Sunday, April 23, 2006 | 8:45 a.m.
In the back lounge of the bowling alley, or the smoky bar next to the dry cleaner in the mini-mall, or the talent showcase held every Tuesday night at the Elks Lounge in Anywhere USA, you'll find them. They are the stand-up comedians of yesteryear and the hopefuls of tomorrow, and they're playing somewhere near you, wherever you live.
Nine times out of 10 they bill themselves as "Straight from Las Vegas," or "Soon to open in Lake Tahoe," or "Recently played to packed houses in Reno."
No one ever bothers to verify these claims. There's no point in rubbing it in.
Dropping Nevada's name is supposed to give instant credibility to a comic, despite the fact that he is currently working for the crumpled lettuce sympathetic patrons stuff in the fishbowl on the piano.
The bartender smiles as he watches the comedian stick two five-spots in the bowl before the first show. He knows that big dreams seldom come true. He had a few of his own years ago.
But every now and then, maybe one in 5,000 cases, a comic breaks out of the back room and into the big time. Through equal measures of talent and resilience - the tough-hidedness that comes from enduring years of hecklers and bad microphones and friends asking him gently when he plans to get a real job - the comic jokes his way to the main showrooms of Nevada.
The secret, once he gets there, is the same as it's been all along - make 'em laugh. But for every George Wallace or Jeff Foxworthy or Larry the Cable Guy, there are thousands of Billy Petarskys, a kid I grew up with in Spokane who dreamed of becoming Bill Cosby but instead never rose much above the status of being the third of seven Petarsky children.
I guess the one thing that keeps many of these dreamers from changing careers is that it doesn't take much to be the funniest person in Sheboygan. And even when you bomb in Sheboygan, you can still play Sheboygan. But if you bomb in Las Vegas, you get blown out of the state forever.
Some talented comedians never adapt to showroom comedy. The late Ted Knight, for one, was a terrific television comic. He had great timing, a dependable variety of facial expressions that worked well in close-ups, and a distinctive voice that defined his character. But he was not a good storyteller, and he was accustomed to getting more than one take if he blew his lines.
On his first showroom gig in Las Vegas, Knight bombed as an opening act and threw in the towel. He admitted as much in an interview at the time. "I thought, hey, I'm a comic actor," he said. "Of course I can do Vegas. I was wrong."
And when Knight returned to the comfort zone of television, he had another hit series.
A similar case was Anthony Clark. At the time we saw him perform at the Sahara in the mid '90s, he was starring in a popular TV show called "Boston Common." He was hilarious in it. But Clark's live gig to a half-filled room in Las Vegas was a bust. You couldn't believe you were watching the same performer.
So Clark returned to the sitcom world, and his current series "Yes, Dear" is a big hit.
An opposite case is Shecky Greene, the long-time Las Vegas resident who in his prime was the best stand-up comedian I've ever seen. Greene was the flip side to Knight and Clark in that his comedy didn't translate well to television. Greene's style was to tell long, winding stories that circled back to punch lines and key words.
When you watched Greene in a one-hour performance, you left knowing you'd seen a comic genius. His style simply required more than the three to five minutes allowed in the impatient world of television.
The late Bill Willard, a long-time reviewer of Vegas shows, recalled a night the comedian rose from the dead.
"He was up there doing his routine and nothing was hitting, so he laid down flat on his back, folded his arms across his chest, stared up at the ceiling and just kept on with his spiel. Well, Buddy Hackett was in the audience, and he came onstage and lay next to Shecky. And Victor Borge followed suit. The three of them were just lying there lined up, staring up into the lights, shooting the bull. The audience went nuts."
No Las Vegas headlining comedian has more locally relevant anecdotes than Greene, who best exemplified the joy and torture of doing stand-up comedy for a living. Here's just one:
"There was a bell captain named Ray at a hotel I was playing," he once told me in an interview. "He was an alcoholic who liked to squeal on another alcoholic, namely me. As soon as I'd walk out of the hotel after my last show, about 2:30 in the morning, he'd call the cops and tell them I was leaving the hotel drunk. They'd always pull me over and hassle me a little.
"So one night I'm with a woman who later becomes my wife, and she's driving. The cop pulls us over and he walks around to the passenger side and has me roll down the window.
"Hey, you're going pretty fast, aren't you?" he says to me.
"I say, 'I'm not driving.'
"The woman says, 'He's not driving.'
"The cop says to her, 'You stay out of this!'
"I say, 'What is this, England?' I don't have a steering wheel in front of me.'
"He finally gives her the ticket, but I get the lecture."
Perhaps Greene's grandest memory, one that can be savored by comedians playing everywhere from Caesars Palace to Mom's Diner, sums up all the rage and desperation that comes with the profession.
Back in the early '60s Greene was playing the lounge at the Riviera, and night after night it was packed with admirers and many other headliners, who frequently caught Greene's act between their own performances. Just before the final show of a two-week stint, Greene was informed that the next day the room would be converted into a Keno parlor.
Greene came out on cue with a pickax, chopped the stage into kindling, and gave the pieces of wood to his fans for souvenirs. The next morning, Riviera owner Ed Torres, unaware of what had transpired the previous night, called Greene with the good news: "Guess what, Sheck?" he said. "We've decided to keep the lounge open another month."
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