Over the past four decades, Hermosa’s Comedy and Magic Club has built up loyalty from fans of comedy: those in the crowd, and on the stage

Guests take in an act Saturday night at the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach. The club is celebrating its 40th anniversary throughout July. Photo

Last week, in a proclamation honoring the Comedy and Magic Club’s 40th anniversary and declaring July to be “Comedy and Magic month,” Mayor Jeff Duclos touted some of the innovations of the Club’s owner and founder Mike Lacey, including holding shows at earlier hours and deemphasizing alcohol sales. First among the trails blazed, however, was opening in the South Bay and breaking out of the Hollywood bubble that defined comedy at the time. “He gave comics and magicians a new performance venue in a popular outlying area of Los Angeles. By doing so he opened these popular forms of entertainment to a more diverse and less trendy audience,” Duclos said.

Lacey describes the Club’s South Bay location as “probably the most important piece of the puzzle.” Although it draws talent from all over, the crowd remains overwhelmingly local. The club’s first decade coincided with the zenith of the local aerospace industry, and over the ensuing years, the Beach Cities became dominated by professionals. (During Saturday night’s show, when a member of the audience responded to a question by saying he was an electrical engineer, a comic, without skipping a beat, responded, ‘Hey, I have electricity in my home!’). But the area boasts a different kind of affluence than neighborhoods closer to central Los Angeles. Performers at the Club are far less likely to find an audience of “industry types.”

“They don’t have any attitude. They’re normal, down to earth people. But they’re also incredibly smart,” Lacey said. “Jay [Leno] says that the audience is smart enough that you can’t pull off a joke that isn’t really good. But they’re not jaded like it has to be a certain genre or they won’t laugh.”

The typical take on the Comedy and Magic Club is that it is the place where comedians “try out” their jokes in advance of television specials or bookings at large theaters. Though meant to be a compliment, this also reduces the club to a kind of product-testing ground — a Columbus, Ohio of laughs. For comedy purists, who revere the ability to command an intimate setting even more than box office receipts or Netflix streams, this gets things exactly backward.

Jim McDonald, a comedian, and Hermosa resident, has recently been opening for Jay Leno in his venerable Sunday night show at the Club, a gig he said he could not have imagined in his early years. He has an elevated appreciation for Lacey and the Club, something that he attributes to the years of hard work “on the road,” in far less glamorous venues. He is fond of sharing a quote from Laurie Kilmartin, a “Last Comic Standing” finalist, writer for Conan O’Brien, and occasional performer at the Club: “‘I feel like I have to do a joke on TV before I can do it at the Comedy and Magic Club.’”

What’s passed is prologue

In Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the carpenter Quince, looking for a place in the forest to put on a play, says, “This green plot shall be our stage, this hawthorn-brake our tiring-house.” In the London of the Globe and the King’s Men, urban theaters attempting to mimic pastoral settings would frequently store shrubs and other plants used as set decoration in the “tiring-house,” the area of the theater where players changed into their costumes or “attire.” As longtime language columnist William Safire pointed out, actors were thus surrounded by “green” while they waited to go on stage.

Comedy legend Jay Leno, left, with Club founder Mike Lacey. Leno has appeared at the Club almost every Sunday for years. Photo

That’s one theory of the origin of the term “green room,” which remains a contested etymological question. But at the Comedy and Magic Club the most notable feature of the area where performers hang out before going on stage is not green but gray: a wall of row after row of cement bricks bearing the Sharpie-marked signatures of comics who have played there.

The room itself is sparsely furnished. It is lit by a dull fluorescent light that contrasts sharply with the dimmed tones that bathe the Club’s seating room but is probably good conditioning for the brights of the stage spots. Combined with a large rectangular table in the middle that takes up much of the floor area, at first glance the green room could be mistaken for an office-park conference suite (or, for that matter, a television writers’ room.) A small couch sits against a mirrored wall that leads to the connecting office of Richard Barrett, the club’s talent booker. The opposite wall contains a TV showing the feed from a camera trained on the Club’s stage, so performers can watch the sets of those on before them.

