Showcase Hell

A recent Thursday night audience at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood was about to get a special treat. Rodney Dangerfield had arrived at the club, and the legendary comedian, showing his age, was shuffling to the stage for an impromptu set.

The surprised crowd cheered wildly, but upstairs, in a lounge that doubles as a kind of peanut gallery, Dangerfield’s appearance was hardly good news. The lounge is where “the industry” hangs out--assorted casting agents, talent managers and television development executives--and they had come to see a dozen comics audition, or “showcase,” for a coveted slot in the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, held in Aspen, Colo., in March.

Twelve comics on one bill makes for a long night, and now Dangerfield promised to make the evening even longer. If that sounds jaded, you need to understand what showcases mean in the world of stand-up comedy.

Held practically every weeknight around town, from cattle calls of 20 comics at the Improv or Laugh Factory to one-person shows at smaller venues like the HBO Workspace in Hollywood, showcases feed a mutual need. The TV industry needs comedians for late-night talk shows and situation comedies (never more than now, with pilot season around the corner), and the comedians need TV to pay the bills, unless they’re content being on the road 40 or 50 weeks a year.

No comic should come to L.A. hoping to make a living in the clubs: Space is limited, and the major venues are usually given over to showcases, which pay a pittance. But ask a given performer if he’d rather headline in Des Moines, Iowa, or throw himself to the TV gods in L.A., he’ll probably choose the gods, cruel or random as they may be.

“People don’t come here to become comedians. They come here to stop being comedians,” says Jeffrey Ross, a New York comic whose deal with Disney brought him west. “Right now, no one expects anything of me. If I were Ted Danson, they’d expect something.”

The reason is simple: TV is where the money is. Comedy clubs boomed in the late 1980s, then dropped off a cliff, the result of a saturated market and a rise in cable comedy hours.

The bigger names can still do well on the road, the Rita Rudners and Jeff Foxworthys, but the club circuit isn’t terribly fertile anymore. Sitcoms, meanwhile, including one starring a former club comic named Jerry Seinfeld, have proved to be the TV industry’s most lucrative programming option. Which is why young comics will knock each other over to get into the Aspen festival and the Montreal Comedy Festival in July, where the audience is well-populated with industry people looking to sign promising talent.

But amid the gold rush for deals, say many, few stop to consider that someone like Seinfeld came to television after more than a decade on the road, honing his act.

“This is a very deal-driven business, which is why you see so many 25-year-old comics getting signed,” says David Tochterman, vice president of creative affairs at the Carsey-Werner Co. and the executive producer of “Grace Under Fire.” Back in 1992, Tochterman, searching for a comic who could play a single mother, found Brett Butler at a showcase in New York.

Unfortunately, the process isn’t always that simple.

“I always say this is like kissing frogs,” Tochterman says. “You’ve gotta kiss a lot of frogs, because you don’t know which one is a prince.”

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On yet another weeknight at the Laugh Factory, 20 comics are doing five minutes each for representatives from two late-night talk shows, “The Keenen Ivory Wayans Show” on Fox and “Vibe” on UPN. The comedians come and go in such numbing succession, it’s hard to remember just who was funny two hours later.

Asked what she looks for in a comic, Pat Buckles, a talent executive scouting for “Keenen,” says: “The audience is very energetic on ‘Keenen,’ so the kind of comic who plays well on that show is high-energy. Each show is different. If I were working for Jay Leno, I would be looking for someone who’s more middle of the road.”

Graham Elwood and Suli McCullough, two comedians on the bill, are both 28, their careers in that vast holding area between the open mike and Seinfeldhood.

Elwood, from Chicago, did the road for five years and then came to L.A. two years ago to get into TV and film. Nothing has come his way yet, so to make money in the midst of all the showcasing, he’ll play what he calls “the perimeter”--dates at the Improv in Brea or Irvine or a week at Harrah’s in Las Vegas. Elwood has particular disdain for what he calls “these L.A. comics”--comedians who put together five or 10 minutes of material and then try to skip straight to TV without paying dues in the clubs.

“You know, it’s the old story,” he says. “It takes 14 years to become an overnight success.”

As a 19-year-old student at UCLA, McCullough opened for Seinfeld at the school’s Ackerman Union auditorium; nearly 10 years later, he’s had small film parts, and he’s a sketch player on “Vibe,” but he’s not so far along in his career that he can eschew the showcase.

He’s got his nightmare stories to tell, like the one about the unendurable night he found himself near the end of a bill featuring no fewer than 30 comics at Igby’s in Santa Monica.

“Each comedian was supposed to do six minutes, but then of course everybody does, like, nine minutes, because they think they’re gonna get their big break,” he says.

