In New York, Stand-Ups Are Wrestling With Comedy’s Fine Line

Most everyone was saying it was too soon for comedy, even Letterman, but Marc Maron wasn’t sure. He had come up with his first World Trade Center joke in no time and was intent on trying it out, as soon as the clubs reopened. So that’s what he did, slipping the joke in at each of his three gigs Saturday night, even at Stand-Up New York, where the show’s producer implored the comics to steer clear of the terrorist attacks, saying, “You don’t want to make any tasteless jokes about a national tragedy.”

Maron was not totally insensitive--he started by sharing only a hint of his twisted mind, dipping his toe in the comic water:

“My manager called me yesterday to see if I was OK. He said, ‘So, are you going to move to L.A. now?’

“And I said, ‘Well, you know, you got earthquakes out there. Our city may be the target of terrorism, but yours is the target of God.”’

And they laughed. The audiences were small--not everyone was ready to be amused--but no one walked out, no one even booed. Three times he tried it and three times they laughed.

Maron figured it was then OK to do what he really wanted, which was to take it further, to turn his thoughts into a fuller routine. For starters, he wanted to discuss how God, arguably, “might be the greatest terrorist of all time.”

Sunday would be a good time to do that, he decided. He was booked at the Comedy Cellar in the West Village, an easy walk from where the towers had stood. The club management let the comics say what they wanted, to let it fly, even do God-the-terrorist.

Of course, Maron wasn’t the only one pondering whether to make a routine out of what was happening. Russ Meneve, who was on the Sunday bill as well, saw possibilities in the phone calls he was getting, checking to see if he was alive. Hard-liner Nick DiPaolo couldn’t get over how the supposedly pious hijackers got ready for their last day on Earth ... by visiting strip joints.

Then there was poor “Hood,” Hood Qaim-Maqami. What could he do now? Certainly not his old act, in which he came on saying, “My name is Hood, it’s an ancient Arabic word, means ‘the top of your car.’ I’m originally from Iran”--and he would wait for the silence to greet the announcement of his homeland--”Thank you, I feel the warmth .... So I was actually going to start today’s show in the name of Allah,” and then he opened his shirt to reveal, strapped around his torso, dynamite.

No, Hood, a guy from Encino, couldn’t play Hood-the-terrorist anymore. But perhaps he might find fresh material from his day job, in which he was merely a Harvard and MIT-trained expert in economic development, working for Lehman Bros., with an office--until last week--on the 40th floor of the World Trade Center. Perhaps he could craft a bit or two from last Tuesday.

Heeding Leaders’ Urgings to Get Back to Normal

The special Sunday services had concluded with prayers for the firefighters missing and presumed dead, and for the financiers and lawyers, the cops and the clerks. But President Bush and Mayor Giuliani had asked the nation, and New Yorkers, to get back to normal, and that’s what they were trying to do along MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village.

Eddie Brill was at the Comedy Cellar as a booker for David Letterman’s show, helping one of the acts get ready for an appearance on the CBS program. Tom Papa had four minutes prepared, with safe everyday-life jokes, such as how it stinks having a large head (“What am I going to do? Go to the gym, get on a head machine?”)

But they had already eliminated one bit, on how you have fewer friends every year. “If anyone over 30 tells you they have more than 10 friends, you know they’re counting co-workers,” went Papa’s axed quip. “Counting co-workers” has other meanings these days.

Even here, they weren’t in denial about how sensitive a time it is. On CNN, commentator Jeff Greenfield had suggested the instant obsolescence of wise-guy “post-ironic humor” in which “you never take anyone seriously.” Even Letterman, the nation’s preeminent smirker, was doing without his usual monologue and top 10 list. When his show resumed Monday, he sat behind his desk, “confused and depressed,” and confessed his doubt whether he should be delivering entertainment.

Letterman did say, “Thank God Regis is here, so we have something to make fun of,” but even Dave was taking it slowly.

In the Comedy Cellar, Russ Meneve asked, “Anyone get a call from a friend today ... to see if you were OK?” Only a dozen customers were scattered around the club, but all got his drift--wasn’t it a little late to be checking up?

“It happened like four days ago!” Meneve ranted on the narrow stage, in front of an exposed brick wall. “I’m in the rubble, dude! Call help, you moron!”

Half an hour later, he was upstairs at a sidewalk table, relieved at how it went. “Not many there,” he said, “but they were with it.”

