Good Crude Fun

The comedy of No Time isn’t sketch or stand-up or improv. It isn’t anything, really, so much as good fun in very questionable taste. Billy Portman, 29, Chas Mastin, 27, and Robert Cohen, 29, have been performing together since they met as students at George Washington University and started doing midnight comedy shows on campus. Nearly a decade later, their act still has the loose, raw feel of something cooked up over many late nights of pizza and controlled substances.

There’s the skit in which Mastin wheels himself out as Stephen Hawking, stand-up comic, and does jokes about the differences between “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” fans. There’s a thoroughly disgusting three-man magic trick involving saliva, food coloring and long tubes. And there are lots of songs, including the one least likely to become the next anthem against world hunger, “Eat All the Old People.”

Those bits may or may not be on their playlist Saturday night at 11 at the Lex Theater in West Hollywood. Regardless, No Time’s crude spirit is sure to be in evidence.

“Even when we were doing sketch comedy, we didn’t do game-show bits,” says Portman, explaining the trio’s artistic inclinations over lunch at Canter’s in the Fairfax District. “And we stopped very early doing commercial parodies.”

“It’s a reaction against being raised with ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ” Mastin adds. “We saw parody taken to its apex, and we didn’t want to participate in it.”

Instead, what No Time is striving for is something more deconstructive than your typical sketch show, something worthy of one of their comedic heroes, the late Andy Kaufman, or a contemporary troupe like the Upright Citizens Brigade, now seen on Comedy Central.

No Time also relies heavily on music, doing credible renditions of funny, original hip-hop and rap songs, with a few folk tunes thrown in. The trio has a CD out, with a Spinal Tap-sounding title, “Smoke This Album.” The CD includes such numbers as “Gay Gangsta” and “Gap Song,” a little ditty about a jilted boyfriend stalking his ex-girlfriend as she purchases pre-torn jeans and overalls at the Gap. One hesitates to call these songs parodies, for that instantly evokes the hammy, hackneyed work of a Weird Al Yankovic. No Time’s music is cleverer than that, if no less relentless in its pursuit of laughs. When Portman, for instance, straps a plastic doll to his forehead and sings “Little Friend,” you know he’s going places Weird Al would probably fear to tread.

Since arriving in Los Angeles in 1996, No Time has taken up semi-permanent residence at the Lex, a small space off Highland Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard. Getting stage time in the mainstream clubs or the alternative-comedy hot spots has been difficult, they say. People hear they’re a group and envision three guys who want to do sketch.

“We face that kind of discrimination all the time,” Cohen says. “We’ll call up a place like LunaPark to do the Uncabaret thing, and they tell us, ‘Oh, we don’t do groups.’ ”

No Time’s rap and hip-hop songs, meanwhile, have earned the group crossover approval among African American audiences. They recently won a spot on the Phat Tuesday lineup at the Comedy Store, a weekly showcase of black comics.

But that kind of gig isn’t going to enable any of them to quit their day jobs (Mastin acts in and writes educational videos, Portman refers cryptically to a “consulting business” he’s started and Cohen jokingly calls himself a gambler). They’ve played the college circuit (including a gig in a field at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Georgia) and are putting together a film of the tour.

Inevitably, they’re also now meeting with television executives about translating their act to the small screen. But as what? They have pitched a kind of free-form talk show, but people still seem eager to guide them into the sketch comedy format.

“We go into this meeting yesterday,” Cohen says, “and we tell this woman that we don’t necessarily want to do a sketch [comedy] show, and she makes a comment back saying, ‘That’s like if you were welders and you said you wanted to do my taxes.’ ”

“What’s really ridiculous is my welder’s been doing my taxes for years,” Mastin jokes. “And he’s been doing a great job.”

BE THERE

No Time performs at the Lex Theater, 6760 Lexington Ave., West Hollywood, Saturday night at 11 p.m. Tickets are $10. Call (310) 289-4408.