Unlikely Laugh Factories

On the coffeehouse-bookstore-restaurant circuit, comedians tell jokes over the drone of espresso machines and ringing cash registers. They compete for your attention while pizza chefs toss dough into the air and while shoppers browse for CDs.

Comedian Paul Alexander even does a bit where he’s beaten to his punch line by a restaurant hostess calling out, “Smith, party of two, your table is ready, Smith party of two.”

But hey, nobody’s complaining.

For the inexperienced comic, a set at Berri’s Pizza Cafe in West Hollywood or Lulu’s Beehive coffeehouse in the Valley is better than waiting eight hours to get seven minutes onstage at the Improv or Laugh Factory.

At the same time, veteran club performers such as Rick Overton and Andy Kindler are attracted to the scene because, in the words of comedian Henriette Mantel, “the audiences are smart and they’re not drunk.”

“It’s just looser,” says Mantel, who played the housekeeper Alice in both “Brady Bunch” movies and performs regularly at the Borders Books in Santa Monica and West Hollywood. “People haven’t paid to get in, they don’t have any expectations. It’s not like the Improv, where there’s someone in the back expecting a laugh every five seconds.”

In the early 1990s, the same growing frustrations about the limitations of mainstream clubs gave rise to L.A.’s so-called “alternative comedy” movement, a more experimental approach to stand-up led by then-unknown performers such as Janeane Garofalo and Kathy Griffin. Today, this alternative scene is headquartered at the HBO Workspace in Hollywood and at two popular shows, Uncabaret at LunaPark on Sunday nights and Largo on Monday nights.

But many comics say that even these shows have become cliquish and hipper-than-thou, while the mainstream clubs are still colonized during the week by TV industry showcases.

And so comics have turned to places like the Book Grinders in Van Nuys and the Church in Ocean Park in Santa Monica, where stained-glass windows and pews provide a convenient setting for the comic praying for a laugh.

The audiences, too, diverge from the first-date crowd that fills your average club. The regulars at the Book Grinders range from an 81-year-old accountant named Harry Edelstein to 13-year-old Andrew Lawson, whose mom lets him come to the show under the condition that he leave by 9.

As comic Jeff Garlin says: “In L.A. you have to be a huge star to go up in a club more than three or four times a week, with the constant showcases and just the abundance of comics out here.”

Garlin, who came face to face with this reality when he was preparing for a recent appearance on CBS’ “The Late Show With David Letterman,” has gotten time at the Improv and the Laugh Factory but found stage time much easier to come by in New York.

“In New York, I walked in unannounced in four or five clubs on the same night, and they said, ‘So when do you want to go on?’ ”

But if the comedy club scene isn’t as happening here as in New York, Los Angeles at least deserves marks for ingenuity. The shows can come and go according to the whims of restaurant and bar owners, but right now there’s comedy in bookstores, coffeehouses and restaurants.

And then there are the group shows, including “Margot’s Bush,” a sketch comedy show at Pedro’s Grill in West Hollywood, “That Jeff Garlin Thing” at Bang Studio in West Hollywood, and “Free Speech,” a socio-politically themed kibitzing fest held Thursday nights at 9:30 at the Church in Ocean Park.

At most of these places, the comedy is free. No two-drink minimum, no “please tip your waitresses” exhortations from the comics. Often, the adage “You get what you pay for” holds true--these venues are nothing if not a place for relatively inexperienced comics to get work, and on a given night you’re liable to encounter people who shouldn’t quit their day jobs. Still worse, some feel the relaxed atmosphere means they can saunter onstage with a pad of paper and some idle thoughts and just riff for 10 minutes.

But at their best, coffeehouses and bookstores offer a place to see talented young performers (such as Patton Oswalt, Paul F. Thompkins and Karen Kilgariff) finding their voice and established veterans working out new material, staying fresh amid sitcom stints and movie work. That’s why comics like former “Saturday Night Live” cast members Nora Dunn, Sarah Silverman and Laura Kightlinger play the circuit, along with Margaret Cho, Rick Overton, Bob Odenkirk and David Cross (of HBO’s “Mr. Show”), Andy Kindler, Tom Kenny and Cathy Ladman.