The signatures on the bricks, which run along the north and east walls of the green room, are older; some bear dates from the club’s first year of business. And the Club has clearly proven more successful than whoever started the practice could have imagined because the waiting area has long since run out of bricks: more recent acts use of bricks on a long hallway that runs perpendicular to the green room.

Comics Jackie Fabulous and Andre Kelley were talking backstage in the hallway connected to the green room before their sets Saturday night. Fabulous told me she got into comedy by doing open mic nights for fun. She discovered that she was good at it, and eventually had to do a bit of soul-searching. “I had to ask myself, ‘Do I want to just keep doing this after work?’” she said. She first appeared at the Comedy and Magic Club in 2012 and, after a few successes, she was “passed.” (When I asked what that meant, Kelley said, “That’s right, he’s a civilian,” and prodded Fabulous to explain.) To be “passed” means that a comic is eligible to be called to perform at the Club when his or her “avails,” or availability, coincide with openings. Fabulous scanned the wall for the signature she’d put down years before when she had “earned her brick.”

For Fabulous, working her way up to the Comedy and Magic Club was a big part of reassuring herself that comedy was a viable career path. “Usually you’ve got to put in a lot of time to get here. This place gives you a lot of credibility,” she said. Fabulous will have her first solo show at the Club next month.

Running parallel to the green room is a brickless, white-walled hallway covered with signed, framed photos of comics performing at the club. Some of those in the photos — Jerry Seinfeld, Jeff Foxworthy, Robin Williams — are among the most famous stand-up comedians of all time.

“Look at this wall, all these big names. It’s like being in Skull and Bones,” said comic Leo Flowers as he stood looking at the photos after finishing his set.

Flowers said that his odyssey began when he met Barrett, the Club’s talent broker, at a comedy festival in Boston. Barrett told him to go ahead and submit, and he gave the talent booker a CD of one of his performances. Two years later, seemingly out of the blue, Barrett called him and asked him to come audition. (Barrett has a “steel trap mind,” Lacey said. “He’ll say, ‘Ah yes, I saw you 28 years ago. It was Wednesday and cloudy.’”) Flowers knew that he had to deliver a solid performance. But he said that he had watched the sword-and-sandals epic “Gladiator” just before his performance, and he thought back to the admonition given to Russell Crowe’s character Maximus, about not being too eager to land the killing stroke.

“You have to make them love you first. I thought, ‘If the crowd loves me, they can’t deny me,’” Flowers said with a smile.

Comic Bobby Slayton points to a photo of himself backstage at the Club, which memorializes sets from the many famous acts to have performed there. Photo

Back against the bricks, Kelley shared what it was like to be newer to the club. He first performed here in January of this year but said that he immediately felt welcomed. Later that night, after his set, club staff took pictures as Kelly posed, smiling as he signed his name to the wall. He had earned his brick.

“This club is much more like a family than a business. Patrons notice, and the performers notice,” he said. “Anyone can do something great one time. But to do it consistently… well, that’s how you get to 40 years.”

Sign-up sheet

In an egalitarian touch, the Club does not set the order of performances on the showcase nights, when as many as 20 comics will perform. Instead, it leaves a clipboard with a pencil and a white sheet of paper, and the comics figure things out themselves. It can help to arrive early, because some performers are attached to certain slots: Mario Joyner, a comic who has appeared on multiple episodes of “Seinfeld,” always tries to go 10th.

The sorting process was dispute-free on Saturday, and backstage on nights of the anniversary-month shows can have the revelrous feel of a high school reunion. Comics who may have come up together, but would now rarely be booked on the same night, have the chance to introduce one another on stage. “What do you want me to say about you?” was perhaps the most commonly heard phrase Saturday night as comics cribbed biographical notes.

Comedian Dan Gabriel noticed friend and fellow act, Chris Cope. Gabriel had helped Cope secure his first appearance at the Club, which Cope had parlayed into a recent appearance on “Conan.” Looking farther down the hall he saw Ty Barnett, who helped him secure his own first slot at the Club.

The comedians were able to catch up at a time when they might normally have been going over material because the shorter sets of the evening’s showcase format limited the stress that each performer faced. But, Gabriel said, comics took their time at the Club seriously, even if it was only five minutes. No matter how many times one appears at the Comedy and Magic Club, the sheen does not fade.

