Finding the Funny 

"Hated by most and feared by all" is how Joe Zimmerman is introduced as he struts to the stage and aggressively grabs the microphone stand. But before he says a word, the young comic cracks a smile that crooks to one side and slacks open, letting on that his bad-boy image is a parody -- if you couldn't already tell by his puffy, center-parted hair and conservative navy blue button-down.

"Heeeey, everybody," Zimmerman says in the silly Hee-Haw-like tone of a goofus, his self-described persona.

He is performing in front of other novice comedians at Johnny Millwater's free stand-up workshop. It's comedy charity from Millwater, a headlining act who is trying to help local amateurs make the leap from open mic at coffeehouses to MC in comedy clubs in less than the three years it usually takes for comedians with talent.

Zimmerman, who is 24, has been doing stand-up for about 10 months. According to the rule of comedy, his experience is the equivalent of being a 10-month-old baby in real life. Most comedians can guess how long another comedian has been at it, some down to the month, just by listening to his or her act.

Getting laughs is a serious business in the comedy world. Many promoters and bookers will count a comedian's laughs per minute, or LPMs, as they call them. Four to five LPMs show potential for a beginner. Seven to ten, which is a laugh every 6 to 8.5 seconds, mean a comedian is at the level of a headliner like Millwater. Zimmerman gets just over five LPMs.

His three-minute bit tonight is about "being on the prowl." In the set, Zimmerman talks about playing truth or dare with his date:

"She asks me what my favorite flavor of ice cream is, and I tell her it's chocolate. And then I'm like, 'So how many dudes have you slept with?'

"She thought about it. She was like, '73.'" He pauses. "'...ish.'"

"I'm like, 'Whoa!' That's honest. It's a lot for an ish.

"Now she's going, 'Who are you to judge me?'

"All I said was, 'whoa.' Whoa isn't a judgment, it's an expression of surprise. To me, a judgment would have been more like, 'Whoa, you're loose.'

"Now she's pissed. She's going, 'Fine, Mr. Goody Two Shoes, how many women have you slept with?'

"'Three.'" He says while flashing the number like a gang sign. "'..ish. I pretty much get A-round. I had to use the ish too, because like you, I also lost track. Somewhere around two. Two point five. Three point one four. Pie-ish.'"

Zimmerman's act has come a long way. When he first started after graduating from Davidson College, he made many of the classic mistakes. He tried to tell funny stories, and stories never work. Premises take too long and punch lines are nonexistent or have too little pay-off for the time spent on the set-up. Initially, the humor in Zimmerman's material was in the set-up, such as his routine about going to Starbucks and being suckered into upgrading his drink size because the baristas were perky and pleasant to him. He didn't get many laughs.

"I hate thinking about it as set-up and punch line because it sounds so jokey," Zimmerman says. "But if you look at any stand-up comedian, even if they don't sound like they're telling jokes, even if they just look like they're being funny, it's all set-up, punch line, tags."

Tags are add-ons to punch lines and are the best way to get extra laughs. To illustrate the use of tags, Zimmerman retells cult comic Mitch Hedberg's doughnut joke. Depending on the crowd, Hedberg could eke out eight separate laughs from tags in under 30 seconds:

"I bought a doughnut, and they gave me a receipt for the doughnut. [set-up]

"I don't need a receipt for a doughnut. I'll just give you the money, you give me the doughnut. [punch line]

"End of transaction [tag 1]. We do not need to bring ink and paper into this [2]. I just can't imagine a scenario that I would ever have to prove that I bought a doughnut [3]. To some skeptical friend: 'Don't even act like I didn't buy that doughnut.' [4] I got the documentation right here [5]. Oh wait, it's back home in the file [6]. Under 'D' [7]. For doughnut [8]."

Other material Zimmerman tried out in the beginning got laughs, but he decided to cut the successful jokes because they didn't fit his comedic personality. Take this early nugget: "When I die, I want to be reincarnated as a bird. So then I can fly above other birds and shit on them."

