The boozy white noise of a recent Saturday night crowd at the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard confronts comedian Ari Shaffer as he starts his act. Sensing the lull, Shaffer tweaks the audience, "What's the matter with everyone, is it the recession?"
That gets the laugh, and Shaffer moves on, but his riff on the current economic malaise isn't the last that evening. Later, Barry Diamond boasts about a $6-million Venice "mansion" that cost him only $800 down -- and $87,000 a month -- and Bret Ernst contrasts his grandparents' stoicism with his peers' self-pity: "Unless you were in the Great Depression, you're not allowed to have one."
Despite a tsunami of deadeningly dire financial news, Ernst's material kills, and the roars of laughter amid recession only highlight a stand-up's gift for reaching into his or her own experience of suffering and drawing joy out of circumstances that are on the face of it, well, depressing.
Talk to comedians of every stripe these days and you find that even with smaller venues closing, the last clubs standing still fill with audiences in search of a laugh. To many, helping America find the funny in the meltdown is no joke. Take Jamie Masada, owner of the Laugh Factory -- he's offering free admission to his 8 p.m. show on Thursdays to those who show proof of unemployment as well as petitioning Congress for a $700,000 fund, a la FDR's Works Progress Administration, to send struggling comics out to perform for the economically depressed. Jay Leno's also on the case, having announced he's giving free shows in Detroit as part of his "Jay's Comedy Stimulus Plan."
In fact, rather than shrinking from the hardship afflicting their audiences, many comedians are tackling a pervasive sense of angst, schadenfreude and disgust head on -- and hitting a vein.
"Every time I start writing my resume, it turns into a suicide note," quips young comic Duncan Trussell during "Comedy Is Dead 5," a gothic night of stand-up that packed a crowd of hipsters and Silver Lake creative-types into the arch-vaulted, stained-glass-windowed Masonic lodge at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. It's a younger, more "alternative" audience than those at the tourist-stocked Sunset Boulevard clubs, but Duncan's jokes strike a chord even with the ever-hopeful generation Obama crowd. He continues: "Obama has this look in his eyes, like a flight attendant who just found out the landing gear fell off but still has to try to keep everybody calm."
