Columnist Lisa Ferguson: Kasten took the comedy road less traveled

Lisa Ferguson

Friday, Aug. 6, 2004 | 9 a.m.

"I never did my homework well in school," Hiram Kasten explains, "and it came back to bite me."

The actor/comedian hasn't necessarily had trouble as an adult attempting to tackle simple equations and the like. Instead, he's referring to his decision more than two decades ago to follow through with a stand-up act that swam straight against the mainstream-comedy tide.

In New York City during the early '80s, when his comedy cohorts -- including an up-and-coming Jerry Seinfeld -- were breaking ground with humor built on personal observations, Kasten held strong to a style of shtick similar to the sort favored by some of comedy's legends, with an act performed almost entirely off the cuff.

"Everybody went one way and I went this other way to where I was like an extension of the older guys -- even though I was younger -- like Alan King and Shecky Greene," Kasten, who performs through Sunday at Riviera Comedy Club, explained during a recent call from his Los Angeles home. He may be best known to local audiences for his nearly two-year-long stint as a Joey Bishop-like character in "The Rat Pack is Back" production show during its late-'90s run at the Desert Inn.

"People need to cubbyhole things in show business. They need to say, 'This is officially an ad-lib act.' I didn't say that," he says, adding that his stand-up act is "never done the same way twice; it's never the same exact order, sometimes not even what I'm gonna say first." He explains his ability onstage to "actually censor a joke, run it by my mind and change it" in less than a minute. "I don't know where that comes from. That certainly isn't taught."

Meanwhile, "I like telling 'joke-jokes' also. That was something that went against the tide of my generation." His fellow comics, he insists, "didn't like to tell regular jokes with a beginning, a middle and an end. They considered it old-fashioned, (but) the audience loves it."

In retrospect, he says, a proper label for his old-school style would likely have helped him garner one of the sitcoms that television-network execs were handing out like candy in recent decades to seemingly any stand-up comedian who could fog a mirror. He shot a 1987 TV pilot, titled "Dr. Paradise," which failed to be picked up.

"That was hard," the 40-something Kasten recalls of the attention that was being showered on his fellow comedians. "I was too dumb to be really jealous or envious ... I had to make believe that I wasn't thinking about it, or it didn't hurt."

"There were people that were given shows who couldn't act; who didn't have a personality." TV bigwigs, he says, "liked to pick guys who spoke more personally about their life. Tim Allen was just an itinerant comic and he did that thing about power tools, and he made that hog noise, which was funny ... Somewhere, someone figured out this could be made into a show."

A steady television gig would be a dream job for Kasten, who earned a theater degree in college and worked in off-Broadway plays before entering comedy in 1978, just prior to a comedy-club explosion experienced across the nation. That's when he and a slew of other Big Apple-based comics hit the road on weekends for performances throughout the East Coast.

Kasten also served as emcee at several New York clubs including Dangerfield's, where he spent five years hosting his own Sunday-night show.

One of his aspirations was to become "the next Johnny Carson. I thought, 'Well, they're gonna need a guy who can just talk about anything.' " He never did shake the acting bug: In '87, the Bronx native moved to Los Angeles in search of television work. It wasn't long before Kasten found it, and he's since enjoyed recurring roles on "Seinfeld" and "7th Heaven," as well as guest spots on "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "Mad About You" and "Everybody Loves Raymond," among a host of others.

His "big break" came with "The Rat Pack is Back." "It was a case of, they needed a guy who could do that style and it's supposed to be 1961. I didn't even have to audition. It was, 'Oh, get Hiram,' and everybody knew it was just right."

Despite the character's name being Joey, he insists the role was not meant to be a portrayal of Bishop.

"My wife said it was like Hiram meets the Rat Pack. ... It was very cosmic, the whole thing, and nobody quite understood how that could happen. I was playing me. So when they said I could wear a tux and I could smoke a cigarette, which I do anyway, and I could drink onstage, now I was in my element because it was everything that I'd seen on 'The Ed Sullivan Show' as a kid."

Kasten lists his vocation as "actor" as opposed to "comedian," and refuses to abandon his TV-star dreams. "I would do very well with being the funny, put-upon dad in a sitcom." But you won't catch him lamenting the directions his career might otherwise have gone. "This is what I'm supposed to be doing and ... I think there's very few people who can say they're where they're supposed to be at that moment."

Out for laughs

This summer's "Last Comic Standing" winner will not be crowned in Las Vegas. The NBC reality series last year taped its final "reveal" episode at Paris Las Vegas, during which comic Dat Phan was named champion. Earlier this year the show again moved into Le Theatre Des Arts and taped two episodes, when this season's funny contestants were selected. But network reps tell Laugh Lines that Season 2's final episodes -- set to air at 9 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday -- will be staged in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, rumors are circulating about the recently ordered third season of "Last Comic Standing," which may -- or may not -- begin airing later this month (the NBC folks have yet to officially confirm its slot on the upcoming fall schedule). There's talk on reality-TV Web sites, however, that the next installment may pit comedians from Season 1 against the jokesters from Season 2.

"Last Comic" fans may also find some interesting reading in this month's issue of online comedy 'zine Two Drink Minimum (formerly called Uproar; www.twodrinkmin.com). In an interview with Bonnie McFarlane -- the first contestant booted from the house this season -- the comedian explains her use of one obscenity in particular, which drew gasps from the audience (and a big ol' bleep from network censors), during her set featured in the contestant-selection episode taped at Paris Las Vegas.