So This Teacher Goes Into a Club . . .

Jeff Jena was 31 years old and teaching at one of the most prestigious prep schools in the country when he decided to give it all up for show business.

At least for a year.

Jena was a teacher at Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., and had spent his off-hours during the last four years writing and performing comedy.

“I’d always wanted to be a comedian. Some of my best memories of being a kid are sitting on the sofa, right next to my dad, watching Jackie Gleason and the comics on ‘Ed Sullivan,’ ” said Jena, now a 44-year-old Tustin resident.

“My dad loved comedy and he had a great sense of humor. He had all the comedy albums. We would watch a comedian on television and I would ask him, ‘What does this guy do for a living?’ And my dad would say, ‘That’s what he does; he tells people jokes.’ And I said, ‘You’re kidding!’ I was amazed. When you grow up in a small town in the Midwest, it’s not one of the options they generally present on career day.”

Jena chose the more practical and predictable path of a teaching career, waiting until he was 27 before he tried stand-up comedy. It was a low point in his life. He was a junior high school teacher in Houston and recently separated from his first wife when he saw a small newspaper ad for a comedy workshop. He enrolled, and before long worked up the nerve to try his five-minute act on amateur night at a local club called the Comedy Annex.

“I did a little song parody I called ‘The Jimmy Carter Reggae,’ which was very, very bad. And I did some really, really mean-spirited jokes about my wife. I was just no good.”

But he got one big laugh from a joke about how employees at a Texas nightclub hosed down the parking lot to make it muddy, “so guys could get mud on their pickups.

“It was kind of a local joke and it got a huge laugh. It was the only thing I did that night that got a laugh, but it was enough to keep me going. I kept writing and I’d go to clubs on ‘open-mike’ night. By 1983, I was actually starting to make a little bit of money doing clubs.”

But Jena knew how ruthlessly tough it was to consistently make an audience laugh. He was fully prepared to fail as a full-time comedian and return to the classroom.

“I decided I would live that life for a year and then probably go back to teaching, just so I could say: ‘For one year, I did this.’ So at least I wouldn’t wake up someday and be 50, standing in front of a class of junior high kids and wondering what could have happened.

“I never went back to teaching. It’s not like I was making a killing, but I made enough money and enough things happened to convince me that maybe I could do this forever. Maybe.”

*

Jena has spent the last 14 years becoming a regular at comedy clubs throughout the United States with regular appearances on radio and television. He does not recommend the profession to the faint of heart.

“Audiences sense two things: insincerity and fear. If you’re afraid, they will eat you for breakfast. Your opening line is all about confidence. If you walk on the stage and just say, ‘Hello,’ with the attitude of, ‘I’m in charge now,’ that can be a great opening.”

From that point on, Jena works hard to convince audience members that he’s one of them.

“The idea is not that I’m up here trying to make you laugh--that’s the wrong attitude for a comic to have. I just happen to be up here on stage talking right now, but I am one of you. It’s us against them.”

Jena, a regular at the Improv in Irvine, says he enjoys the more politically conservative audiences in Orange County. He’s a Libertarian.

“Orange County audiences tend to be a little more affluent and a little more well-educated. You can work at the higher end of your humor. They also tend to be a little more Republican. And I’ve found that conservative people, generally speaking, have a better sense of humor about their politics than liberal people.

“You can take a conservative audience and make fun of Newt Gingrich, and if you’re funny and not just slamming him, they will laugh. But if you get in front of a really liberal group of people and you start making fun of feminism, or what I call ‘Euro-environmental weenies,’ they will not laugh. No matter how funny it is, they will say: ‘Hey man, that ain’t funny. That’s the cause, man.’ ”

He has yet to appear on “The Tonight Show” or “Late Night With David Letterman,” but Jena says he can actually earn a “comfortable” living by being funny, just like the comedians he used to watch on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

But the real reward is laughter, Jena said, not money.

“The guy who makes $15 an hour driving a truck, who takes 45 minutes of his life and gives it to me in the form of a $10 bill to make him laugh, to me that is greater praise than some television producer giving me a sitcom.

“Not that I would turn it down. If they bring back ‘B.J. and the Bear’ and need somebody to play the part of the monkey--hey! I’m there.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Profile: Jeff Jena

Age: 44

Hometown: Middletown, Ohio

Residence: Tustin

Family: Wife, Carrie

Education: Bachelor’s degree in education, Miami University (Oxford, Ohio)

Background: Taught in Australia, Italy and the U.S., 1975-83; began writing and performing comedy part-time in 1979; left teaching for full-time comedy career in 1983; has appeared on more than 50 television shows; television acting roles on shows including “The Jenny McCarthy Show,” “Murder, She Wrote” and “Hunter”; featured each month on “Five O’Clock Funnies” on radio station KLOS-FM; occasional radio co-host with Mr. KABC; creator of one-man show (“Grounded Forever”) inspired by his teaching career.

That first performance: “I was horrible. I got one good laugh out of the whole five minutes I was on. But the fact that I actually got a laugh convinced me that I had something.”

Source: Jeff Jena; Researched by RUSS LOAR / For The Times