Stand-Up Guy

It’s a languid fall afternoon, and Jamie Masada is doing what he is best at--parting the waters to lead a struggling comedian to the promised land. Try to imagine Michael Eisner agonizing over the fate of every entertainer yearning to join the Disney family and you begin to understand that Masada, owner of the Laugh Factory on Sunset Boulevard, is an Industry aberration.

For this meeting--like many others Masada has orchestrated for his flock of comics--the 38-year-old impresario is working his magic with this season’s sitcom Wunderkinds: producers David Janollari and Robert Greenblatt, creators of “The Hughleys” on ABC and “Maggie Winters” and “To Have & to Hold” on CBS. The topic is Aisha Tyler, a statuesque stand-up comic who first appeared on Masada’s stage a year and a half ago, when she was still green and working days at an ad agency. For six months, Masada says, he became her “third eye”: meeting with her two, three times a week, massaging punch lines, correcting stage posture, leading Tyler to that spot where a comic’s life and stage act fold together seamlessly, hilariously. Next fall, if things go well, Janollari and Greenblatt will produce an NBC sitcom, “Soulmates,” featuring Tyler as the star.

“How did the meeting at NBC go yesterday?” Masada asks. “We had a great meeting,” says Janollari. “A great meeting,” Greenblatt repeats. “Aisha had the network people cracking up. We just pitched her story, basically her life story. She’s black, her husband’s white. But not that kind of spin. You know, not, ‘How can it ever work!’ Not, ‘What food are we going to eat tonight!’ ” “Right, not that,” adds Janollari. “It’s not about she’s one way and he’s the other. Basically, they’re idealists on the verge of getting engaged. Of course, we will have some issues.”

A year working with the third eye has paid off for Tyler, as well as for Masada, who doubles as her manager. Her looming trip from club stage to sound stage underscores the power of L.A.’s handful of comedy club owners: Masada, Budd Friedman, who owns the Improv, and Mitzi Shore at the Comedy Store, are gatekeepers to the comic talent pool. With the success and syndication profits that a Jerry Seinfeld or Jim Carrey or Tim Allen or Roseanne Barr can bring to a network, every producer and network VP wants through that gate, wants to know the judgments of the gatekeepers.

But for Masada, something else is at stake here. “Television and film severely lack African American women comics,” he says. “Besides Whoopi Goldberg and Marsha Warfield, they’re just not there. And I have an obligation as a club owner to build up that part of the Industry that is lacking, to find the next Whoopi Goldberg.” It’s a quest now shared by the networks, whose appetite for ethnic humor is growing.

“Jamie has explored niches and broadened them, and people respect him for that,” says Jordan Levin, senior vice president of programming at the WB television network. “He’s always been ahead of the curve on ethnic comedy, and right now the networks are just starting to play catch-up with him.”

After the meeting with janollari and greenblatt, masada heads over to William Morris, where he is soon engaged in one of the stranger Hollywood negotiations that week: Masada and agent John Sher trying to get the producers of “The Real World” to create a college scholarship fund for 36 inner-city teenagers, stand-up hopefuls who will pass through Masada’s comedy camp. It’s Masada in the role he has adopted since opening the Laugh Factory 19 years ago. “What makes Jamie the best and most generous comedy club owner in the country,” says Charles Joffe, Woody Allen’s manager for 40 years, “is that he simply cares about the comics who work for him. It’s never about himself. He cares for the performer.”

