Kids, if you want to be famous, don't try stand-up comedy. Sure, it worked for Jerry Seinfeld and Drew Carey and, at least for a while, Ellen DeGeneres, but at what cost? Traveling from town to town, standing in front of a brick wall, yelling like a crazy person, delivering the same jokes night after night--what kind of life is that? Being a comic is being in show business only in the way that being a bowler is being in professional sports. And much like a bowler, you will have groupies, but they will look like the Nanny. Within this Comedy Hell there are four circles, and probably a couple of levels and bolgias too, but we don't have time to get into that. Let's just say that in the first circle are comics negotiating TV deals; in the second are comics whose agents claim they're negotiating TV deals; then there are comics playing clubs like the Improv in Los Angeles and Catch a Rising Star in New York City; and at the bottom, comics who play the other clubs, which don't pay them money. There are no comics who don't want TV deals, only comics who say they don't want TV deals because they don't have TV deals. Onstage this line kills. Trust me.
Everyone at this year's Just for Laughs festival in Montreal--the comic equivalent of the PBA championships--designed his or her act for the television execs in the audience. The art of telling jokes died with the comedy glut of the '80s, and in its place has grown not the rarefied, cerebral, arch alternacomedy that Janeane Garofalo, HBO's Mr. Show and Andy Kaufman-reincarnation Andy Dick have hyped but two much simpler comedic forms: characters and physical gags--the two forms that TV houses most comfortably. Cable has created an endless number of Comedy Central-ready troupes: there are 50 sketch groups in Toronto alone. The cleverest of them, like L.A.'s sketch-comedy and a capella troupe the But Franklies, try to expand the genre. The rest are busy perfecting Limp Boy.
The scene in Montreal in late July included lots of late-night shots of whiskey, 100 comics being ignored by the public while Emmanuel Lewis (TV's Webster) signed autographs and veteran dork-for-hire comic Kevin Meaney dropped his fake high voice to brag about a development meeting. The business of comedy was summed up by festival standout Mitch Hedberg, who was introduced as a comedian "seen on David Letterman." He said, "Four million people watch that show, and I don't know where the hell they are. I believe more people have seen me at the store. Which would be a better introduction: 'You might have seen this next comedian at the store.' And people would say, 'Hell, yes, I have.'" Nevertheless, after Montreal, Hedberg signed a development deal with Fox. Herewith a sampling of comics you've never heard of but who very well may be about to be employed by another really bad sitcom.
SEAN CULLEN, 32 Circle of Hell: II Seems like: A sleep-deprived Steve Martin Next Seinfeld? Next buddy of next Seinfeld