Still, comedy teacher Tom Haines and Comedy Zone owner/booker Brian Heffron encourage young comics to copy their favorite comedians before developing a stage personality, which comes with time. Another local amateur with potential is Carlos Valencia, who always wears a fedora and a sport coat over a T-shirt. He mimics Hedberg in his short set-ups, clever and weird punch lines, and apathetic mumbling.

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• Angus Lamond
• Joe Zimmerman cracks his goofus grin...and fires up the crowd

"Take your favorite comedian, the one that's closest to your personality, and write it as if they were saying it," says Haines. "It's not so much to copy them, but to develop your style from emulating other people."

Millwater, who began performing as a magician at age 11, wears an expression that seems frozen in the post-punch-line "eh?" even when he's not trying to be funny. At 15, he was the youngest to win the Society of American Magicians' Magician of the Year award by 20 years. Now 28, he still incorporates magic into parts of his act, which is now mostly stand-up.

"There's a whole series of psychological symptoms that leads to stand-up comedy," Millwater tells me. "Usually, it's a rough childhood; probably not [being] very physically imposing, because sense of humor is a defense. Attention starved. Validation -- that's one of the things that I need.

"There's also a need to please people. There's no better feeling in the world than having a room full of people telling you you're great all at once. No better feeling in the world than strangers hugging you and knowing that it was just you that did it. That's addicting." His eyes begin to tear up at the thought.

At the headliner level, Millwater is adept at reading his audience to determine what material will get the most laughs. It starts with his opening: "My name is Johnny and you guys are in for a treat tonight, because I'm manic depressive and you caught me on a good day." The joke isn't funny, he tells me, but it has a couple tests in it.

"I leave a pause after Johnny, one to establish my physical presence on stage and two because if they're a talkative crowd, they'll say shit right away. And I'll know how to work around them and use it when I need to." After saying he's manic depressive, he makes a crazy face. "There's no punch line there yet. And if it gets a laugh there, that means they can be guided."

After the opening, he follows with "booby jokes" to gauge how prudish the audience is. "If they're offended as a group they'll say with their bodies, 'I'm laughing but it's not the right kind of laugh.'" Millwater also puts in the joke because he says it helps with his "heterosexual street cred." He says wearing a shirt with flames, and sometimes including a magic trick he calls the Animal Balloon Trick of Death, in which he swallows a giant balloon, can give the audience a certain perception of his sexuality. In certain places, he doesn't care if the audience thinks he is gay, but "playing in small towns in the South, Middle America and places out west like Montana, you can't even joke about homosexuality as a concept."

Millwater explains: "With stand-up, funny is defined by -- I want to use the word -- beauty, perfection. You start with that chunk of marble as the joke and then over years, you hone it and you craft it until it's the perfect joke. And you have that perfect joke and you know it's going to get a laugh every time, and it's about you, and it's just great." Jerry Seinfeld has said a joke takes five years before it can mature to reach its full potential.

Zimmerman has only been working on his "on the prowl" bit for four months, and Millwater starts his critique of it:

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• ANGUS LAMOND
• Joe Zimmerman performs at SK Netcafe's open mic night

"Everything needs to be tighter. For every two sentences you have, you only need one for pretty much the entire set." Millwater gives Zimmerman more pointers about timing and selling jokes. When Zimmerman says to his date "you're loose," Millwater tells him to say it in a more hurtful manner, or if he chooses to go with a sillier approach, he should break up the contraction and draw out the "oo" sound. "Instead of saying, 'you're loose,' go with 'you are ... loooose,'" Millwater says.

When Zimmerman is tabulating the number of women he's slept with, Millwater tells him: "Play it up with your body that you're going to go up to 60, 70, 250. Just sell an infinite number, then go, 'three.' And a bigger pause between 'three' and 'ish.' You'll get two laughs instead of just one."

Other suggestions in the workshop are for actual jokes.

Zimmerman's stand-up buddy Valencia asks him about his decision to change the answer of favorite ice cream flavor in the bit to boring chocolate.

