Standing for Something

Paul F. Tompkins, Patton Oswalt and Karen Kilgariff sit in a funky Los Feliz bar called Ye Rustic Inn, huddled with pitchers of beer, talking shop well into the night.

It’s an L.A. bar in which lots of people are defiantly smoking--an apt, anti-establishment setting for three talented stand-up comedians in their late 20s to sound off on why sitcoms stink, why network executives drive them to drink, and why rumors of stand-up comedy’s death are greatly exaggerated. A typical exchange goes as follows:

Kilgariff: “Sitcoms are bad in so many ways it’s hard to say why. They can hype things as much as they want, but it’s all crap, no matter how many TV Guide cover stories there are.”

Tompkins: “You need a good idea. It’s not enough to have a personality.”

Oswalt: “They wanted to build a show around me where I was going out with this girl who would never go out with me. Ever. It was almost like they were pitching a bizarro world show where I was on this planet with a hot girlfriend and friends who were really cool. And I kept saying, ‘Don’t you understand? These people would never hang out with me!’ ”

Tompkins: “That’s why it’s now called ‘The Paul F. Tompkins Show.’ And I can’t wait to start work.”

As much as anyone in L.A.--a city so overloaded with comedians hankering for TV breaks they practically make up a voting bloc--Tompkins, Oswalt and Kilgariff represent stand-up’s edgy, youthful present.

In their acts, they reference topics more relevant to people in their 20s and 30s than airline food, family life and fabric softeners. Recently, for instance, Oswalt and Tompkins teamed up onstage at one of their regular haunts, Largo in West Hollywood, for a bit in which Oswalt imitated PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose and Tompkins was James Lipton, the blustery, pretentious host of Bravo’s “Inside the Actors Studio.”

In high-falutin’ voices, they insulted each other’s mothers for20 minutes.

“I can’t stand watching stand-up comedy, but I love watching them,” says comedian- actress Janeane Garofalo. “They’re brilliant and real. Watching them is like a whole different experience artistically, if you can use that word talking about [stand-up comedy].”

When he was a writer for Fox’s “Mad TV,” Oswalt once wrote a skit in which a ventriloquist is outed by his dummy. Tompkins, who got into stand-up as a 17-year-old in Philadelphia, marvels at how people in L.A. subsist on Jamba Juice, as if meals were evil (“With this drink, I have conquered the tyranny of dinner!” he bellows). Kilgariff might spend 10 minutes onstage reading about freak mutations in “The Book of Lists,” and how peer pressure would take on a whole new meaning if you were the kid whose head had a head.

Television executives tend to view them as talented performers who aren’t quite mature enough to handle the at times maddening politics of developing a sitcom.

That’s code for: You’ll have to sell out. Just a little bit.

For now, TV’s loss is the L.A. public’s gain. Monday night, the trio will be back at Largo, semi-regulars in a show that, like the long-running Sunday night Uncabaret at LunaPark, is supposed to represent the “alternative” to the set-’em-up-and-knock-’em-down joke-telling you see at the Improv or Comedy Store.

The alternative versus the mainstream club scene is as close as you get to class warfare in stand-up comedy. Mainstream comics see the alternative scene as snotty and ultimately lazy. Alternative comics say they’re not alternative, they just like to come up with more than eight minutes of material they can ride for 10 years in any Comedy Zone in the country.

Both have recent history on their side. The mainstream clubs produced observational comics who were good but didn’t offend: Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Reiser, Paula Poundstone. The L.A. bookstore / “alternative” scene has nurtured the talents of Garofalo, Julia Sweeney, Dana Gould, Andy Kindler, Kathy Griffin--acerbic insiders, people who wanted to do comedy by dismantling the old way of doing things first, to show how boring the game had become.

“But there are just as many people [in the mainstream scene] who would tell you I suck,” says Garofalo, whose onstage stew of off-putting arrogance and refreshing honesty typifies the hit-and-miss proposition of a given Largo or LunaPark show.

Indeed, at their worst, the so-called alternative shows are tortuous attitude-fests where self-proclaimed but unschooled comedians go onstage to whine about another audition gone horribly wrong, where too many performers refer to notes onstage, pieces of paper that apparently have nothing funny written on them.

But at their best, these shows encourage the wicked minds and burgeoning talents of a Kilgariff, an Oswalt, a Tompkins.

“When I perform at Largo, there are really talented people in the room,” Oswalt says. “I’ll do a Monday and Paul will be on the bill and Greg Proops and David Cross and Karen, and I’ll think, ‘I can’t just go up there and walk through this. I better have a solid 10 minutes ready to go.’ ”

They have known one another for a while now. Oswalt and Tompkins first crossed paths in the late 1980s, when Tompkins was based in Philadelphia and Oswalt was working clubs out of Washington, D.C. Later, Oswalt moved to San Francisco and met Kilgariff, a native of Petaluma who had just gotten into stand-up and was working San Francisco nightspots like the Holy City Zoo and Cobb’s, finding her anti-comedy comedy voice.

“It was good to see somebody as frustrated with comedy as I was,” Oswalt says of the first time he saw Kilgariff perform. “Except she had brought it onstage. I didn’t think you could tell the audience how [bad] it all was.”

