Friday, Dec. 5, 2003 | 8:23 a.m.
Performing comedy at colleges has provided Kivi Rogers quite an education.
"You can go in and have the best situation, and you can have the worst, so I just go in thinking the worst ... and it can only come up from there," he explains of the oft-cramped campus venues and "dynamic" student-body audiences he encounters during the 60-plus school shows he performs nationwide each year.
It's not uncommon for the 40-year-old to find himself yukking it up "in a little lounge room, in a little cafeteria room where they ... put a nice, little platform with a microphone and some speakers, and you're doing a gig right there. You've got people running in and out of doors; you've got people in the back cooking, you've got to compete with a lot of things."
And then there are the showgoers. "You hit some places where you wonder, 'Are these people on the same intelligence level?' " Rogers said during a recent call from Philadelphia en route to a gig in Atlantic City.
He recalls a show at a school (he's blocked the name from his memory) in Bluefield, W.Va.: "It was one of the worst experiences. I was laughing because they were so clueless. They had one girl in the audience who wasn't from there -- she's cracking up ... Everyone else was looking at her with a big, 'Duh, I don't get it.' "
So what keeps the Los Angeles native coming back to institutions of higher learning?
"With the money they pay, you can pretty much endure it for that hour," he says.
In fact, the stipends are so terrific that Roger typically only performs at comedy clubs -- as he does through Sunday at The Improv at Harrah's -- when he has a break in his college-show schedule. (He'll record this weekend's Improv shows for potential use on a CD due early next year.)
"The market is so saturated now with comedians, and then you have so many mediocre comedians that really water down the money because they'll go in cheap" into a comedy club. In turn, he says, some club owners scoff at ponying up the proper payment for established comics. "Just as long as they get people in there to fill seats, they don't care how funny it is."
Rogers -- whose former career was in the computer industry -- can't afford to work for peanuts. After all, the father of four girls abandoned his day job 10 years ago to pursue comedy after co-workers coaxed the resident-office funny guy into going pro.
"They kept pushing me and prodding me for about five years, and I kept putting it off," he explains. One fellow worker was "really passionate about it, saying that I should go and do it, and that was the motivator."
The following week Rogers performed at an open-mike night in Whittier, Calif., and hasn't looked back.
"I was always a clown ... and it wasn't until those guys really started pushing me that I started considering" comedy as a career.
With an act built on material about his large family (he's No. 6 of seven children) and relationships, among other topics, Rogers likens his shtick style to the one practiced by comedy legend Bill Cosby, but with "a little bit more edge."
His "cheap dad" is the butt of many jokes. "I say, 'Everything was homemade, right down to my Schlitz Malt Liquor Beer-can walkie-talkies,' " Rogers jokes about his childhood. When he asked his pop for roller skates, the lad got a pair "made out of platform shoes. He didn't even get real skate wheels; he just took some gold wheels off an old couch. It was easy to spot me -- I was the one skating down the street, just spinnin' around."
Rogers made the leap into acting about six years ago, and has amassed an impressive list of film and television credits, including appearances in "Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion"; "Everybody Loves Raymond"; "Home Improvement"; "Dharma and Greg"; and "The West Wing."
"That was frantic, That was chaos," he recalls of working on the set of the Emmy Award-winning NBC drama "Wing."
"There's so much going on on that show ... They compress everything into a really short period of time. You see Martin Sheen, (but) you barely get to meet any of these people because everything is happening so quickly."
Twice Rogers has come this close to landing a sitcom of his own, in which he was set to portray -- surprisingly -- the straight guy surrounded by comic reliefs.
"I don't want to have to do the quirky stuff," he says. "I did at one point, but not anymore."
Unfortunately, neither project got the green light, but that won't stop Rogers from giving another show the old college try in the future.
"It's a continuous process," he explains. "You get opportunities and things happen and they don't get picked up, and you just keep trying to create."
Out for laughs
Beginning tonight and running through Dec. 13, Catch a Rising star at Excalibur is dark. Performances will resume Dec. 14, with a lineup featuring local comics Mike Saccone and Rob Sherwood.
Nick Gaza has made his presence known on the small screen, having appeared in a slew of sitcoms including "Becker," "Malcolm in the Middle," "The Drew Carey Show," "Greetings from Tucson" and "Grace Under Fire." See the funny man in the flesh tonight and Saturday at Palace Station's Laugh Trax.
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