Older, Getting Wiser, in Comedy

It is a different Emo Philips walking through his ranch-style childhood home in suburban Downers Grove one recent afternoon, shortly after his mother’s death.

Gone is the brownish-black pageboy hairstyle and gangly, herky-jerky body that enhanced Philips’ reputation as a comedy oddity. His hair is gray and moussed, and his body, at one point 130 pounds stretched over 6 feet, 2 inches, is a respectable 180 pounds.

The singsong cadence with which the stand-up comedian has bombarded fans for more than 20 years remains, although it is not as pronounced.

“You couldn’t even walk through here,” he says, looking around a room strewn with boxes, papers and other items. “She was a pack rat and she collected everything,” Philips says as workers sift through the items, determining what should be tossed in order to make the home suitable for sale.

Philips at 45 is not the comic we once knew, one who regularly contorted his body in weird angles and whooped and bleated while playing on the persona of a demented man-child. He dimmed his spot on the comedy radar, partly to tend to his mother and to live a quieter life.

But he’s developing his career again. He has released a new comedy CD and is taking a new approach to his act, moving away from bizarre, sometime freaky and exaggerated musing about his life.

“It’s more mature now,” says Philips, a comic since 1976. “I used to joke about my childhood a lot, and that’s because when I started I was a child. I was a minor; I was 20 years old.”

That direction is no doubt a reflection of Philips’ getting older and wiser. But an argument can be made that he is looking for a new audience and the resumption of the popularity he had 10 or 15 years ago, when stand-up was the rage.

Philips isn’t alone. The 1980s comedy boom went bust: There were too many mediocre clubs and second-rate comics, too many stand-up comedy showcases on television. Now the comedians who enjoyed the heyday have reached middle age, and they’re finding they’re not the most sought-after acts anymore.

“You start out with a bunch of people, and some of them really go far. And some of them don’t get far at all,” says Jimmy Wiggins, a Chicago comic for 30 years.

“There’s no more ‘Well, it was not a good audience’ or ‘The lights weren’t right’ or ‘The sound wasn’t right.’ The longer you stay in it, the more you realize that the tools that you have to work with [aren’t enough anymore]. You’re not playing Arie Crown and you’re not playing Park West [both in Chicago]. You’re playing Bob’s Place, and Bob doesn’t have enough money for a microphone and a light.”

The career slowdown happens for many reasons. It could be that agents didn’t strike when the fire was hot, not presenting their clients to television or movie casting directors, not pushing aggressively enough for regular appearances on “The Tonight Show” or “The Late Show,” or not booking more high-profile tours.

Sometimes the comic was unwilling or unable to push writing and/or performing abilities up another notch, content to repeat the same, safe comedy. Eventually, audiences grew tired of hearing the same jokes.

But even comedians who used to pack theaters, frequent the late-night talk-show circuit and were expected to be the next Jerry Seinfeld find it hard to fill up mid-level comedy clubs.

Bruce Hills, chief operating officer for Just for Laughs, the Montreal International Comedy Festival, explains: “If you were one of these people that had a series of HBO specials, and there were all these additional outlets, and all these additional clubs that had all this additional money to spend, and you had sort of reasonable success--and then you hit a wall, and then you went back to the road and you haven’t had new vehicles to enhance your image and your visibility--there’s only one place to go, and that’s really sort of down.”

Roseanne, Butler, Richard Lewis and Andrew “Dice” Clay are just a few of the comics who enjoyed success years ago and now find themselves at a crossroads. Roseanne, for example, has gone from a hit TV show and movies to playing the road again, including dates at the Irvine Improv this weekend.

So what’s a middle-aged comic to do? One of the main things is what Philips did--try to reinvent yourself. George Carlin, who at 64 continues to be a draw at venues around the country, cites his realization that he suppressed his rebellious side in the ‘60s, finally embraced that side of himself and used it to his advantage in the ‘70s, which allowed him to fashion an act that has kept him viable into the ‘90s and beyond.

“It was only after that started eating at me, the conflict started eating at me, that I was able to make that change from the suit and tie in the late ‘60s to the things that happened for me starting in the ‘70s,” he says.

The radical Carlin of the ‘70s gave way to the grumpy, disenfranchised Carlin of the ‘80s and beyond, as he formed a “theatrical version of discontent” as his persona, “disconnected and contemptuous of the way humans have let themselves develop and the way they’ve used their gifts.”

Agent Rick Greenstein, who represents Lewis, Jamie Foxx, Arsenio Hall and a host of others, suggests other possibilities for creating a mid-career boost: An act can go to a variety of alternative venues to stay in the public eye, such as performing arts centers or casinos, rather than theaters. In addition, the stand-up could tour with a new hot comic who would love the opportunity to share the bill with an established star.

It will be interesting to see what place the new Emo Philips will have. Hills, whose comedy festival celebrates 20 years next summer, saw Philips perform in Edinburgh, Scotland, as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August, and he was impressed with the new Emo.

“I thought that Emo had made some nice refinements,” Hills says. “The problem I think that has arisen is he needed to grow, and I think he hit a bit of a wall ... and he didn’t know where to go. And I think he’s come up with a great solution and that is he’s made his act a little bit more modernized.”

Philips is now tackling more “serious subjects” such as divorce, politics, even the current terrorist threat facing America.

“The spokesman for [Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network] said thousands of young men look forward to dying as much as Americans look forward to living,” goes one joke. “So I think that’s going to work out pretty well for everyone.”

“Look at comedy and tragedy and they are inseparable,” Philips says. “Even in the best comedies, like Charlie Chaplin, you have tears. Chaplin could make an audience go from laughter to tears and back again in a matter of seconds.

“I’ve got it down to 2 hours and 40 minutes.”

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Allan Johnson is a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune Co. newspaper.