Time is everything on the laugh track

Ken Bright, a gym teacher in Little Rock, Ark., had a serious problem with one of his students. The class clown, a fifth-grader named Lil JJ, was always cracking jokes on everybody in class. He could bust up a whole class, wrestle the attention away from teachers.

Bright’s problem? He couldn’t stop laughing.

“He’d be ragging on other teachers, right there in class,” Bright, 32, says. “I knew I shouldn’t laugh, but I couldn’t help it.”

Fortunately, Bright had a solution: Put the little comedian on stage.

Bright stuck JJ in front of an open mike at a poetry reading. He slayed. Then Bright started writing material for the boy and helping him with his delivery, honing the craft in Little Rock clubs. Eventually, with the blessing of JJ’s mother, Bright quit teaching to become JJ’s manager, and they took the show on the road.

It’s paid off.

Two years later, at 13, JJ is among the country’s youngest stand-ups, the darling of the Black Entertainment Television reality show “Coming to the Stage,” a talent search for comedians. JJ (his real name is James Lewis) is the prohibitive favorite to win a one-year contract with a Hollywood talent agency, a walk-on role on a UPN sitcom and a trip to Jamaica. He has a Web site (www.liljj.com) that sells Lil JJ T-shirts for $15, and he’s doing shows nationwide.

He helped fill the historic Lincoln Theatre in Washington on a recent night. Deborah Wells went to the show just to see JJ. She speaks about him as if he were her own son.

“Every Tuesday at 9 p.m., I’m racing home to see him on TV,” says Wells. “He’s survived nine weeks. Nine weeks! He hangs so tough with the big guys.” Viewers will learn results of the talent search Jan. 13.

Adolescents love him too, girls especially. He has a nonthreatening boy-next-door look, but he dresses with just enough edge to make him hip: the requisite LeBron James-style headband, shoes without laces and sagging pants.

At the Lincoln, JJ blows them away. He has wonderful timing and a command of the audience uncanny in someone so young. Dante Carter, a comedian who has performed on Russell Simmons’ “Def Comedy Jam,” watches from the wings and sees something special in JJ. “He has the stage presence of a veteran,” Carter says. “You can’t teach that.... He’s just one of those childhood phenoms.”

JJ does bits about childhood: his crack-head bus driver; how adults lie about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Daddy’s jail time, and the reason black kids run faster than white kids (to avoid beatings).

It’s pretty sophisticated stuff and, until you know better, you wonder how a seventh-grader could come up with it all. The answer, of course, is that Bright still writes most of JJ’s material.

Now that JJ has entered the other world of child performers, he’s taught by Bright and another tutor.

His mom, cosmetologist Tonya Frazier, 31, misses him, but she calls all the time, she says. Besides, except for busy holidays, he’s usually gone only on the weekends. At home in Little Rock, she says, he’s got to clean his room and take out the trash like other kids.