It’s a credo among the more experienced comics that nobody gets their big break at a showcase. Little breaks, maybe, but not the big one. Some managers don’t like herding their clients into large showcases, fearing they’ll get lost in the crowd. For the comic who takes five minutes just to get warm onstage, large showcases can be detrimental.

“The worst for me was ‘Star Search,’ ” remembers Ray Romano, now the star of the CBS sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond.”

“They gave you 120 seconds--two minutes. It takes me two minutes just to say hello.” (He didn’t win.)

Conversely, others say, an executive may see a young comic kill for five minutes and sign him or her to a deal, not realizing that five minutes of material is all the comic has.

“There are [comics] who try to skip whole chunks of the evolutionary charts of stand-up,” says Barry Katz, a manager whose clients include Dave Chappelle, Jay Mohr and Jim Breuer. “If you look and analyze [successful] shows, what 99% have in common is that the star of that show has been doing stand-up for at least 10 years.”

An evolved voice, a clear point of view. That’s what Roseanne, Seinfeld, Ellen DeGeneres, Drew Carey and Tim Allen--all club comics who made the transition from stand-up to sitcoms--have in common, industry members say.

“Maybe one of the worst things that can happen to a young comic is to be snapped up before they’re ready,” says Karen Taussig, a manager who saw that very thing happen to her then-client Margaret Cho, who in 1994 had the short-lived “All-American Girl” on ABC.

“A comic is bought and sold based on what they have to say,” Taussig says. “And if they’re on TV saying someone else’s words, someone who doesn’t understand their point of view, then that can really damage their careers.”

Says Cho, who is getting ready to direct her first feature film but has shied away from more television work: “I don’t know if my persona is so easily adaptable to sitcoms. My case was difficult. I was dealing with other factors, [having to] represent an Asian American identity. The mistake I made was not focusing on the humor of it.”

Through his showcase work, McCullough has signed “holding deals” with Castle Rock Entertainment and NBC, so called because the comedian is locked into working only on shows affiliated with his studio or production company. Often those deals lead nowhere, but they can at least pay enough to keep the comedian off the road or college circuit for a year.

Having been through two holding deals, McCullough knows not to get too excited about the next one.

Onstage, he’s polished, relaxed enough to attack the audience, but if you could climb into the head of an unsmiling studio or network person watching him, you might hear these questions: Is this someone who can be a star or just a supporting player? Would he appeal to Middle America? Can he act? McCullough’s African American: Do we have to skew him ethnic, or does his act cross over to white audiences?

Karen Kilgariff ticks off the types she’s been offered on TV based on her club work: There’s the “sassy secretary, the hopeless tollbooth operator, the glass-is-half-empty sister-in-law.”

“I’ve done bit parts on shows where I’ve been the fat girl or the punk rocker,” says Kilgariff, a 27-year-old comedian in the alternative, acerbic vein of Janeane Garofalo. “It’s a bummer. I’ve been standing there saying to myself, ‘I’m more than this.’ But you’re trying to actually work.”

Such typecasting of comics drives Andy Kindler to cynicism. Not that the 41-year-old comedian needs much of a nudge to get there. Among fellow comics, Kindler is much loved for his biting attacks on the TV industry, a world so shallow Kindler can imagine an executive pitching a show starring Hitler (“He’s got energy!”).

That’s not to say television has been all bad to Kindler. He has a recurring role this season on “Everybody Loves Raymond,” work that enables him to feed his stage habit with a Sunday night gig at Borders Books in Santa Monica, where comics are paid with $20 gift certificates.

“A lot of these people involved in finding the next new comic, they’re not really involved,” Kindler says. “Instead they do these forays into the clubs. You know: Show me 20 comics at the Improv tonight. It’s very hard to figure out who’s good when you do it that way.”

But Julie Pernworth, director of casting at NBC, does more than make forays into the clubs. In fact, she practically lives in them, trolling the well-known spots and smaller venues like LunaPark and Largo, two popular alternative clubs in West Hollywood.

Take a recent Thursday night in Pernworth’s life. At 7:30 p.m., she went to the HBO Workspace in Hollywood to see Sean Whalen, a former member of the improvisational troupe the Groundlings, perform a one-man show titled “One Thing?” Before Whalen had finished, Pernworth was off to the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard to check out a comedian named Brian Holzman. Afterward she went up the street to the Laugh Factory to see the comics showcasing for Aspen.

Now multiply that evening by 150, roughly the number of nights she estimates she spends in clubs and small theaters, and you get a feel for her job.

“There are times when you don’t want to be sitting in a comedy club, and you wouldn’t go if it weren’t your job,” Pernworth admits.

