The Smartest You’ll Ever Laughsm
March 23, 2003: Los Angeles Times: They've surely got a degree of humor
A series of showcases at the Improv is testing the mettle of Ivy
League graduates who want to do stand-up comedy.
By Lori Gottlieb, Special to The Times
"Oh, no--there's lots of white people!" quips Michael Junior, a
young African American comedian, as he gives the packed house at the
Improv a once-over.
Junior, who recently appeared on The Tonight Show With Jay
Leno, is right. It's almost midnight at the Melrose Avenue comedy
club, and the mostly twentysomething, mostly white audience members
have something else in common: an Ivy League degree. They've come to
see their peers--those who chose joke-telling over medicine or
investment banking--in the third of a series of "All-Ivy" showcases
featuring stand-ups with diplomas from the likes of Harvard, Yale and
Princeton.
"My parents were like, 'You could have done anything--why
this?'" says Andrea Savage, a Cornell graduate who has the Improv
audience howling at her unapologetic admission of self-absorption: "I
want people inconvenienced when I die!"
Although she writes sketch comedy and has guest-starred on
Suddenly Susan and Good Morning, Miami, Savage recalls that "there
was a period when my dad would send me business school applications
and ask why I picked the one career that has no guarantee."
Show business may not offer guarantees, but when it comes to TV
series gigs or the ultimate pot of gold--the development deal--doing
stand-up isn't a bad insurance policy. According to Katie O'Connell,
vice president of comedy programming at Imagine Television, gone are
the days when the "Harvard Mafia" dominated the credit roll at the
end of every sitcom.
Now, agrees ICM literary agent Michael Rizzo, an Ivy League
degree and sample scripts often need bolstering by live performance.
"The stereotype of the brainy kids being socially awkward and
reclusive tends to have some truth to it," Rizzo explains. "But when
they can connect with an audience, that's great, because often their
joke-telling is so smart."
Smart indeed. At a recent Ivy League showcase, audiences were
left to decipher punch lines like, "That makes me heterozygous for
having no soul"--Harvard graduate Daley Haggar's sardonic take on
having one atheist and one Catholic parent. But Stu Golfman, the
Improv's talent coordinator, who admires Haggar's irreverent style,
cautioned that "she can get into trouble with her education. She used
to have a Thomas Pynchon reference in her set, and I had to tell her,
'No one gets this.'"
Haggar, who wrote for South Park and hopes to land more series
work, finds stand-up important for testing her material. "I wrote a
novel for my college thesis, which was horrible--it was one of those
postmodern disasters that mercifully wasn't shown to the public," she
says. "But when you show your work onstage, you quickly learn what
works and what doesn't."
What doesn't work, insists Marty Belafsky, who uses broad
physical comedy in his act and has opened for Rodney Dangerfield in
Las Vegas, is telling audiences that he went to Brown. "It goes
against my whole act of being a moron," says the self-deprecating,
reed-thin 27-year-old, whose height appears to be inversely
proportional to his width. "And besides, once you say you've gone to
a fancy school, some people think you're spoiled."
"That's a naive stereotype," says Richard Claflin, vice
president of comedy programming at ABC and a 1992 Harvard graduate.
"I didn't go to school with the ascot-wearing, martini-swilling set."
But Lesley Wolff, a University of Pennsylvania alumna and
producer of the "All-Ivy" series, admits that if comedy is said to
come from tragedy, many Ivy Leaguers are underachievers in the angst
category.
Wolff's act, in fact, revolves around the problem of having no
problems.
"Part of my shtick is that I'm this person who has to create
angst," she says. "I do a bit about how, despite all I've achieved
academically, being a teen mentor gives me an inferiority complex. I
mean, what could I possibly offer to an at-risk teen? I'm an
unemployed comedian. What kind of role model is that?"
Mining for angst
Faith Salie, a Rhodes scholar and Harvard graduate who became a
finalist for this year's HBO/Aspen Comedy Festival, can relate.
"People who go to these schools have a secret fear that they may have
peaked in college, so that's where a lot of the comedy comes from,"
she says. "It's not, 'I'm so smart, here are my observations on the
world,' but 'I went to this great school, and now I'm a big screw-up.'"
ICM's Rizzo isn't worried about Ivy Leaguers having it too
easy. "One of the hardest things is to put yourself out there and
control the room," he says. "If you haven't had angst before you
started, you'll definitely have it after."
Even for well-received comics like Princeton's Pedro Hernandez--
who opens his set with a joke about being a black kid in Detroit
cursed with a Hispanic name--there's also the angst of playing the
comparison game. "A lot of my friends from college are about to
graduate from law school, and they're looking at six figures right
now. I don't get that kind of guarantee." Armed with a degree in
architecture, Hernandez can always fall back on a design career, but
he hopes Plan A will work out.
"Hope is a great thing," says the Improv's Golfman. "These kids
haven't experienced much failure, and they don't want to be some
'bad' road comic. They want to be the next Seinfeld." Or Ivy League
successes like Conan O'Brien, Bill Maher, Talk Soup's Aisha Tyler and
The Daily Show's Lewis Black.
Still, says ABC's Claflin, "Executives don't care where comedy
writers went to school. The only time an agent might mention a
client's Ivy League affiliation is when there's an opening on Frasier
and the agent might say, 'My client went to Harvard, so he'll
understand effete references.'"
But Claflin adds that doing stand-up can give Ivy Leaguers
"street cred"--especially when they're seen by non-Ivy industry types
like Saturday Night Live's Chris Parnell, comedian Chris Hardwick and
Andrew Green, a former producer on Suddenly Susan, all of whom sat in
the audience.
"It's sort of like networking for the intelligentsia,"
Harvard's Salie says wryly of the "All-Ivy" series, which continues
next month at the Comedy Union. Salie also finds the camaraderie of
her peers to be a welcome respite from the cutthroat stand-up world.
Sure, the same people who once vied for the highest SAT score now
compete with equal fervor for their big break, but Salie feels that
bonding with fellow Ivy Leaguers tames her competitive instincts.
Well, mostly.
"I still want the Harvard comics to be funnier than those from
Yale," she concedes. "But maybe that's just because Yale rejected me.
Twice."