“I think the Industry is structured to weed people like Jamie out,” says Barry Katz, the owner of a management company. “Everyone in Hollywood feels under pressure to care about only one thing--themselves. But Jamie has lent comics thousands and thousands of dollars over the years, and when I ask, ‘When are you going to get some of that money back?’, he says, ‘Ah, buddy, when he has it, he’ll have it.’ ”

Certainly Los Angeles comics need someone like Masada. “The comedy club scene is an Industry aberration,” says Rick Messina, who manages both Drew Carey and Tim Allen. “It’s run by eccentric personalities, and it puts the comic last.” And there is an increasing desperation in the local comedy circuit. Network VPs, studio scouts and potential managers constantly rotate through the three major clubs, looking for new talent. Yet for every comic lucky enough to be showcased onstage, another 200 are left in the wings. Those stages mean everything to the unknown comedian: a writing job, a sitcom, a small slice of the billion-dollar syndication pie. The competition to get “hired”--to get stage time--is so tough that many comics will work unpaid, without any guaranteed future and little chance of recognition.

“Comedians have nothing,” Masada says. “We the club owners make money off of them, yet we don’t give it back. But because we make money off of them, we are obligated to their welfare. Obligated. Without them, we’re just a bunch of bar owners serving drinks.”

In one of the coldest and most selfish of businesses--entertainment--he has built up a community from the interior of a once-run-down Chinese restaurant. There are the annual Thanksgiving dinners he throws for 2,000 people, many of whom are homeless; the Christmas presents he gives to almost anyone who plays his stage; and his continuing attempt to piece together a health insurance fund for uninsured comics, all part of his nonprofit organization, the Laugh Factory Academy of Comedy. Most important, there are his weekly open-mike nights, where Masada sits down individually with 25 unknown comics and works over their material--the wedding night jokes, mother-in-law jokes, flat chest jokes, breast implant jokes, breast-feeding jokes, recovering Catholic jokes and Tickle Me Elmo jokes.

“Are you writing every day?” he asks each hopeful. “How much stage time did you get this week?” Comedian Bob Marley says, “Those nights are the only organized way that I know of in Hollywood for a comedian to make any breaks. Jamie’s the only guy in town with a club who will actually sit and watch you, and then tell you what direction he believes you should go.”

In the late ‘80s, Masada began peering into the corners of comedy left unexplored by other clubs. The Laugh Factory devoted nights to women comics, and later, another weekly evening to Latino comics--a new idea then, and still the Laugh Factory’s most popular night. “He was the guy who proved there was a business there, that minority comedy doesn’t just play as a niche,” Levin says. Masada says, “I think the networks simply realized that African Americans and Latinos spend money on soda and cars like everyone else.”

In addition to operating the club, Masada is now consulting for two TV networks, producing movies (“Rocket Man” was his first), running his own management firm, putting together a record label, working with Microsoft to establish an on-line comedy show and, along with producer David Saltzman and music impresario Quincy Jones, opening a series of nationwide, theme-based comedy clubs, the first of which they hope will be at Universal Studio’s CityWalk.”It’s just mind-boggling the way his brain works,” says one of Masada’s assistants. “Most of the time I’m like, ‘Where the hell are we at?’ ”

An immigrant from Iran, Masada has also built his life in America on charitable acts--such as the evenings, which average two a month, when he gives over his club to the American Cancer Society or Project Angel Food or whomever for fund-raising events.

There are friends who believe this altruism rests on old insecurities. “Jamie is a guy whose whole operation revolves around one thing,” Katz says. “Karma. He’s always trying to figure out ways to avoid spending eternity in hell, sharing a bagel with Hitler.”

When masada was young, living with his family in Iran, his father, an entertainer and aspiring cantor, took him along on jobs. They worked weddings and one bar mitzvah together, Jamie’s father on accordion, the son telling jokes to polite laughter. There was even a little dance Jamie did--a boy’s jig, a jumble of untrained muscles accompanied by accordion notes. An American--from Hollywood--showed up at one celebration. Everyone said he was a producer. Jamie told his jokes. The producer said to Jamie’s father, “You should send him to America. He could be a big star there. Take my card.”

