Anne Hunting sat on a stool about 20 feet away from the stage where she would soon stand trying to make a room full of people laugh. Bathed in a blue neon light indicating where the restrooms were, she nervously looked over a sheet of notes to make sure she didn’t forget any of her routine. She took a long, deep breath.
Before Hunting knew it, it was showtime, with a routine mostly lampooning her ex-husband and his girlfriend, who, she joked, was barely beyond voting age:
“They say she looks like me,” Hunting told the crowd, “but she hasn’t reached full maturity yet.”
It would be nice to report that the audience went wild. But that would be a stretch.
“I don’t know why she gave me the rabbit,” Hunting said about the fluffy creature bestowed on her by the ex-husband’s girlfriend. “I guess Dick can’t have two pets at once.”
The crowd, well, applauded generously.
What the audience didn’t know was that Hunting, a substitute teacher and mother of three from Lake Bluff, was “so nervous on stage that my legs were shaking.”
They should have expected as much. Hunting had just performed five minutes of standup comedy in front of an audience for the first time. It was part of her graduation after taking a four-week class in comedy offered by Zanies, the longtime Chicago-area club specializing in standup humor.
Sixteen graduates worked before roughly 200 people, many of them their friends and relatives, as part of the closing ceremonies recenty at Zanies’ club in north suburban Vernon Hills.
Surprisingly, only a handful of the aspiring comics took the class because they wanted to pursue standup full time.
Hunting was not one of those.
“I wanted to laugh,” said Hunting, 39, explaining what moved her to sign up for the course. At the first class weeks before, Hunting, shy and raw as an aspiring comic, jokingly told her fellow initiates that she wanted to be a comedian as a way of dealing with her young charges at school.
“I like to do different kinds of things,” she added, noting that her previous adventure was taking flying lessons. “I just like to keep myself challenged.
“I felt good when I did my little deal, my five minutes,” she said, after her baptism by fire was over. “When I sat down, I thought, `Gosh, that was great.’ It was like flying solo for the first time.”
John Tabisz took the class to understand how comedy worked. A firefighter by day, Tabisz is an admitted class clown who always liked cracking friends and family up. The class was a way to “scratch an itch that I’ve had for many, many years.”
Tabisz now has a rash: “I’m starting to look for open mike nights now because I definitely want to continue this.”
Tabisz’s routine at the last comedy class was understandably amateurish, with a few jokes sprinkled among several stories about fighting fires and saving lives.
Among his jokes was that old standby, a slap at attorneys. “Being a paramedic and firefighter,” he began, “you have to be caring and compassionate and have love for mankind — the opposite of being a lawyer.”
It’s great when it’s good
Dobie Maxwell, the standup comic who taught the course at Zanies, tries to give students the basics for making it in a cut-throat business, including how to write material, how to deliver it, deciding what kind of comic to be on stage (one can be observational, for example, offering insights on life’s vagaries; a storyteller, spinning out long funny tales; or a character portrayer, taking on amusing personas) and how to forge a career after the classes were over.
“I think I’ve made every mistake there is to make, and I hope that I can at least save them a (few) of the mistakes,” said Maxwell, 33, a Milwaukee native who has taught comedy since 1993.
“It’s great to be on stage when it’s going good as a comic. There’s not a better feeling in the world. I think a lot of people want to feel that, or they think they want to.”
Judy Brooks had already felt what it was like to face a crowd, having worked in the theater, both on stage and behind the scenes, for some 30 years. But the 52-year-old wanted to know what it was like to go it alone.
“Most of the improv and the classes that I’ve taken have been more towards acting,” said Brooks, who lives in Highland Park. “And I like the comedy aspect better. I like improv comedy. Not acting, but standing up there and just doing it.”
There is an old saying that “Dying is easy, but comedy is hard.” That’s a concept Brooks now knows all too well: “You’re not saying words that are printed, there’s nobody to act off of, so it’s sort of like jumping in an ocean without something to save you.”
When Brooks performed her graduation act at Zanies, she used material involving family (she’s been married 30 years), living on the North Shore and her devotion to shopping malls.
“My husband,” she deadpanned, “is a wonderful man. He’ll give you the shirt off my back. But I’d rather have the wallet out of his pocket.”
Maxwell, a former baseball player who became a comic in 1983 and works all over the country, said some who take the class want to experience a “psychological bungee jump. They want to see what it’s like up there for those five minutes.”
And what is it like?
“The lights are bright,” said Maxwell. “Sometimes it’s like shadow-boxing and going in the ring with (Mike) Tyson for three minutes.
“Three to five minutes is a long time when you’re in a boxing ring or on a stage,” he said. “It’s very easy to get lost. When I first started out I blanked out lots of time.”
Everybody has some funny
Tabisz, 40, a Chicago native who lives with his wife and two kids in Downers Grove, said he forgot his act seconds before taking the stage.
“I practiced it a dozen times in front of a mirror. I practiced it and practiced it. And as I was walking up there I was so overwhelmed that I forgot my material.”
The veteran of 12 years of firefighting said he took a deep breath, and, as he was taught by Maxwell, began by telling the audience who he was and what he did for a living. And suddenly his routine came flooding back to him.
When he got his first laugh, Tabisz felt “in control” and comfortable (although that didn’t stop him from hyperventilating halfway through his set).
“It felt like they were accepting me,” he added. “All this hard work, all this practicing in front of a mirror, became worth it.”
But is it? Maxwell and others in the comedy industry say you can’t teach “funny.” But one comedy teacher says funny can be developed.
“You have funny in you. Everybody’s got some. Some have got more than others. You can’t manufacture that,” said Bill Gorgo, a longtime Chicago comedian who has taught a standup course at Columbia College in Chicago.
“The best you can do is show people how they can mine it. How they can polish it. How they can put it in a good setting.”
“The class,” said Ron Gold, a 40-year-old comic who got his start by taking the Maxwell-taught Zanies class, “kind of helps you put it all together and organize it and tells you how to focus it into the right direction.”
When teaching comedy, Gorgo concentrates on writing, which he said is “the basis” of everything related to comedy.
“Writing is writing, and learning how to write funny, learning the difference between humor and a joke, and a story and a joke, and how to polish (material) as much as it needs to be funny — those techniques transcend taking it up on stage.
“You may tell some jokes, you may tell stories in a humorous way, but at the heart of it there’s something you have to say. That’s words, that’s ideas, that’s writing.”
Stage presence counts, of course, Gorgo notes. “You can sell it with a funny face or a nice gesture. You’ve got to cue the audience with your non-verbal language. All those performance skills come into play.
“But if you have nothing to say, you’re not a standup. Get off the stage.”
Gold has been performing for a year around the Chicago area at Zanies and other clubs, and both Tabisz and Brooks would like to try to continue their “education.”
But Maxwell said that for those who aren’t aspiring to be the next Jerry Seinfeld or Roseanne, there are still some practical lessons that learning standup can provide.
For instance, Maxwell teaches his students how to deal with unruly people in the audience, a talent that can be applied equally well in job situations. “If someone gets a (ticked) off customer, they can deal with it a little bit better,” he explained.
Being comfortable enough to make strangers laugh can give a person enormous confidence, no matter what the situation, Maxwell said.
Anne Hunting had a reasonably successful experience on graduation night at Zanies. But she won’t be quitting her day job anytime soon.
“If someone were to knock on my door and said, `Gee, here’s a contract, do you want to do it?’ I’d say okay,” she admitted. “But I don’t think I’m going to be hanging around clubs at this age and (with) kids and all that kind of stuff. But I think it all works together somehow, somewhere. It all works in your life somehow.”