“It’s really hard to get in here. You gotta be clean, and you gotta be clever. There’s a very cherished energy, and we are all on our best behavior,” he said.

Barrett, the Club’s talent booker, said that recommendations from established acts are part of the process for discovering new acts, but only part. (Lacey once handled bookings himself. Barrett, who has worked at the Club for 21 years, now oversees the process, but Lacey is still involved.) Comedy, he said, is “kind of a small world,” but he is constantly going to other clubs and catching new acts. Unlike many venues, there is no Comedy and Magic Club “type.” The result is a selection process that is less rule-bound but somehow more exacting.

Despite the national stature that the club has taken on, the selection of acts is guided by local tastes: a sense of what is going to do well with the club’s mostly South Bay audience. Unlike some clubs, which try to carve out niches of over-the-top or political humor, the Comedy and Magic club operates by a simple rule: “As long as it’s funny.”

“You have 250 people. You try to make all of these people happy. They want original, they want fun. I’m looking for people I can’t say no to. Those are the people who can reach as many people as possible,” he said.

This is made more challenging by the unpredictability of the audience.

“Sometimes, the 18-to-20 year-olds will relate to the oldest comic of the night. The audience never really knows where things are going to go,” Lacey said. He recalled that Rodney Dangerfield, who was in his 40s before achieving mainstream success and whose decades-long struggle to break into comedy inspired his self-deprecating “get no respect” act, often drew the Club’s youngest crowds.

Especially on the showcase nights, part of the Club’s formula for connecting with audiences is having a diverse lineup. Both of Saturday’s sets featured a full slate of black, Latino and Middle Eastern comics. Barrett said that diversity was less of a box for the club to check than a natural outgrowth of booking a successful slate of talent. Because comedy is defined by the ability to communicate a point of view that is highly specific, and often eccentric or even neurotic, having as many outlooks on life as possible is important.

“They are so good at painting pictures of what life is like for them, and no one wants to see the same thing, time after time. But it’s still secondary to being funny,” Barrett said.

Meritocracy aside, there is a streak of idealism that runs through the club’s operating philosophy. Lacey recalled being in Hermosa in the early days of the Club and walking down to the Pier to catch Howard Rumsey do a Sunday set with the Lighthouse All-Stars. At a time when there was “pretty much just one kind of person” living in the South Bay, Rumsey often helped bring in black and Latino acts, which in turn brought in a different kind of audience. Lacey feels honored to continue that tradition.

“It’s one of the things I’m proudest of,” he said.

Lacey and Barrett are also aware of the need for comedy to keep up with the times. And over the years the Club has evolved, including a significant expansion of its Hermosa Avenue storefront. The Club also runs Live at the Lounge, a smaller, more intimate space connected to the main theater.

Lacey describes Live at the Lounge as a laboratory. Over the years, it has hosted singer-songwriters, Broadway show-tune acts, avant-garde classical music, and even a reading hosted by this newspaper. The space fulfills Lacey’s need to experiment. And, even if “99 percent of them do not work out,” as Lacey quips, the tiny fraction that does help shape the future of the club.  Looking around at the empty confines of Live at the Lounge, he said that the room keeps him grounded.

“You have to comfortably live in the dead center of humility. Don’t forget to not know,” Lacey said.

Knocking you off balance

Out on the floor of the Club, the walls are decked with vintage posters and costumes from famous moments in vaudeville, movies, and television. Depending on where a guest is seated, he or she might look up to find Seinfeld’s “puffy shirt,” Robin Williams’ “Popeye” costume, or bowler hats worn by W.C. Fields and Buster Keaton. Lacey recalled that George Carlin asked if he could come into the club for lunch, just so he could be in the presence of a clown outfit worn by Charlie Chaplin.

“He would say, ‘It’s got Chaplin’s DNA,’” Lacey said.

While the Club’s serious-about-funny ethos attracts those at the top of the profession, Lacey is also aware that it can give comics a case of nerves, especially those doing their first solo shows.