“But if you go with the idea of, ‘OK, fella, make me laugh,’ then you shouldn’t be doing this.” As a scout for all of NBC’s shows, Pernworth has a wide net to cast; she’s looking not only for potential leads but for supporting players as well. Kathy Griffin of “Suddenly Susan” and Jeff Garlin of “Mad About You” are both comics Pernworth saw and recommended to her bosses.

Pernworth says she rarely judges a comic based on one appearance.

“Unless people are just hacks, everyone deserves at least an annual check-in,” she says.

“That’s what a lot of people don’t understand about showcasing,” adds Jeremy Gold, vice president of talent and development for Panamort Television, former “Late Show With David Letterman” producer Robert Morton’s production company. “It’s not like you go once and say, ‘He’s good’ or ‘He’s bad.’ You have to watch people develop over two or three years.”

Ray Romano toiled in the stand-up game for more than 10 years before a spot on “The Late Show” brought him a development deal with Letterman’s Worldwide Pants production company. In his act, Romano talked about the travails of marriage and fatherhood, subjects that lent themselves to a sitcom.

“When I was doing stand-up, people would say that my act was appropriate for a show, but nobody offered,” Romano says. “People had known about me, I assumed; I had done all the cable shows, ‘The Tonight Show’ and I saw that they were giving deals out. So in that sense, it was a little discouraging. But it wasn’t like [TV] meant everything to me.”

Maybe, Romano thought, the problem was his acting. In New York, he took a class in which, not coincidentally, half the students were stand-up comedians. As any skeptical TV executive will tell you, being funny onstage isn’t the same thing as being able to act; many is the tale of the promising comic brought into read for a part only to reveal a paucity of acting talent.

“I felt pretty comfortable onstage,” Romano says. “It was at auditions that I would get very nervous and feel self-conscious.”

Largely in response to concerns about acting ability, comedians now regularly put together one-man shows as a way of highlighting their depth. Many take place at the HBO Workspace, a 65-seat theater in Hollywood set up by HBO about two years ago to give comedians a more forgiving space to perform than comedy clubs.

The Workspace is where Sean Whalen showcased “One Thing?,” a one-man performance he hopes to take to the Aspen comedy festival in March. For a performer like Whalen, whose act is somewhere between stand-up comedy and live theater, the Laugh Factory or Comedy Store is hardly an option.

“I wasn’t going to do the showcase where I just do characters, I wanted to tell stories,” says Whalen, whose hourlong show, directed by Fred Savage of the NBC sitcom “Working,” includes a hilarious monologue about a Big Brother experience gone awry. It was the kind of story that wouldn’t have translated to a comedy club, where performers are expected to deliver punch lines in rapid succession.

“I can’t think about deals,” Whalen says. “I just want to know, ‘Did people come and have a good time?’ ”

Nevertheless, there are so many one-man shows being showcased these days that they’ve become something of an inside joke among comics. Got a tragic story to tell about an alcoholic father or a mother who died of cancer? Put on a one-man show! Want to do your stand-up in a more “dramatic” setting? Put on a one-man show!

“There’s a tremendous backlash among comics about that,” Kindler says. “It’s like, ‘C’mon, you’re just doing your act in a theater.’ ”

But one-man shows can open doors. Jeffrey Ross, 31, parlayed his witty and moving one-man show “Take a Banana for the Ride” into a development deal with Disney.

On a recent weeknight, a collection of Disney executives and sitcom writers filed into the Stella Adler Theater in Hollywood to see Ross’ show, a bittersweet love letter to his colorful late grandfather, with whom Ross lived after his parents died.

Though Ross later joked that the Disney people came “just to see what they’d bought,” there was a very specific purpose to his one-man showcase: to marry the comedian with a Disney writer to develop “Take a Banana for the Ride” into a pilot that could, eventually, end up on the fall 1998 schedule.

“Basically, I’m looking for my Bruce Helford,” Ross says, referring to the executive producer who teamed with comedian Drew Carey to create the hit “The Drew Carey Show” on ABC.

Back at the Laugh Factory, as the last of the comedians showcasing for Aspen took the stage, the weariness upstairs was palpable. The paid house had thinned out, the industry members were sagging under the weight of too many punch lines crammed into one evening.

“The comedy scene is so picked over, it seems these days if you have five minutes of decent material you can get a development deal,” sighed one, Marc Hirschfeld, a partner in Liberman Hirschfeld Casting.

Nearly a decade ago, Hirschfeld cast the pilot for “Seinfeld,” surrounding a talented stand-up comic with a group of performers whose chemistry would prove to be golden.

Today, as the public mourns the imminent departure of the show from its Thursday nights, pundits wonder who will come along to fill the void. Don’t look now, but there are a thousand and one comics taking a number.

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‘I always say this is like kissing frogs. You’ve gotta kiss a lot of frogs, because you don’t know which one is a prince.’

David Tochterman, Executive Producer of “Grace Under Fire”