“The venue really affects the way people watch any presentation,” Odenkirk says. “You have to compromise a little too much in the mainstream clubs. You’re really expected by the audience to deliver quickly, and deliver a lot. That doesn’t lend itself to delivering anything of depth. And because I do so many things, I don’t have time to focus on my stand-up act, and I’m sloppy. These venues allow you to be a little bit sloppy.”

“I have a rule of thumb,” adds Overton, on why he likes performing at “All Things Comedic,” the Sunday night Borders show where comics are paid with a $20 or $30 gift certificate. “Lots of hats--dumb audience. Lots of glasses--smart audience. Borders has lots of glasses. It’s an oasis of ‘hmm’ in a desert of ‘huh?’ ”

Begun by comic Jackie Wollner two years ago, “All Things Comedic” is held on a postage-stamp-sized stage on the third-floor music section at Borders; you half-expect ehe comedian to step aside while a customer checks out the “Titanic” soundtrack. But the show works, Wollner says, for the very fact that it’s held in a place where bookworms--not the type to venture out to a comedy club--comprise a large part of the audience.

“[The comics] are grateful for an audience they don’t have to pander to,” she says.

Like many a fledgling L.A. performer, Wollner was frustrated with the club scene--so many showcases, so little stage time--and took matters into her own hands by starting her own show.

So did Dorothea Coelho, co-founder of “Velveeta Underground,” now at Berri’s Pizza Cafe; Robin Roberts, who produces “Comedy by the Book” at the Book Grinders; and Mimi Gonzalez, who puts on the “Women With Balls” show at Little Frida’s. It’s no small coincidence that all four are women; while comics like Roseanne and Ellen DeGeneres are part of the stand-up elite, women still find it’s a boys’ world out in the clubs.

“The only way I was going to get stage time was to start my own room,” says Gonzalez, whose show consists exclusively of female comics, some lesbian and not afraid to banter about it.

“I was used to watching 13 comics get up [on stage], and only one of them was a woman,” she says. “You can’t afford to grow in the mainstream clubs. You have to be pretty well-sprouted and on your way before a mainstream club will invest in you.”

“Free Speech,” held at a Unitarian church in Santa Monica, can border on theater of the absurd. Show producer Bill Bronner picks a different topic each week, then assembles 10 or 12 comics, giving each a brief solo set before bringing them all on stage in a free-for-all discussion that plays like ABC’s “Politically Incorrect” without a stage manager. Recent themes have included “What’s Wrong With Lawyers?” and “I’ve Made Some Mistakes.”

Jeff Garlin, meanwhile, has started up his show, “That Jeff Garlin Thing,” again on Thursday nights at 8 at Bang Studio in West Hollywood. Garlin emcees, two comics perform, and then all three come onstage at the end for what Garlin calls “the combo platter,” a kind of tag-team improvisational exercise where the comedians trade off of one another’s thoughts.

It doesn’t always work, but then again, polish doesn’t necessarily equal laughs. If stand-up comedy hit critical mass by the end of the 1980s, with cable TV shows killing off a lot of Improvs and Comedy Zones, it also gave the art form a chance to reinvent itself--to clear its head of all those Chicken McNugget jokes and give people a compelling reason to seek out laughter again.

“A lot of people don’t even know if they like comedy anymore,” says Steve Neal, who produces the show at Lulu’s Beehive coffeehouse. “These people who go to coffeehouses with their laptops, to them comedy lost its way in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. They don’t want to hear, ‘You might be a redneck if. . . .’ They want insight.”

They are people like Patrick Weakland, 31, who works in the publications department at the new Getty Center. Weakland, who took in “Velveeta Underground” at Berri’s Pizza on a recent Wednesday, had a succinct answer when asked why he would go to a pizza place for laughs.

“There’s not a five-drink minimum,” he said. “You can just go there and hang out.”