Routine, but funny, hazards

IT’S not normal, this business of comedy. Countless are the depravations and humiliations that come with the gig; it’s hard to fathom why so many try to succeed at it. Few ever make it beyond the open-mike stage, and this is one of those diabolical occupations in which its practitioners find new ways to bomb on a nightly basis. And for the aspiring stand-up, there are few things worse than the dreaded seedy nightclub tour. Right now, there are countless comics holed up in cheap motels all across America, desperately clinging to their sanity while working dingy beer-stink rooms for gas money.

Mark Schiff, the co-editor (along with fellow comic Ritch Shydner) of this very funny anthology of road stories from professional comics, gives us some idea of just how deep into Dante’s circles of hell most comics find themselves when performing. If you want to pay homage to the folks in the book, writes Schiff, “get a bottle of cheap wine (but pay $75 for it), deep-fry a pound of mold-tinged mozzarella, place thirty lighted cigarettes next to your chair and, with the windows shut tight, sit back and enjoy these frequently hilarious glimpses into how hard it is to keep smiling while trying to make others laugh.”

“I Killed” comes at a propitious moment. In the annals of groan-worthy bombs, Michael Richards’ flameout at the Laugh Factory will probably go down as the mother of them all. Fortunately, this very funny book is more interested in more benign subject matter: crooked promoters, sexed-up waitresses, that kind of thing. There’s racism and bigotry aplenty, but it’s all hecklers, and the vituperation never escalates into a full-blown diatribe from the comics. All of them have the presence of mind to disengage from any nastiness with a few cutting bons mots.

In order to quell a multi-pronged attack from a number of audience members, Peter J. Fogel asks if they can “all huddle and come up with one thought.” When someone in Carol Leifer’s audience takes offense to a joke about gays and the pope, Leifer asks, “Who do you think designs all his outfits?”

For the aspiring masochist, there are a number of solid lessons to be learned from this book. For one, avoid the South whenever possible. There are lots of cringe-inducing stories in “I Killed” about various klansmen and other benighted souls taking offense to gay comics or making lewd gestures to female stand-ups. Openly gay comic Ant tells one anecdote about being verbally harassed by an Arkansas crowd that thought it was getting Antler, an off-color comic. Fortunately, his safety was assured when a man named Bubba (“it was tattooed on his left arm”) picked him up and spirited him away in his pickup.

But that’s the great thing about America: There’s abuse and humiliation to be found everywhere. Richard Lewis finds it as an opening act for Sonny and Cher. One day at a Pennsylvania fairground, Lewis has to tell jokes to a crowd “a quarter of a mile away from me” with a giant roller coaster behind him. “I had to time my punch lines

No one except a comedian (or maybe a politician) can turn a crowd into a lynch mob with one tasteless barb. Bob Goldthwait had a tough time at a gig opening for the band Nirvana, and a rotten joke about Michael Jordan’s deceased father at a Chicago show created “a tsunami of primitive verbal rage. Clear voices yelling ‘Kill him!’ popped out at me from this wall of fury.” Goldthwait needed a security escort to get out of there.

Of course, verbal and physical abuse is the mother’s milk of comedy. You can almost sense the relish with which these comics recount their trials by hellfire. These are the endurance rituals of the battle-tough warriors. If they can survive wayward gunshots, beer showers and the like, they will be ready for anything.

It’s good material, after all.

*

Marc Weingarten is the author of “The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion and the New Journalism Revolution.”