The Festival You’re Supposed to Laugh At

Here among the heavyweights of comedy--everyone from Jerry Seinfeld, James Brooks, Martin Short and Neil Simon--what was Robert Evans doing at HBO’s fifth annual U.S. Comedy Arts Festival?

Practically stealing the four-day event, which ended Saturday night, as it turned out. The legendary Hollywood player and producer of such demonstrably unfunny films as “The Godfather,” “Chinatown” and “Love Story” gave a command performance Friday morning, collapsing onstage, though not from the altitude. He was merely re-creating the stroke he suffered 10 months ago at a dinner party. Evans then took a seat to give a rare reading from his 1994 memoir “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” and from a forthcoming work, “Seduction”--his old-style Hollywood bravado and deep, gravely voice playing to bigger laughs than many of the comics who had come to this pristine resort town hoping to catch a TV or movie break.

Still, just what Evans was doing at a comedy festival is a question worth pondering, though the producer who has seen life at the top and bottom of Hollywood would later joke that “my life has been a comedy. A black comedy.”

“Have you listened to his book on tape?” said comic Janeane Garofalo, referring to the audio version of “The Kid Stays in the Picture.” “It’s hilarious.”

Seen another way, why not have an industry raconteur like Evans at a festival that is nothing if not winter camp for the self-loving entertainment industry, a smorgasbord of skiing, schmoozing and fine dining, interspersed with low and high comedy art: cast reunion shows, stand-up showcases, tributes (this year, to Brooks and Simon), alternative acts and, for the first time, a film festival.

In the end, HBO, which has sponsored this event since its inception, gets to bask in the reflected glory of Hollywood’s comedy elite, providing in the process some genuinely memorable events.

In addition to Evans, these included a reunion of the cast from the sketch comedy show “SCTV,” which easily outshined similar homages during the festival to “The Ben Stiller Show” and “Seinfeld.”

Moderating the “SCTV” panel, Conan O’Brien, host of NBC’s “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” recalled how he discovered the show as a 14-year-old, told by his brother Neil to watch this zany new comedy syndicated out of Canada.

“I think it was the comedy education and it was the backbone of most of the good work that’s been done by my generation,” O’Brien, 35, said of “SCTV,” a sentiment that Ben Stiller would echo.

Set at a fictional television network in the fictional Canadian outpost of Melonville, the series was a sketch show within a sketch show, the performers parodying not only the dysfunctional network brass but also the programming they put on the air. In the process, viewers met Guy Caballero, the cantankerous SCTV network owner and Sammy Maudlin, the hammy Vegas emcee whose variety show was typical of the network’s tacky shows.

All of this brilliance began with a pilot shot for $10,000 and continued in a series that for most of its seven seasons in the late 1970s and early ‘80s was produced in Edmonton, Alberta, hardly the hotbed of pop culture.

But a cast that included Martin Short, Dave Thomas, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Andrea Martin, the late John Candy, Harold Ramis and Rick Moranis blossomed nevertheless.

“Nobody coming out of ‘SCTV’ has done better work than they did on that show,” said Levy, last seen in the mock documentary, “Waiting for Guffman.”

Ramis noted that during the show’s first season, the producers decided to bring in guest players as an experiment--an experiment that began and ended with Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson. Forced to come up with sketches for the British actors, the staff brainstormed a skit called “Stonehenge Estates,” “Where all the stones from Stonehenge were moved to Arizona and made into condos for old folks,” said Thomas.

“The Ben Stiller Show” reunion, by contrast, was a misshapen, listless affair briefly enlivened by Andy Dick’s drugged-out antics. This was fitting as the show aired for all of 12 weeks on Fox in 1992.

Jerry Seinfeld and his sitcom co-creator Larry David were presented with an American Film Institute award for achievement in comedy and then interviewed by NBC sportscaster Bob Costas.

“It’s been a year now, and you’ve had time to reflect,” Costas began the discussion. “Is there anything at all you’d like to say to Hillary and Chelsea?”

Later, asked if he would like to return for another go at a sitcom, Seinfeld immediately replied no, and said he’s planning a more concentrated return to stand-up in six months or a year.

Speaking generally of his future career plans, he added: “I want to be one of those people about whom it’s never said, ‘I liked his earlier funny stuff.’ ”

This year’s festival, as always, included 20 so-called “New faces of stand-up comedy,” culled from a nationwide pool of some 2,000. But the faces weren’t exactly new to many in attendance, and with the networks heavily into pilot season, this isn’t exactly a hot deal-making time. Indeed, stand-up comedy, which could use a lift out of the prestige gutter, took a back seat in Aspen to the aforementioned star showcases, though Jim Gaffigan and Louis Ramey were two bright spots. Ramey won the award for best new stand-up artist.

HBO, while committed to putting on a yearly comedy festival, will take a hard look at whether to hold the event in Aspen next year, said festival executive director Stu Smiley. While a help in drawing big name stars for a weekend in the mountains, Aspen lacks large venues, is expensive and poses travel difficulties, Smiley said.

By weekend’s end, talk of the festival was still drifting back to Evans, though that much coveted cliche--good buzz--was also focused on “Bill Graham Presents . . . A One Man Show,” starring actor Ron Silver as the late rock impresario; Kravits & Jones, a comedy troupe out of New York; and Moon Zappa, an L.A.-based performance artist and daughter of the late Frank Zappa.