“You walk through the halls and you look at those photos, and you think, ‘Oh my God,’” Lacey said. “If it looks like someone is nervous, I’ll tell them, ‘You’re here now. And you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t really strong.’” Often, for a comic’s first set, the Club will position the next act right behind the curtain, to quickly go on if the new comic starts to struggle. “It works because no one knows if you’re supposed to go on for two minutes or 10 minutes. It’s safe here. That’s a big part of this,” he said.

Comic Zainab Johnson cracks up in the doorway to the Club’s green room. The bricks in the wall contain comics’ signatures going by decades. Photo

The Club does what it can to make things easier for performers. It is, for example, cautious about alcohol sales: the club a policy against shots and, profits be damned, caps the number of drinks a patron can order. Because some of the performers come to the Club from much larger venues with thousands of seats, the proximity of patrons can be jarring, especially ones inclined to heckle. Lacey described the Club’s doormen as “careful.” Talking back and forth with the audience is a critical part of many acts, but crossing the line into bothering comics is not tolerated.

“They’re putting themselves out there. They work very hard to get there. We have to keep them feeling like no one’s interrupting,” Lacey said.

This gentle seriousness is a reflection of the way the club venerates comedy. It has been called a “cathedral to comedy,” and the staff is keenly aware of the profound effects that laughter can have on both the audience and the comic. Barrett said that Rodney Dangerfield, in his last shows at the Club, appeared labored in his movements backstage. But as soon as he stepped into the lights, it was as though he had “come to life again.” The description recalls the stories of musicians like Carly Simon, Bill Withers, and even Elvis Presley, all of whom had stutters that disappeared when they sang. Speech pathologists have attributed this phenomenon, also reported in people of more earthly talent, to a variety of explanations, but the most common and convincing is also the hardest to pin down: performing and talking are so fundamentally different that they rely on different parts of the brain.

“Comedy is like someone who comes up behind you and kind of hits the back of your knee, knocks you off balance — something who reminds you, maybe I should be a little bit more open, a little bit more understanding,” Lacey said.

Although its vaunted reputation could easily allow it, the Comedy and Magic Club is the opposite of a “boiler room.” Instead of an environment in which people are left to fight and compete, Lacey has consciously created an atmosphere that comics say is friendlier to performers than almost anywhere else. This friendliness is responsible for perhaps the club’s most valuable and ephemeral asset: the desire of performers to be there even without the need to boost their career. This can be seen almost every Sunday when Leno, who has long since ceased to want for fame or money, continues to perform. And drop-ins — brief, unscheduled sets — by famous comedians are a regular occurrence at the Club. The chance of catching an unannounced Seinfeld or Paul Reiser is a thrill on the minds of many ticket holders.

The drop in is a phenomenon almost unique to stand-up comedy. Part of this is the individual and under-determined nature of the art form: John Gielgud could not have simply popped into the Old Vic to do a scene from a production of “Hamlet,” any more than LeBron James could stop by Cameron Indoor Stadium to sub in for the Duke Blue Devils. But it is also rooted in the obsessive need that comedians seem to feel to connect with people on an intimate scale. The Comedy and Magic Club’s greatest accomplishment is providing perhaps the world’s most desirable place to do this.

Barrett, who has seen his share of famous drop-ins, said that comics can seem almost like addicts seeking a fix when they show up and ask to do a set.

“It’s just who they are. It’s like they don’t have a choice in the matter. They go out, say what they have observed, and get a response from real people. With a TV show or a movie, it can be months, maybe a year down the road. Here, the response it as immediate as it can be,” Barrett said.

But why here? Why the Comedy and Magic Club? Why a 250-seat venue that is far from Hollywood and often requires a burdensome commute?

After he finished his set, comic Allan Havey, who has recently appeared on TV shows like “Mad Men” and “Billions,” stuck around to watch the comics who followed him. Before heading home, he walked into the brick-backed hallway to say goodbye to Lacey. As he stood next to the founder, Havey mused that the Club’s success was not due to some grand secret, but to simple things done uncommonly well.

“They treat the comics well, they treat their customers well, and they treat their staff well. As a comic, I can tell you that doesn’t always happen,” Havey said.

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