"It didn't get a laugh before, so I was trying to shorten the set-up," says Zimmerman.

"Come up with something more goobery," suggests Millwater. "I think that the spot works. It's just a matter of the choice of ice cream."

"I've never been able to get a punch line in there," says Zimmerman.

"Go to the store. Take a notebook. Dig out the Ben and Jerry's. Here's your Cherry Garcia. Here's your giggadee-gigadee-gigadee-goo. Chunky Monkey is funny," Millwater offers.

Zimmerman is still incredulous. "I've said that before, it didn't work."

"Or make up your own, which I think is even better," Millwater adds. "If you can make up your own ice cream flavor that doesn't actually exist but should, then you have four jokes happening in that one phrase."

"How about sorbet?" I suggest.

"Sugar-free or low-fat?" another comic in the room asks.

Zimmerman tries it out in his goofus accent. "Sugar-free sorbet." He giggles, but it sounds a little forced. To Millwater that reaction is OK, but probably not good enough to get a consistent laugh.

"As a comic, your brain defaults on a joke," Millwater explains to me later. "It just always happens, 75,000 times a day. You don't take note of it most of the time. The only time you take note of it is when you laugh out loud. That's the best advice I've ever gotten. If you laugh when you think of it, write it down. If you don't laugh out loud, it's not funny."

Tom Haines, a former Comedy Zone owner, booker and current stand-up instructor, takes a more systematic approach to the creative process. Haines has written jokes for 20 to 30 comedians and has freelanced jokes for Jay Leno's monologue on The Tonight Show. He also wrote some material for prop comic Carrot Top back when he was carving a name for himself in Charlotte. For one of Carrot Top's bits in which he fashioned hangers after celebrities, Haines suggested poking two eye holes in the paper interior and calling it David Duke's hanger. The joke got a standing ovation on an MTV Spring Break show.

In Haines' class, he instructs students to brain map when creating a joke. Using the location of our interview as an example, Haines writes Starbucks in the middle of a piece of paper and circles it. Then he draws branches extending from the word, and writes some things found in a Starbucks cafe: coffee, cups, green, whipped cream. The next step is picking two or three of those things and combining them. "I'm going to tie in the color green with a straw and whipped cream and put together the joke," he says. "You can train yourself to think funny. You just have to look for it."

Without the use of a brain map, Millwater has thought of the funniest ice cream flavor for Zimmerman. "What's that ice cream with three flavors in one?" he asks.

"Neapolitan," a comic in the room answers.

"Neapolitan, except for the strawberry," he says fast.

Zimmerman erupts in a high-pitched hyena laugh.

"See, 'cause that's just a weird thing to say," Millwater continues, then makes another suggestion: "Chocolate fudge chunk but I take the chunks out. Just find a funny way to answer that question, which is funny and irrelevant and perfect. The best jokes come when they think it's over. So make an inspired choice in ice cream flavors."

Brian Heffron, a Paul Giamatti look-alike who owns Charlotte-based Heffron Talent International, the largest comedy booking agency in the country, says that many young comics get too dirty too quickly in their careers, lured by the cheap and easy laugh.

"You don't look back on Richard Prior and say he's filthy. But if you actually listen to Richard Prior, he's pretty dirty. Same with [George] Carlin," Heffron says. "The reason that you don't is because they're professionals. The bottom line is the new guys are not qualified to do edgy humor yet. It's very difficult to be dirty and effective, dirty and not vulgar, dirty and not offending. It's very hard. They try, and it can be a train wreck."

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• www.johnnymillwater.com
• Headliner Johnny Millwater

To get a comedy gig in the US, impressing Heffron is almost essential. Heffron Talent books comics to all of its 54 Comedy Zone clubs in 20 states as well as for the Bahamas and for cruises. Heffron has a stable of 750 to 1,000 comedians he squeezes into 100 weekly slots, and he receives 30 new tapes a week for spots that don't exist. Some of the aspiring comics get desperate. One tape he received was attached to a bowling ball the comic paid to ship. "If I book you, you're pretty much guaranteed work for a year, but you have to be better than the worst comic on the roster. I have to take someone out to put you in," says Heffron.

