Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Columnist Lisa Ferguson: Liberman leading charge to restore laughter

Avi Liberman has gone where most comics fear to tread.

This summer he and a trio of fellow funny guys performed a series of gigs in Israel, where ongoing political strife and random suicide bombings have largely silenced the laughter among citizens.

"I thought to myself, 'Why don't I try to boost morale a little bit?' " Israeli-born Liberman -- who plays through Sunday at The Improv at Harrah's -- recalls of organizing the shows at theaters in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Raanana. He and comics Wayne Federman, Dan Naturman and Gary Gulman performed their respective acts for hundreds of members of the nation's large American, Anglo-Saxon and English-speaking populations.

"I think they were just so primed to laugh and have a good time ... after all of the hardships that have been going on over there," Liberman said recently from his Los Angeles home. "I had a girl come up to me after our first show and she said, 'I just wanted to thank you. I haven't had anything to laugh about in over a year.' "

Such comments struck a chord with 32-year-old Liberman, who was born in the town of Nahariya. At age 4 he moved with his parents to the United States and was raised in Houston. After graduating college in New York, he headed west to California to pursue an acting career and, in the mid-'90s, stumbled into comedy via an open-mike night at an L.A. club. "As soon as I got offstage I knew that's what I wanted to do."

Some of his first big gigs were performing his act -- which features an array of voices and characters based on people he's met, and jokes formed from life experiences -- in Las Vegas, where he continues to play several times each year.

He continues to act and has appeared in several television commercials and sitcoms ("Dave's World," "Boston Common"). In December he'll be featured on an installment of Comedy Central's stand-up series "Premium Blend."

After vacationing in Israel in 2002, Liberman devised his plan to bring a comedy tour to the country. Convincing other comics to join him "was a challenge ... A lot of people were like, 'No, I don't think so.' "

Who could blame them? Recent coverage of the terrorism-plagued nation has been frequent, violent and horrifying. Nevertheless, "I think a lot of what you see in the media is over-hyped," Liberman says.

"A lot of the areas that they're reporting are bad, you don't go to anyway. I think a lot of it would be equivalent to if I were to film a crack deal in the middle of ... a really bad neighborhood with people shooting at each other and say, 'This is America.' I'm not lying -- it is, but that's not most of it. Gaza is a bad neighborhood; nobody would ever go to it."

Of paramount importance for the comics was "being careful," he says. "We didn't ride any buses -- that was kind of the deal we made. We took cabs ... To me it was just the aspect of going there to show people, 'Look, we're here, we're behind you, we're gonna try to provide some sense of joy for you.' "

The foursome didn't have to tweak their respective shticks much to suit audiences.

"At first we were all very nervous about how our acts were going to play," Liberman explains, "but, again, most of the people showing up there were Americans. It was just like doing your act at any other gig.

"As soon as we were done, people were like, 'You have to come back and do this again,' " he says. "We didn't have one bad show; nobody had one bad set."

The only negative experience, Liberman says, involved the shows' promoter. "The whole thing was kind of an experiment. He was left footing the bill for everything, because basically no artists are going (to Israel) now. He had major bands cancel on him two weeks before they were supposed to come," which resulted in scant funds with which to properly advertise the comedy tour, among other expenses. To help subsidize some of those costs, Liberman is organizing a comedy fund-raiser, to be held Nov. 20 at The Improv in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile he is in the process of starting The Israel Comedy Arts Fund, a nonprofit organization he hopes will raise "a constant amount of funds" so the stand-up tour can come through the country every few months. Plans are also in the works for Liberman and other comics to return to Israel for another set of shows in late December.

Still, there's no convincing Liberman that restoring laughter in his homeland is groundbreaking work. "There are a lot of comedians who will do USO tours and entertain the troops. I didn't see it too much different than that," he says.

"It's new in the sense that I don't think anything like this has ever been done before and we certainly learned some things from it ... For me, it was great to bring comedians who had never been there before -- to show them the country. Almost everybody who goes there falls in love with it immediately."

Out for laughs

It was announced last week that Wayne Newton will receive the Bob Hope Lifetime Service Award at the Las Vegas Comedy Festival, being held Wednesday through Nov. 2 at Stardust. Also scheduled to be honored are Rita Rudner (Las Vegas Comedian of the Year Award); The Smothers Brothers (Las Vegas Comedy Festival Career Achievement Award) and The Improv-chain owner Budd Friedman (Steve Allen Pioneer of Comedy Award).

Meanwhile, the winners of the Las Vegas auditions for the Laugh Across America contest -- being held in conjunction with the festival -- were also announced: Perry Bruno (in the Youth category); John Beede (College); and Rob Sherwood (Mainstream), a longtime comic who performs often at local comedy clubs and lounges. From Aug. 30 through Oct. 15, amateur and professional comics in 15 cities competed in eight categories. The final winners from each category will perform in a special show at Stardust, among other prizes.

Dane Cook -- men's magazine Ramp ranked him the Sexiest Comic in America, while both Maxim and Stuff named him Comedian of the Year -- headlines today through Sunday at Paris Las Vegas Theatre des Arts. Cook, who has appeared in his own Comedy Central special and on the puppet series "Crank Yankers," can also be seen in the upcoming action flick "Torque."

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