Comedy Dojo: So Funny It Hurts

You might say that Chris Barnes gets to moonlight at his own workplace. On Monday evenings at Comedy Dojo in Santa Monica, the third-degree black belt can be found wearing a traditional karate uniform, saying something like, “Breathe out on the strike,” while demonstrating a move for a reverent martial arts class. Fifteen minutes later, Barnes, who is also a veteran of Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe, will be in his civvies, quoting Moliere and citing a favorite “Frasier” episode to his next class, a wisecracking gang of comics-in-training.

As the dojo’s owner and lone instructor, Barnes, 42, has the challenge of wearing two hats down to a fine science. The Pennsylvania native, who moved to L.A. in 1990 and has dozens of television and film acting credits, started the school a couple of years ago after a near-fatal bout with alcoholism. Today, Barnes offers four karate classes and two comedy workshops to about 100 students per week at the dojo, on the second floor of a nondescript industrial building on Colorado Avenue. (About 10 double dippers--all actors--study both subjects.)

Noting that both comedy and martial arts require discipline and breed confidence, Barnes finds the transition from stern sensei to comedy coach easy. “Even in the comedy world I’m known for being pretty strict.” That said, there’s undeniably a different vibe from class to class. “The karate deck stays pretty serious,” says Dan Weiss, who has been studying both comedy and karate with Barnes for nearly two years. “The comedy class is slightly looser.”

But the biggest divergence may be in student reactions to constructive criticism. With karate, Barnes says, the response is always a reverential “arigato sensei “ (“thank you, teacher”). “In comedy,” he says, “I give a correction and it almost hurts their feelings. You will not hear ‘arigato’ in a comedy class.”