Heffron has a soft spot for the local guys, often giving them shots as MCs. He says with confidence that in terms of opportunity for new comics, there is no better place in the world to try and make it than Charlotte. Zimmerman already has gotten MC work, a rarity for a comic not even a year into the game.

One of the places Heffron scouts talent is the SK Netcafe's open-mic night on Wednesdays. With the exception of experienced amateurs, such as Zimmerman, and professionals working on new material, the most common acts are the "train wreck" types Heffron spoke of. On a recent Wednesday, one woman delivered some raunchy comic carnage devoid of punch lines: "I had sex with a guy older than my father, and he was on Viagra. His penis was up, he got it up OK. Have you ever felt a man's penis on Viagra? You do have it in your vagina, it just feels really weird. So I'd rather go for the hardness over the size of the penis."

Staying away from the cheap dirty laugh is a problem Keli Semelsberger has battled with among her improv troupe, the Charlotte Comedy Theater. Semelsberger started the group five years ago, which now performs on weekends in a small stage attached to Joe's Raw Bar in Plaza Midwood.

At first, Semelsberger required her players to stay away from the ribald. But audiences, she says, didn't want squeaky clean. Like Heffron, Semelsberger says there is an intelligent way to do dirty, but more often than not, that's not how it's done.

Shannan Brice, founder of the sketch comedy group the Perch, says there was a time four years ago when all the content got too filthy. The shock value wore off and the group started to lose its audience. It got so bad, the landlord of the Perch's building told Brice the show made him uncomfortable, and he would no longer attend. Since then, Brice has tried to maintain a variety of humor in the show.

At an improv show I attended last month, the Charlotte Comedy Theater cast displayed its potential for higher brow humor in one game in which Ave Wilson read real lines from a play he randomly selected out of a book of plays, and another player, Nikki Frank, had to improvise around him.

Wilson selected a character from the play Amadeus -- not Mozart, though -- and Frank chose to use a Southern persona.

Wilson: "Let your voice enter me."

Frank: "Uncle Roberto, like I tell you every Sunday when you come over for Mommy's tamales, no."

Wilson: "Let me conduct you. Let me!

Frank: "You're disgusting."

Wilson: "As for Mozart, I avoided meeting him."

Frank: "Maybe you should talk to him. You guys both seem like really cool guys. Just be like, 'What's up?'"

But most of the show's suggestions from the audience forced the cast into the gutter. In another game, two players alternate retelling separate accounts of an unfortunate incident. The unfortunate incident suggested by the audience was defecating in one's pants.

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• Daniel Coston
• Charlotte Comedy Theater improv troupe performs, from left to right: Ave Wilson, James Walker, Keli Semelsberger, Austen DiPaulma and Colby Davis

Afterward, I asked Semelsberger about the show.

"Yeah, it was funny. But to me it was trite. There was no meat to it. We said nothing political. We didn't say anything of any value. I don't want to do dick jokes. It was like, occupation: hooker. Can I get something else: OBGYN. Can I get something else: Abortion clinic person. Oh fuck it, let's just go dirty because we're not going to get anything else. But we should be able to take that suggestion and make it clean. Just because they give us massage parlor, doesn't mean we have to do the happy ending scene. We can have a real scene in a massage parlor and do it intelligently."

For the first time this weekend, Semelsberger will start implementing long-form improv. Scenes in long-form build on top of other scenes. The focus is on humorous relationships among characters, instead of troupe members talking over each other to get one-liners out, which can be the result of bad short-form improv.

To Semelsberger, the funny is in realistic characters, in "how awkward and quirky people are. Something that is based on reality and truth -- that's funny to me. Like in The Sopranos ­-- that's funny. You know the characters. You know how they respond to things. To have these characters that are multi-dimensional. They bring out things we relate to, that we see in our own character."

