No Celebs, No Scouts, No Problem

On a recent Saturday night at about 8:30, in the back room of a small coffee shop off Hollywood Boulevard and Las Palmas called Killer Burger No. 1, three people sat in front of a TV set watching a History Channel documentary on the Nuremberg trials.

This might not sound odd, but Saturday night is comedy night at Killer Burger, and none of the three men watching the Nuremberg trials looked as if they would start telling jokes any time soon.

Just then, in walked Jeremy Kramer. Kramer is a 45-year-old comedian with a Harpo Marx shock of gray/white hair and a fedora that sits perched atop his head like a faithful parrot. Back in the late 1970s, Kramer and Robin Williams were close comedian buddies in San Francisco, doing zany things on stage together at places like the Holy City Zoo and the Other Cafe. Some 20 years later, Williams is getting millions of dollars to star in things like “Patch Adams,” about a doctor who heals with shtick, and Kramer is emceeing a comedy show Saturday nights at 8:30 at Killer Burger, which is run by a man called Biker Jerry, who was recently named “the fourth least powerful man in Hollywood” by the weekly New Times.

And yet, Killer Burger may be the last best place to see stand-up in Los Angeles, with Kramer the show’s out-there muse. Whether he’s doing a salute to Panorama City or introducing a comic in the voice of a Nazi, Kramer has an Andy Kaufman-esque way of forcing an audience to catch up to his bent persona.

“This is the part of the show when I forget where I am,” he confessed on stage one night. You believed him.

The 6-month-old show Kramer hosts is called “Frank’s Chophouse” (named for show co-founder and regular Frank Conniff), and it’s about as un-industry as you can get, held in a hole-in-the-wall room on a seedy stretch of Hollywood Boulevard where you can’t just leave your Range Rover with the valet out front.

Indeed, everything about the show seems designed to scare away the talent executives who prowl L.A.’s laugh factories, and so far it’s worked--about zero spectators for every two comics waiting to do their 10 or 15 minutes.

“Some people are uncomfortable in [this] part of town,” Conniff says. “To that I say, ‘Feel free to see Tom Dreesen up at the Comedy Store.’ ”

Still, even Conniff admits that the show is so grass-roots that he’s somewhat ashamed to tell his comedian friends about it.

“Sometimes the shows are so weird, comedians who I consider more established I won’t ask [to perform] because I think it’s beneath them to come.”

On the other hand, how many comedy shows can claim their own keyboardist and a staff cartoonist (Doug Lawrence, holding up decorative applause signs)? True to the so-bad-it’s-funny tone the shows often assume, the walls are covered in sequels of bad comedies that never should have been made (“Another Stakeout,” “Beverly Hills Cop 3,” “Another 48 HRS”).

After five years as a writer and performer on the cult TV hit “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” Conniff is now a co-producer on ABC’s “Sabrina the Teenage Witch.” At the “Chophouse,” he likes to sing made-up songs like “Michael Landon’s Legacy of Love” (“It’s a legacy that’s wondrous and wholesome/It’s a legacy that involves Merlin Olsen”).

“The best shows are the ones where unexpected people end up performing,” he says, “people who wander in off the street.”

Like Japanese tourists, says comic Kathleen Roll, another show regular and co-founder. Roll counts herself as one of those comics who doesn’t quite fit into either the Improv-Laugh Factory-Comedy Store circuit or the power cliques who perform regularly at the alternative nightspots LunaPark and Cafe Largo.

Mostly, though, the show belongs to Kramer and his wandering psyche.

Over lunch, Kramer talks about his high school years in Santa Barbara (he was the only student body president ever to face impeachment, he claims), his San Francisco days (when the Holy City Zoo closed its doors, Kramer hosted a marathon 48 hours of continuous comedy) and life on the margins of comedy in L.A. (he does the occasional voice-over work and film and TV parts, in addition to writing).

“Creative people need a place to come and work together,” he says of the “Chophouse” show. “I feel more at home in that environment than I would at the Improv.”

Kramer says he hasn’t spoken to Robin Williams in years. Williams, for his part, expressed surprise during a phone interview recently that Kramer was doing live comedy in the heart of Hollywood.

“Jeremy Kramer, wow!” he said. “You’ve found the Dead Sea Scrolls of comedy.”

* “Frank’s Chophouse” at Killer Burger, 6679 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. No cover. (323) 462-6110.