“If you take yourself seriously, you’re lost,” said Papa. “We’re not preachers.”

Then Marc Maron walked up, the last act on the show. He has the John Lennon look, physically non-threatening. But of the lot, he is the edgiest, the most dangerous comic. He does do mainstream material, such as the sure-fire bit he used when he was on Letterman in 1999, confessing his lust, at 37, for teenage girls (“That’s why there’s a law”). But he also lashes out on political topics, or religion, as in the show he’s turned into a book, “The Jerusalem Syndrome,” about delusions that beset people in the Holy Land.He is struggling to make sense of the attack, trying out material he may use downstairs: Did the other comics notice the huge ads in the New York Times? “There’s a full-page flag, ‘Hang this in the window in the name of freedom.’ Then there’s this lewd Gucci ad, this woman with her legs spread. I’m tempted to put both in my window. Like that’s what we’re fighting for?”

After the attack, there were debates at clubs all over town over what was appropriate. Most concluded: Nothing. “We can’t predict what comes out of a comic’s mouth,” said Geoff Kole, the producer at Stand-Up New York on the Upper West Side, “but we’ve requested that they not discuss it.”

Yet even average people were not only discussing it, but finding humor, in ways impossible to anticipate. A prime example was the e-mail that quickly made the rounds, showing a rebuilt World Trade Center shaped like a hand, with its middle finger raised in a familiar defiant gesture. That humor clearly was OK for the masses.

But even at the freewheeling Comedy Cellar, some comics were not sure anything was suitable for the stage, owner Manny Dworman said. “One said, ‘I don’t want to be beaten to death.’ It’s more important to be funny than poignant.”

He decided to trust the comics, and the audiences. “If you’re that grief-stricken, you’re not going to come out,” he reasoned.

The crowd had grown to 50 by the time Maron went on. He took the mike, leaned back against the brick wall and told his story about his manager asking if he was ready to flee to L.A.

When he said, “Our city may be the target of terrorism, but yours is the target of God,” they laughed once again.

But this time he continued, “And, of course, God--arguably one of the greatest terrorists of all time.”

He paused and let it sink in. The laughter was even louder.

“God will kill people anywhere, in many different disguises for no [expletive] reason at all. God is responsible for most of the death on this planet! That guy’s a bad [expletive]. “

He carefully alternated his new material with tested routines, observational humor on, say, the cost of a cell phone. “I got a great deal on mine. It’s only $900 a month.”

He invited the audience to consider the call for them to “‘Get back to your old way of life.’ What does that mean in this country? Start consuming, go out to eat, distract yourself? Go back to the jobs that you hate .... “

He segued into some of his favorite rants, wondering why “30% of the people voted for president and 98% of them went to see ‘Pearl Harbor,”’ a movie “arguably worse than the invasion itself.”

They laughed at all of it.

When he was done, Maron wasn’t sure what to make of that, whether any of it was appropriate--his bits or their laughter.

“I’ve been feeling myself wavering between heart and mind,” he said. “We’re still sitting on a mass grave. They’re excavating a level of hell down there, and people are relying on whatever spiritual system they have. Why mess with that?”

Maron finally decided some people merely needed to laugh that night--and hadn’t really heard what he’d said, for better or worse.

He shrugged, saying, “I think it’s still slidin’ in under the carpet.”

Hood Qaim-Maqami hopes to get back on stage tonight. He credits comedy, after all, with possibly saving his life. He had three gigs Monday night last week and was so tired the next morning, “I was 10 blocks away--20 minutes late.”

He rushed to the north tower just as the south one crumbled, then fled with the grit-covered survivors over the Hudson River on the ferry to New Jersey, where he lives. People were gathered along the riverfront gawking like tourists, and one man asked him to pose with his father for a photo. “I ended up putting my arm around him and smiling,” he says. “I actually smiled for a picture with the background of the destruction.”

He thought about all that while trying to plot a new act.

“What I might start on is, ‘I’m Iranian, which means for the next year I’ll be Italian,”’ Hood says, trying out the new line, waiting for any reaction.

He developed his terrorist act largely to combat the stereotyping of Arabs. He will still try to do that, he says, but without the explosives. He doesn’t regret that the dynamite will have to be retired.

“I was looking for a good reason to stop being a prop act,” he says, “and what better reason than it will never be funny again.”