Jamie’s father had heard of Hollywood, and he knew what its money could do for the family of a poor cantor. He made a decision, and then borrowed money from relatives, passing out a lot of promises. He was not a big man, but he was impressive, a strong-minded father who told Jamie, “Hopefully you will go to America. And when you make it, you can help the family.” Then one fall day in 1974, his mother baked Jamie a pound cake--a gift to the Hollywood producer who had yet to be informed that a 14-year-old Farsi-speaking boy was being sent his way. With the cake, $850, and the producer’s card in hand, Jamie stepped onto an international flight. In Customs, the pound cake was cut up by agents looking for drugs. Outside LAX, Jamie showed a cabdriver the business card and was taken to an apartment on the Sunset Strip. The cabdriver took $30, and the “producer,” upon opening his door and finding a child entrusted to his care, took the rest and quickly abandoned his apartment.

Masada was adopted, so to speak, by the apartment manager, who gave him empty apartments to clean, a sandwich every day and a couch to sleep on inside a garage. Jamie cried himself to sleep every night. But when he made $40, he sent $35 home, and he never again returned to live in Iran, seeing his future instead in this strange new country. The teenage immigrant started hanging out with comics on the Strip in the late ‘70s. He even got some stage time--telling jokes in his new, halting English. He had one that ends, “And she says, ‘I’d rather have a piano,’ ” which no one laughed at. An up-and-coming comic named David Letterman, who, with an unknown named Jay Leno, was writing jokes for Jimmy Walker to pay the rent, told Masada to substitute “organ” for “piano,” and he got laughs. Comics took the teenager in like that, letting him tag along to Ben Frank’s at 2 in the morning, becoming his second family.

When comics struck in 1979 over club pay, Masada was on the picket line. One night a comedian dove off the West Hollywood Hyatt roof. For Masada, it was like a death in the family. A few weeks later he was walking along the Strip when he saw a “For Lease” sign on a storefront. He imagined a club where comics would feel at home, and after borrowing $10,000 from a new friend--producer Neal Israel--he leased the building and opened the Laugh Factory. He was 17 years old.

A month went by with no more than two or three people showing up at a time to watch. Slowly, however, the comics started to drop in--first John Belushi, then Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, and later Seinfeld and Carrey. Masada took advice from everyone. “Shake the customer’s hand when he comes in and say ‘Hi,’ ” someone told him, and he did. Rick Messina says, “Jamie was the only one who ever treated me with respect back then. I wasn’t anyone special, but if I said he should put a guy on, he did.”

“Jamie was a comer back then,” says Levin, “and like so many of us that are now successful in our 30s, he was running up that hill. My strongest relationship with a club owner now is with Jamie, and I think that’s true with most other young agents. It’s a generational shift, where the Improv and the Comedy Store that once dominated this town have been overtaken by the Laugh Factory.”

“Walk separately into the three clubs on any night,” says Katz, “and you’ll realize the place you want to go back to is the Laugh Factory--because there’s a warmth and a softness there that’s intangible but that radiates from Jamie.” That’s probably the highest compliment for Masada, that inside his club he has created the feeling of home and shelter for his second family. The adopted son has risen to patriarch. A Freudian would say that, in this way, Masada finally usurped his father, the man Masada still felt like a boy around even into adulthood.

“When you think about that family allowing their child off into a world they knew nothing about,” says Christine Gustin, his former personal assistant, “they had to believe in the charity of strangers.” If you believe in Katz’s theory of karma being the centerpiece of Masada’s operation, then the Laugh Factory has become the ongoing payment of an old family debt.

On a Saturday morning not long ago, 15 teenagers from neighborhoods like Compton and East L.A. draped themselves across the Laugh Factory’s vinyl chairs, waiting for stage time. Each was a member of Masada’s Comedy Camp, his program that pulls would-be comics from foster homes or single-parent families, lets them work with comedians like Richard Pryor and Paul Mooney, and then ends with their “graduation”--stand-up on a Tuesday night. Masada is thinking about tough neighborhoods and low expectations and role models when he runs the camp, but he also believes he is taking on corporate philanthropy in L.A. “He wants to see those kids become successes, but what Jamie really wants to see is Disney and Paramount and Virgin following him, providing the same internships for inner-city kids that he’s doing,” Gustin says.