Semelsberger learned comedic acting in Chicago, the improv capital of the world. There, she started the equivalent of an open-mic night for improv players at Comedy Sports. It only took a couple of months to consistently sell out the 100-seat theater on what had traditionally been an off night for improv.

Charlotte hasn't been quite as receptive. Other than a few times in the winter, the Charlotte Comedy Theater's 60-seat venue has rarely been near capacity. In the summer, a good crowd is 15 people. At times during the last five years, Semelsberger thought the Comedy Theater would have to close down. The Perch has also gone through some tough times. They just returned to a Central Avenue location after tenuously existing without a home for a year and a half.

Semelsberger thinks low attendance has to do with the city's many transplants not knowing where to go for comedy because of a lack of money to spend on advertising ­--­ a complaint shared by all of Charlotte's comedy groups, including the Comedy Zone. "Whenever I talk to people, they say, 'I love the Comedy Zone; it's my favorite place,'" says Brian Heffron, who thinks people tend to treat comedy shows as a special occasion activity. "[I ask them], 'When was the last time you were there?' 'Ten months ago.' 'Well, why haven't you been back?' 'I don't know, but we're gonna.'"

Antoine Johnson, booker and owner of Queen City Comedy, which books a comedy night at the Big Chill, believes black audiences in Charlotte support comedy more than white ones. Johnson says the Chill draws between 175 to 200 people on an average Wednesday night and around 500 for a big name. The crowd and comics are predominately African American, but the content is not usually race-related. When I was there several weeks ago, other than one comic saying hello to the three white people in the audience, race was not mentioned in any of the bits.

Charlotte's black audiences are so supportive that in 2000, Greensboro booker Walter Latham picked Charlotte as the site of The Original Kings of Comedy, the Spike Lee documentary about four black comics that propelled comedians Bernie Mac and Cedric the Entertainer into stardom.

Millwater believes Charlotte crowds are the best, even if they are small at times. After touring the country's comedy clubs with his wife for two years on his Homeless American Honeymoon Adventure, Millwater eventually chose Charlotte to settle down in a year ago. "I love the audiences in Charlotte. They're trained. They know when to laugh, when to clap. I think it's a Southern thing," he says.

The ambitious Millwater has plans to give Charlotte an even bigger name nationally for comedy. His new project is a comedy variety show called EGOTRIP, which will begin airing soon on public access TV. One of the recurring segments will be Zimmerman's Chick Safari, in which he approaches women on the street and tries to pick them up in sort of a Crocodile Hunter parody. Millwater's two-year plan is to create a show he hopes can air on Comedy Central and that will be written and performed by many of Charlotte's comedians.

At Millwater's workshop, an older comic, Victor Sanko, has just performed a three-minute set. It didn't get many laughs, and Millwater doesn't sugarcoat his critique. A few jokes have no joke in them, he tells Sanko, the bit on the movie Scent of a Woman is too dated, and about one punch line in which Sanko refers to a Jewish/Native-American tribe as the So-sue-me, Millwater says: "That joke was used in this workshop last year by a guy who stole jokes. I'm not saying you stole it, but it has been done a lot."

Sanko's head drops. He looks as if he's about to fall down.

"I just have one more note for you," Millwater continues.

"One more insult?" Sanko interrupts.

Millwater: "This isn't an insult."

Sanko: "I'm just disappointed, I'm sorry."

Millwater: "Why are you disappointed?"

Sanko: "Because it didn't go well."

Millwater: "It went fine. This is practice, man."

Sanko: "No, I've been practicing for five weeks."

Millwater: "I've been practicing for 10 years; I'm still not good."

Sanko: "This was supposed to be the part that gets me into ... " (he trails off).

Millwater: "I'm sorry, I didn't get that copy of the curriculum. I just thought I was supposed to give you feedback on your set."

Sanko: "I've had feedback. You're a tough guy. The others have been nicer."

Millwater: "I'm sorry. I take this really seriously."

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• Angus Lamond
• Joe Zimmerman cracks his goofus grin

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• Angus Lamond
• Zimmerman fires up the crowd