Jewish Twist on Comedy of Life

The truth shall set you free. And, with any luck, it will make you laugh till your stomach hurts.

That is the premise behind an offbeat program on comedy, religion and spirituality Saturday night at the Skirball Cultural Center. Called “Spirit in the Sky,” the show kicks off a comedy festival at the Skirball that continues through Feb. 11, titled “Comedy and Commentary for the New Millennium.”

Co-produced by Beth Lapides and Greg Miller of Un-Cabaret Productions, the show features stand-up performances by Taylor Negron, Lapides and others.

An advocate of alternative comedy, Lapides explains that she was approached by the Skirball, which seeks to interpret the Jewish experience in America, because Skirball staffers felt comedy is both an art form and an especially Jewish art form.

She agrees, explaining comedy is not about jokes, but about living an examined life and “living the examined life is very much what being Jewish is all about and very much what I am all about.”

The evening is not limited to Jewish comedians, however. Negron, for instance, grew up in a family that was simultaneously Jewish, Puerto Rican Catholic and New Age, in Glendale, no less. Negron, a versatile writer and performer who plays vicious as ably as he plays funny, recalls: “I’d go to a bar mitzvah one day, and a christening the next.”

The idea of using spirituality as a springboard for comedy is a familiar one for Lapides. Un-Cabaret has had theme shows for years at its Los Feliz facility, she says, and one of her favorites has been an annual show on religion that allows the performers “to open up territory they couldn’t get to otherwise.”

“It’s such a difficult, rich area,” she says, about religion, although she and husband and co-producer Miller decided not to call the Skirball show what they routinely call the Un-Cabaret’s religion show.

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“We didn’t think ‘Your Own Personal Jesus’ was appropriate for the Skirball,” she says.

Negron, who is currently appearing on the ABC sitcom “The Hughleys,” says he has always had a spiritual side. He spent time in a monastery in England and has a long-standing fascination with Buddhism. His current interests include the Knights Templar and other religious nonconformists who flourished 1,000 years ago in southern France, where he has a home. In Negron’s view, the religious underground is an invaluable cultural antidote to “Taco Bell and Kmart.”

Negron believes everyone needs to search their souls, whatever that means to them. “Everybody knows if you don’t have an examined life, you go mad,” he says. But he is put off by the current penchant for self-revelation.

Acceptable public discourse has gone from “Who wants a piece of gum?” to “Hello, I’ve had two abortions,” he says.

Negron, who quotes both Dante and Andre Malraux over lunch in his dressing room in Studio City, says he turns to art as a way to escape what Dante called “the forest dark.”

“I paint,” says Negron, who studied here and in San Francisco. “I still do it every day. I never neglected it. It’s a gift. It’s almost like religion for me. It’s the quickest way for me to become still.”

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Lapides says that she will talk about “being a new Jew,” one who combines traditional Jewish beliefs with other spiritual practices such as yoga.

“Are new Jews more limber than old Jews?” she is asked. “Yes,” she says, “and they eat a lot fewer bagels.”

Lapides says the major theme of her performance will be her attempt to reconcile the Jewish need “never to forget” with the New Age wisdom of living in the now.

As a person who values insight over traditional jokes, she is reluctant to cite anything resembling a one-liner. But she does plan to talk about her brother, who went through an Iron John phase that led him to fault their father for never taking them camping.

“We Jews don’t go into the wilderness,” she jokes. “It took us 40 years to get out.”

Lapides sometimes chides Negron for being too ready to tell jokes (he admits to the existence of an Inner Hack who sometimes gives in to the temptation to hear the audience roar). At the Un-Cabaret, she stands at a back mike and asks the performers questions and otherwise engages them in a dialogue that reflects the group’s belief that nothing is funnier than an insightful mind.

Told she sounds a bit bossy, she admits: “I’m bossy, but I have everybody’s best interests in mind. I think of it more as being controlling. Somebody has to be in control. Why not me? I’m a beneficent ruler.”

If there are a great many Jewish comedians (and there are), there are also a great many Irish Catholics in the field. Are people from the “tragic religions” drawn to comedy, she’s asked. “And the storytelling religions,” she says.

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Comedy and the desire to transcend the mundane are both central to the human condition, so why not a night devoted to comedy about religion and spirituality?

Indeed, Lapides argues that there should be a “Greatest Hits Religion” that combines the best each faith has to offer and gets rid of the nasty, oppressive stuff.

Such a religion would definitely celebrate Passover, she says, but it would skip over the slow parts of the haggada (the Passover prayer book) so celebrants could get to the soup.

“Spirit in the Sky” will include Lapides, Negron, Dana Gould, Andy Kindler and Michael Patrick King. The show starts at 8 p.m. at the Skirball, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Sepulveda Pass. For tickets and information, call (310) 440-4500.

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Spotlight appears every Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.