Onstage, the kids adapt to the microphone like Def Jam alumni. Their jokes revolve around after-school lives--riding the bus with their moms, walking the mall with their moms, watching TV with their moms. Like little Woodys, an inner comic monologue of neuroses and depression pours from some, while others channel Chris Rock, the most instantly recognizable public figure for these kids.

Masada is in the audience, dwarfed by leggy girls named Tiffany and Shawna, shouting out warnings. “Mike, mike, mike,” he yells whenever a student holds the microphone in a low-slung, sidewalk-slouch Slurpee grip. “I really like your work,” comic Paul Mooney, who is visiting today, tells a 14-year-old named Aaron. “You know, you work a lot like Jack Benny.” “Who’s he?” asks everyone in the room. “Your Show of Shows” has disappeared down history’s drainpipe, replaced in TV memory by sitcoms like “Martin,” “Moesha,” “Living Single” and “The Parent Hood.”

If you are a kid growing up in Compton, trying to think up a way out of your neighborhood, stand-up comedy looks better every fall season that rolls around. In part, this is due to Masada. The growing phenomenon also means, however, that what Masada sees as proactive intervention in the lives of disenfranchised kids, an entertainment lawyer might view as the culling of a very important talent pool to be tapped in a few years.

As the kids see it, they are living out the lives of America’s new superheroes. They may still look up to Michael Jordan, but what are the odds of landing in the Bulls’ starting lineup? There are 13 Wayans brothers, and they’re all in the business. Still, the NBA example holds. “I’m sure a lot of these kids look at comedy the way others have always looked to basketball,” says Masada. “I have kids that come right out and tell me they’re doing stand-up because they want to buy their daddy a Mercedes-Benz.”

On that early Saturday morning inside the Laugh Factory, with graduation still weeks away, an observer can’t help noticing how distant the promised life seems, and how painful the immediate one is. Masada, whose first jokes made fun of his inability to assimilate in a new culture, sits with his students--a magnet of shared experience they draw around and communicate through. “These kids never had the chance to be just kids,” he says, and he could be talking about himself. As with everything else in his life, Masada uses comedy as a bridge to his teenagers. But comedy is also often based on unfair differences, and when an African American girl launches into a joke about Mexican gangs, and the black kids in the audience break into guffaws and hand slaps, there is a tangible shift on the left side of the room, where the lighter-skinned kids grow very quiet and still, uncomfortable in the role of this moment’s minority.

When “graduation” finally arrives for the class, Paul Rodriguez, the night’s host, opens the evening saying, “These are children that come from poverty-stricken homes and parents that might have been on drugs.” The line makes some mothers in the audience look pained, but it is a perfect-pitch narrative for the dozen or so white agents sitting in back booths, wearing expensive suits and the languid expression of mild interest in almost everything. These are gatekeepers to another, storied life.

When i last saw masada he was pretty down. He had just received word that his opening comic for the evening had lapsed into a coma.

The comedian, a lawyer, is a terminal cancer patient who had worked with Masada and the Make-a-Wish Foundation to act on a lifelong desire to do stand-up. That evening, Masada had two glasses of wine at dinner, something he rarely does. At 8 o’ clock, the dying man’s brother walked on the Laugh Factory’s stage, thanked everyone for showing up, and then launched into one of his brother’s jokes, something he had promised bedside.

“My brother always had a terrible stutter, and to put himself through law school, he went door to door selling Bibles. When someone opened the door, he’d say, ‘H-h-hello. M-my name is Pete. I’m selling B-bibles. Would you like to b-b-buy one from m-me, or would you like me t-t-to read it t-to you?’ ” Masada, who was sitting in the back of the room, stood up and walked slowly behind the club’s rows of seats, clapping. And the audience broke into applause after the first joke of the night.

Dave Gardetta’s last article for the magazine was a diary of his first year teaching at Eagle Rock High School.