Philadelphia Inquirer Dated June 7, 2002
Classes where teachers want students to joke around
By Addam Schwartz
Inquirer Staff Writer
What do you call a school where everyone's a class clown?
If you're a teacher, you call it a nightmare. But if you're a comedy-club impresario, you call it a success.
The Comedy Cabaret chain runs a humor workshop and comedy class, while Steve and Dolly Garber, who own two area clubs, operate the Comedy College.
Forget about an apple for the teacher. In keeping with the slapstick tradition, make it a banana peel.
So who shows up for Wisecracking 101? A bunch of middle-aged guys in Groucho glasses, tugging their neckties in best Rodney Dangerfield style?
"I've had barristers," says stand-up comic Joey Callahan, who teaches the Comedy Cabaret course with colleague Pat O'Donnell. "I've had doctors. I've had crazy people." But they had one thing in common: "They're just people who have a good sense of humor and want to learn how to go onstage and tell a joke."
The same prerequisite applies at Comedy College, Dolly Garber says. "There are some people who are naturally funny. They have to be taught how to refine that... . They have to learn how to write comedy. They have to learn how to work an audience. They have to learn how to handle rejection."
That's one lesson Jim Thomas took to heart: You can't worry about bombing onstage, he says, "because everybody bombs."
Thomas, 42, a Skippack trade-publication editor, signed up for Callahan's class last fall hoping to develop his public-speaking skills. As it turned out, something else developed. "I started right away going to open-mike nights, and that went well... . A few weeks after the class was over, I started getting work pretty regularly."
For an open-mike regular who makes the crowds - and club owners - laugh, those free performances can lead to the paying kind, from a five-minute guest spot to, ultimately, a headlining gig.
Other students agree that the classes were good for a laugh, and more. "Each week they had a different guest speaker, a different working comedian, and I learned a lot of stuff," said Mike Clements, 46, a SEPTA bus driver from Lawndale who attended Comedy College last year and now performs regularly at area clubs.
Alumni frequently turn up at open-mike nights, which serve as class reunions for comedy students, only with familiar punch lines instead of receding hairlines.
"We all still see each other at the open-mikes," Valerie Dole says.
For Dole, 32, of Roxborough, competing for the limelight is nothing new.
"I'm the youngest of nine - eight girls - so if you didn't laugh, you'd cry," jokes the aspiring broadcaster. "You crack yourself up, so you figure you might be able to make other people laugh."
All three comics say their material is drawn from life. Dole, who is single, talks about how her married sisters are always trying to set her up. Thomas, who has five children, takes on family life, the suburbs, and "a recent prolonged bout with unemployment." And Clements riffs about something decidedly unfunny: the breakup of his marriage.
"I really don't do joke jokes," Clements says. "Every joke I do is pretty much my life."
With a few exaggerations. Onstage, Clements says his therapist listed the stages he can expect to go through in coping with his divorce: anger, denial, depression. "Right now, I'm in the... prostitute stage, which is pret-ty cool."
Laughter from misery: It's a story as old as comedy itself.
"If this [divorce] never happened, I
wouldn't be doing this today," Clements says. "I'm working just about every
weekend, and it's been the time of my life."
