late These Jotes...Please!
by Jayson Q. Wechter
Thirty-eight people in one room vying for
laughs is either a class of fifth graders whose
teacher has stepped out, or the Third Annual
San Francisco International Open Stand-Up
Comedy Competition. Held this September, it
drew professional and amateur comedians
from as far away—450 miles—as Anaheim.
California. Just as in the classroom, some of
their jokes had folks gagging on laughter,
while others sank like teamster officials in wet
cement.
The contestants included a fellow who
stripped from construction-worker.garb down to
stockings and garter belts and stuffed piles of
candy into his mouth; a wheelchair-bound
comedian who made jokes about his affliction;
an ecological comic who combined one-liners
with pollution warnings; and a young man
who demonstrated the many inventive things
you can do with a lamp.
Their efforts were directed at a very
unfunny $3,000 in prize money, with judges like
comedians George Carlin and Jay Leno rating
their routines. And, of course, there w as the
exposure, which is as valuable to a comedian as
bottled water from the fountain of youth.
The contest included five weeks of
preliminary and semi-final rounds at seven
different Bay Area clubs, plus a finals night at
The Old Waldorf which sold out three weeks
in advance.
The audience was suspecting—and
rightfully so—that they might catch
someone as hot as Robin Williams, star of the
ABC comedy series Mark & Mindy, who got his
comic start in San Francisco and placed
second in the comedy competition two years
ago, when television scouts raided its corps of
local talent to recruit Williams and Jim
Giovanni. Bill Rafferty and Nancy Bleiweiss tor
Laugh-In and Lou Felder for Fernanod2Sight.
Contenders in this year’s competition hoped
that some of them might also be drafted for
network duty. In fact, one night’s performance
started late to accommodate the talent scout
from The Tomght Show who'd flown up from L.A.
for the occasion.
The finals night, emceed by actor and
comedian Dick Shawn, featured guest
appearances by Robin Williams and Jav Leno.
Leno served on the judge’s panel along with
George Carlin, actress Debralee Scott of Mary
Hartman. Mary Hartman, actor Jack Riley of The
Bob Newhart Show and sev eral local
columnists. They rated comedians on stage
presence, technique, delivery; response,
rapport and material.
When the results were tallied the first prize of
SI.000 went to Mark McCollum, a native San
Franciscan who’d been performing in local
clubs and coffeehouses for two years. His
twenty-minute blend of musical comedy and
impressions—covering everyone from Elmer
Fudd to the Bee Gees—was polished in the
style cff true cabaret entertainment, and his
impersonations were so on target they might
as well have been Memorex. He told how he
hadn't seen Saturday Sight Fever 'til it piayed in
Chinatown, then lapsed into a hilarious
pidgin-Chinese rendition of “Staying Alive.” He
talked about the opposition his father had to
his career. “He was so negative, he could
jump-start a Mack truck just by opening the
crux; mancvso
hood and saying ‘Son of a bitch.’ " He
revamped the Who's “Pinball Wizard” into a
story of his job as a supermarket checker, and
finished his act with a perfect mimicking of
Popeye and Olive Oyl in the
sack—accomplished chiefly through the use of
sound effects. His obvious skill and
professionalism overshadowed any doubts
about whether he was really a “stand-up
comic,” and the twenty-seven year old
McCollum won out over Marty Cohen and
Jack Marion, both sharp, funny, L.A.-based
comedians with more conventional Las
Vegas-stvle routines, who placed second and
third, respectively.
Other contestants included Sid Rosenbloom,
a polio-stricken comedian whose routine
consisted largely of wheelchair jokes (“W'hat do
people in wheelchairs do when they’re alone in
a room together? Get up and stretch”), and
Daryl Henriques, heard regularly on KSAN-FM
as “The Swami from Miami” and “Joe
Carcinogeni—The Purple Poisoner,
recommending the poison that’s right for you.”
Few of the contestants make their living
with comedy; Mitch Krug, who placed
fourth, claimed to have started in the business
as “an industrial comedian” telling jokes to
factory workers and getting “a piecework
rate of five cents a laugh.”
Most make the rounds of a half-dozen small
local clubs like The Other Cafe and the Holy
City Zoo, which feature" regular comedy nights
as well as open mikes for neophyte comedians
to gain practice. Frank Kidder, a local
comedian who ran a comedy night in the
basement of a church coffeehouse for several
years, started the Comedy Competition in
1976 to increase the visibility of comedians in
the Bay Area and draw bigger audiences.
Comedy, he said, has always “come up big”
after wars and national disasters (like
Watergate), and the overwhelming success of
comics like Steve Martin and shows like
Saturday Sight Live is natural, since audiences are
looking for a sense of comic relief.
The young comedians' material, for the
most part, is cleaner and less intellectual than
that of their predecessors a decade or two ago.
Routines about politics, marriage, human
relationships and social problems have given
way to material focused on TV shows and
commercials, new age lifestyles, and, of
course, drugs. The tone of the humor is sillier,
with flippant, almost burlesque-like
characterizations, rather than more detailed
sketches dealing with character-types of the sort
Mike Nichols and Elaine May made famous.
But their jokes are still funny, and they
work as hard as ever to get the laughs.
“The laughs are at the heart of it,"
remarked one comedian. “The contest is fine,
but in the end it’s the laughs that count.
They’re what this business is ail about.” <Hi
Jayson Hechter is an excahdnier from Sew York who
now hoes in San Francisco and writes foe magazines
including Cracked, Sick and New West He’s
working on a musical comedy about the Alaska Pipeline.
“sort of like ()klahoma, only with polar hears.” Gregg
Mancusn attended the i'mversity of Massachusetts and
Syracuse L'mversity, attaining las degree in journalism,
before moving to San Francisco and enjoying the life of a
free lance photog