Hook ‘Em Up to the Laugh Meter

A comedy sketch usually lasts no more than five minutes, but comedy sketch groups can go on for decades. If it’s a weekend and you’re in L.A., you can usually count on finding a few laughs at the Groundlings, Acme Comedy Theatre and L.A. Connection.

After visiting the current first-string sketch show at each of these, it’s time to compare and contrast.

First and still foremost: the Groundlings. This pioneering company stands out in several ways. It presents three performances of its first-string show each weekend (the others present just one), offering more chances for the cast to polish its work and for the audience to see it. It features more female and nonwhite faces. Although most of a Groundlings show is scripted, a few improvs add dashes of a different kind of energy.

Finally, a Groundlings show usually ends with a sensational musical improv, often involving personal information gathered from a guinea pig plucked out of the audience. You leave the show in awe of the group’s agility.

All of the above applies to “Groundlings on Tap,” the troupe’s current offering. Irrepressible Jeremy Rowley splits sides as a security guard who’s being interrogated by a cop after an altercation that may have involved Magic Johnson. Waif-like Rachel Duguay is hilarious as a sixth-grader doing a dance interpretation of the Declaration of Independence.

“Groundlings on Tap” features three sketches about social encounters between two couples, which sounds monotonous on paper. But the main joke of each sketch is sufficiently varied (an absurdly bitter couple, a woman who goes completely blank whenever the men leave the room, an unbearably cutesy couple) that each gets its laughs.

A couple of sketches aren’t in the same league: one about a sexual encounter on a night shift in which the woman’s motivations aren’t clear enough, and another about a hillbilly town council meeting that relies primarily on visual stereotypes. But on the night I saw “Groundlings on Tap,” all was redeemed by the final improv, in which a boy band sang about an Orange County woman in the audience and even managed to get in a rhyming comment about that county’s 1994 bankruptcy.

Acme Comedy Theatre, a few blocks away from the Groundlings, uses the same format minus the improvs. The cast of the Acme Players’ show “Acme Doodle Dandy” has eight men and only two women, but the writing and performing are almost as sharp as at the Groundlings.

Jonna Tameses’ Frat Pink gets “Doodle Dandy” off to a rousing start. She plays a frat man who has gone through a sex change over summer vacation. Billy Wright is the manic equivalent of the Groundlings’ Rowley, and his first sketch is a satire not only of mime--an overdone target--but also the dim audiences that don’t quite understand mime. Bill Kessler and Robert Yasumura portray a car salesman and a customer whose bargaining positions move farther and farther apart--to ridiculous extremes.

At L.A. Connection, “Generation Sketch” is hobbled by poor pacing: 25 sketches with no intermission, and only a sound operator--no live band--to keep the energy up between sketches. The next to the last sketch (“Gina”), which should be one of the best, is the weakest. The group also could use a set designer to brighten the theater’s dark, scratched-up surfaces.

The performances are better than the writing at L.A. Connection, but there are signs of life in the sketches by Peter Fluet and Hal Rudnick, especially in Rudnick’s “Hallmark Moment” just before the above-mentioned “Gina.” The low point of the evening is a retro sketch in a lesbian bar, with a bearded man playing a woman.

*

“Groundlings on Tap,” 7307 Melrose Ave., L.A. Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 8 and 10 p.m. $18.50. (323) 934-9700. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

“Acme Doodle Dandy,” 135 N. La Brea Ave., L.A. Saturdays, 8 p.m. $15. (323) 525-0202. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

“L.A. Connection’s Generation Sketch,” 13442 Ventura Blvd. Sherman Oaks. Fridays, 7:45 p.m. $10. (818) 784-1868. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.