By then, the comedy boom that had given birth to a million Chuckles and Laugh Stops was coming to an end; two years after Oswalt landed in San Francisco, 10 clubs had closed, he says. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing--a glut of clubs meant a glut of bland comics. For Kilgariff and Oswalt, it was time to move to L.A., anyway. Tompkins had gone as far as he could in Philadelphia and come out too.

“It is good that we all kind of come together,” Kilgariff says of the camaraderie among her like-minded alterna-comics. “If you lived here and you were alone and all you had was some creepy agent, of course you would sell out for anything that came along.”

These days, all three have things to plug. Kilgariff has done guest spots on “Cybill” and “The Drew Carey Show” and co-starred in an NBC pilot that went nowhere several years ago. Oswalt wrote for “Mad TV,” had a half-hour HBO special recently and has been meeting with writers about developing his own sitcom. Tompkins did a spot on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” and wrote for HBO’s often-brilliant sketch show “Mr. Show” for two years.

So what’s the next step for a young stand-up comic who obviously has brains and talent?

That question employs many, many people in the entertainment industry. Tompkins recently signed a two-year development deal with HBO Independent Productions, the pay channel production arm that takes comedians and tries to mold their acts into salable sitcoms (CBS’ “Everybody Loves Raymond,” starring Ray Romano, is its latest success).

For a comedian as young as Tompkins, though, such a deal treats him more as a work-in-progress. Since signing, he has appeared at the HBO Workspace, in a one-man show that he took in March to the Aspen Comedy Festival. The hope is that these vehicles will increase his marketability with network and studio brass. Oswalt signed a similar deal with HBO Independent Productions that resulted in his HBO half-hour special but is about to expire without a sitcom. Kilgariff has resisted any deals, feeling it’s not the right career move yet.

“They see themselves as alternative comics, so there’s this reluctance to give into a more commercial adaptation of their work,” says Lowell Mate, an executive at HBO Independent Productions, talking about why Kilgariff, Thompkins and Oswalt are considered not-ready-for-prime-time players.

On the other hand, all three have seen what can happen to friends (Margaret Cho, Tom Rhodes) who capitulated creatively (“All American Girl” and “Mr. Rhodes,” respectively), only to become prime-time road kill in quick fashion.

Says Kilgariff: “In the end, when your show does suck rocks, and it’s over and you have no career, no one says, ‘Where’s the creative team at NBC that’s responsible for this?’ They say, ‘Tom Rhodes, you ate it.’ ”

Says Oswalt: “If you cash in your chips with the network, that’s the quickest way to end your career. . . . I would much rather do the kind of thing that Garry Shandling does or Albert Brooks does, or Bob [Odenkirk] and David [Cross] of ‘Mr. Show.’ Where I have control over the output.”

Says Tompkins: “If you look at the [shows] that are really successful, that everybody across the board likes, it’s always something where there was a vision and people were left alone to do what they wanted. But [executives] are just too scared to let that happen. They’re like, ‘It’s gotta have an element in there that I recognize, something people will talk about at the water cooler.’ ”

Says Oswalt: “If you went to Largo or Tempest or the Uncabaret, you would see at least eight or nine really unique voices that you could develop a show around, if you were given the time. The thing about sitcoms now is, they’re given two weeks, and then they’re killed. Something like ‘Seinfeld’ . . . through these weird set of circumstances, they left the show alone for two years. When will that happen again?”

Comedians who bug them include very popular ones: Jay Leno, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams.

They’re alternately deemed gimmicky (Williams), vanilla (Leno) and way too pleased with himself (Crystal). If you agree, then you’re a good candidate for a Tompkins/Kilgariff/Oswalt show. Disagree and these three will probably strike you as pompous and bitter and still young.

Still, they can never be accused of contributing to a prevailing sense that stand-up comedy is irrelevant.

“I read an article in a Seattle paper recently about Bobcat Goldthwait,” Oswalt says. “It said: ‘We all know that stand-up comedy stinks, but if you’ve got a gun to your head and you have to see a show, you may as well go see Bobcat. That’s how the article started.”

“I think TV is responsible for a lot of bad trends in comedy,” Tompkins says. “I think people have forgotten the joy of the live performance, how great it is to go to a show and see something you can only document with your memory.”

BE THERE

Paul F. Tompkins, Karen Kilgariff, Patton Oswalt and others: 8 p.m. Monday at Largo, 432 N. Fairfax Ave., West Hollywood. Cover charge $5. Call (213) 852-1073.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Not Your Father’s Improv

Where to find more alternative comedy:

* Largo, 8 p.m. Mondays, 432 N. Fairfax Ave., West Hollywood. Cover $5. Call (213) 852-1073.

* LunaPark, Beth Lapides’ Uncabaret, 7:30 p.m. Sundays, 665 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood. Cover $7. Call (310) 652-0611.

* Tempest Supper Club, Comedy Free for All, 8:30 p.m. Tuesdays, 7323 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Cover $3 with two-drink minimum. Call (213) 860-9822.

* Borders Books, All Things Comedic, 8 p.m. Sundays, 1415 Third Street Promenade, Santa Monica. Free. Call (310) 393-9290. Also at 8 p.m. Thursdays and Saturdays at Borders, 330 La Cienega Blvd., West Hollywood. Call (310) 659-4045.