A funny thing happened on the way to stardom

Comedians know audiences laugh in a variety of ways, and almost all of them are disappointing -- the polite laugh, the embarrassed laugh, the strained laugh, the obligatory laugh.

So it was with hidden excitement this weekend that Seth Thomas and Paul Thomas performed their street-corner parody of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” at HBO’s 11th annual Comedy Arts Festival, replacing baseball-player references with profane nicknames of drug dealers. The excitement came from the realization that the routine was taking about 25% longer: waves of uncontrollable laughter -- the only acceptable kind -- were forcing the comedians to slow down. And this was at 4 p.m. Friday inside a tent set up at a city park.

For a pair of Chicago-based guys who perform as the Defiant Thomas Brothers, guys in their early 30s who still work day jobs as a teacher and a teacher’s aide, guys without a manager, guys with 2 1/2 hours of polished skits but without any current bookings -- for guys like these, the moment was overwhelming. And it was going to get better.

A couple of hours earlier, in the same tent, the same kind of laughter descended upon another Chicago performer named Rebecca Drysdale. She was updating Dr. Seuss’ “The Sneetches.” Drysdale turned the snobbery between bare-bellied and green-star-bellied creatures into a feud between two stereotypes of lesbians. Each side fell prey to a salesman who sold them on a machine that changed their style until all were hopelessly changed and confused. The tale grew with Seussian exaggeration until it, and the audience, exploded. For Drysdale, too, this was going to get better.

If you’d done an Internet search before last weekend, you would have found about a dozen small mentions of Drysdale and the Defiant Thomas Brothers. Yet there was a certain fearlessness that won both acts small knots of fans and kudos in alternative weeklies. HBO’s festival-talent producer, Kirsten Ames, asked both to come to New York to compete for a chance to do three sets in Aspen. Both won, and headed for the six-day affair that allows agents to watch a dozen comics a day and still pay homage to stars like Jim Carrey and catch the Cheech and Chong reunion.

The first thing people notice about the Defiant Thomas Brothers is that one (Paul) is tall and white and the other (Seth) is black. The first thing the Thomases do is try to make the audience forget. After their drug-dealer skit, they began tossing a football. Paul was the father. Seth was the 17-year-old son who talked enthusiastically of being a grown-up, and the father obliterated every hope with world-weary metaphors.

“Dad, I can’t wait to vote!”

“Son, voting is like going into a pornography store. You go into a booth so that when you come out nobody knows what you did.”

“Dad, I’ll be able to join the military!”

“Son, joining the military is like being a stripper. You get hollered at, but it’s a good way to pay for college.”

Then they were next-door neighbors, swapping advice on where to hire good home maintenance, recommending companies whose abbreviations were ethnic slurs. What was funny about the Thomases was their willingness to follow that bit with a song about the one group they hadn’t yet touched: “We don’t bite the hand that feeds.... One thing we know: Presumed anti-Semites don’t get their own network show.”

Drysdale, meanwhile, was getting big laughs for her portrayal of a 13-year-old girl being bat mitzvahed against her will. The humor, she said offstage, lay in her belief that “everyone has something like that in their childhood, something they were blindly forced to do.” Her character, standing at a lectern, spoke in a stilted, candid voice:

“”Sophie and Walter, thank you for being here even though you are so visibly close to death ... I blindly mouth these words to an ancient promise in a language I will never know.... The Torah portion, translated from the original Hebrew, means about as much to me as the original Hebrew.”

These moments stood out to many audience members who had been subjected to lesser talents at several clubs and theaters in Aspen. For every Drysdale or Defiant Thomas Brothers, a visitor was subjected to mediocre observational humor, such as:

“When you’re growing up, it’s hard to tell if you’re good at hide and seek or people just don’t like you.”

“Have you ever noticed how many bad presidents have ‘George Bush’ in their names?”

“I’m going to jail because it’s a gated community.”

HBO’s roots are in stand-up comedy, but organizers take pains to make the festival broader, exhibiting comedic films, documentaries and special programs. Stand-up, said Pat Tourk Lee, an executive producer of the festival, “is the easiest form of comedy.” Yet it is also, Lee said a few moments later in an interview, when the talk turned to the pressure of standing naked before an audience, “the hardest thing in the world. There’s no support.”

Paul Thomas was born in Wisconsin, Seth Thomas in Oakland and Rebecca Drysdale in Ohio. They wound up in Chicago because that is where the temple of comedy -- the Second City -- is located.

Paul and Seth had seen each other work in separate Second City training programs. Three years ago, they met at a Black History Month theater program. Paul -- the only white guy -- was portraying a man in an interracial relationship.

“We’re backstage, we’re cracking jokes, things are starting to click,” Seth said. “We kind of formed this brotherhood.” Paul, who has a master’s in sports administration but threw it away for showbiz in 1999, was wackier. Seth, who studied theater at Clark Atlanta University, had a better grasp of stagecraft. The named their act for “The Defiant Ones,” the Tony Curtis-Sidney Poitier movie about fugitives handcuffed together.

By 2003 they’d put out a CD, were performing at a club in Chicago and wangling invites to comedy festivals. While their mixed-race appearance was the first thing people saw, they took pains to limit the topic.

“It’s something we’re literally over,” Seth said. “We’re not that America anymore. I’m so tired of hearing that voice” -- he imitated the nasal, emotionless tone that black comics often use to mock whites. “Whites don’t sound like that any more. Every white person I’ve met here is like: ‘Shaddup, Dogg!’ The culture is so much smaller now.”

Still, their backgrounds allow them great power when they want to touch race. Among their skits last week was a movie scene in which a white cop about to arrest a black suspect is supposed to use the N-word but cannot make himself do it, much to the disgust of the black actor. They also created dueling monologues in which a white soldier talked about feeling close to several black infantrymen and one of the infantrymen exposed the white soldier as self-deluded.

Drysdale, 26, had a family connection. Her brother Eric, 10 years her senior, is a comedian. Before she finished high school she was performing. She was impressive enough to win a coveted job as a Second City regular, which pays enough to avoid a day job. HBO’s Ames marveled at the quality of her writing. “Becky is like a perfect ‘Saturday Night Live’ performer.”

The buzz started. On Friday night Drysdale was plucked from obscurity -- she was invited to perform at a midnight show organized by Catherine O’Hara. The order of performers was: O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Cheech and Chong and Drysdale, who wrote a mock self-congratulatory song about why she didn’t belong there. Part of her acted like she belonged there. “And the other part of me took the running [performance] order off the stage and put it in my bag and called my Dad.”

Saturday, the panel of industry experts who judged live performances gave the Defiant Thomas Brothers the “best sketch” award for their “Who’s on First?” parody. The panel gave Rebecca Drysdale one better. It created a new category -- the Breakout Award -- and made her the first recipient.

“Agents are asking me out to lunch to get to Becky,” Ames said late Saturday night.

“It’s just crazy,” Drysdale said. “It’s like one of those dreams that puts you in a good mood for a week. But it’s real.”