persona. From the show runner’s standpoint, you have to find someone whose act you can translate into 22 minutes for 100 episodes and keep it entertaining and fresh.”

Says Fleary of ABC Entertainment: “That journey is different every single time. It’s a tentative, elusive thing to find someone who can capture a performer’s voice. It’s very tricky.”

And then there are those even sadder cases who get tantalizingly close--they land a development deal from a network or production company but then are never heard from again.

“The danger comes when the comedian isn’t ready but he thinks he is because they put him on a contract,” says the Laugh Factory’s Masada. “He thinks he knows it all, and instead of developing his comedy, he’s relaxing, living in a dream that they’re going to make him a star. I remember one guy, he got put on contract, it wasn’t even for very much money, but he came into the club the next day with a bodyguard. His material was not even developed yet. He got a bodyguard, a $40,000 car, moved into an expensive place, and his contract was only for $30,000, $40,000. At the end of the year, he had to give the car back.”

Ultimately, comedy isn’t the quick path to fame that many perceive it to be. Patience and a work ethic are the keys to success.

“I’ve spent eight, nine years on the road, building a base, a following,” says comedian Lopez. “I have an eclectic group for an audience. I’m a harder sell because I’m a Mexican American. Latino comics get deals, but the shows always revolve around being a Latino. So you have to be a Mexican policeman, be a Mexican crook. I just want to be a human.

“It’s like boxing: If you’re not up at 4 a.m. doing the roadwork, when you get in the ring, it ain’t gonna happen. So I’m always working on my material when I’m on the road. I always show respect for the stage--I dress up in a suit, even if it’s a Wednesday night in Dayton, Ohio. I’m a comedy throwback: I have no Plan B, so I’ve got to make this work.”