Alt comedy as the new mainstream

Four years ago, Harris Wittels was just another alternative-comedy nerd with big dreams, the kind of guy who started doing stand-up in junior high, revered the sketches on HBO's "Mr. Show" and could recite the late comic Mitch Hedberg's bits from memory. Now the 25-year-old tours with Louis C.K., hangs out with alt-comedy princess Sarah Silverman and writes for NBC's Amy Poehler comedy "Parks and Recreation."

This is what success looks like inside today's comedy pipeline. It starts in the small theaters of L.A., places like the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, Largo at the Coronet and ImprovOlympic -- today's version of the Catskills of the '40s -- where a comic like Wittels can be playing to small crowds and quickly end up reaching millions of fans on prime-time TV and the cineplex in one exhilarating ride.

Wittels' leap up the comedy food chain says as much about his talent as it does about the changing appetites of the American audience. What once was primarily the domain of self-proclaimed intellectuals and artists is becoming the new mainstream. When an oddball like "The Hangover's" Zach Galifianakis is a bankable movie star, College Humor.com is owned by Barry Diller and the Internet absurdity of Funnyor Die.com is soon to be an HBO show, something has clearly shifted in the collective idea of what's funny.

"In comedy alternative is the path to the mainstream," noted B.J. Novak, a Harvard grad whose offbeat stand-up bits landed him on TV.

Or, as Silverman said: "It used to be that alternative comedy was alternative to something. It really isn't anymore," added Silverman, whose shock comedy launched her from stand-up at Largo to a hit Comedy Central show to a $2.5-million book deal with HarperCollins last year. Years ago, someone with Wittels' dark, twisted sense of humor --with jokes about date rape and Megan's Law -- was likely to be the product of a poor, lonely childhood who spent years bombing at open mikes from Tampa to Barstow. Instead, Wittels is a doctor's son who grew up in Houston, watching MTV's sketch comedy show "The State" -- "That was my Monty Python," he said -- and whose parents booked 200-seat performance halls so Wittels and his friends could put up their sketches. Not exactly the school of hard knocks.