A New Routine

For Richard Jeni, putting out a 60-minute comedy special is difficult work, but it is also, well, special.

Some comics balk at putting good material into one basket, fearing overexposure for their act--in their view, taping an hour’s worth of material is tantamount to burning their club lines.

“The logical end to that argument is, I can never let anyone see my material,” says Jeni, who will be at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts on Saturday to tape material for his fourth cable-TV special, scheduled to air on HBO in October. “The fact is . . . doing a special has kind of glamorized it somehow.

“I can’t think of a drawback,” the Brooklyn native said recently from the Montreal International Comedy Festival (which, Jeni added, was “teeming with executives determined to find comedy talent--even if they have to spend all night in a strip bar to do it”).

“Here’s an hour of TV in front of millions of people to say whatever the hell you want. How many people get that opportunity? The only real requirement is that it has to be funny.

“When people come to your shows, your material has that as-seen-on-TV aspect . . . like a greatest-hits thing. As long as you keep creating, overexposure never becomes a problem. By the time they get tired of it, you have a whole new thing.”

Though he said it’s tempting, Jeni refuses to recycle from previous specials, not that the idea hasn’t occurred to him.

“Man, I wish I could put it under an ‘improved’ category,” he said, referring to his habit of continually refining certain bits. “It’s unspoken that of course you wouldn’t do stuff you did on the last show.”

Instead, Jeni said, he pulled this show together “out of thin air.”

“Everybody has a peak creative time of the day,” he said. “Mine is between 5 and 5:04 in the morning.”

He sat down and wrote.

“The upside is it forces you to be productive and creative, because every time you have to do a new special, you need to come up with material that doesn’t sound like the last special.”

For “Boy From New York City,” his first special in 1989 for Showtime, the comic simply put the best of his act on tape. “That material was sitting there.

“For a 30-minute special, you need 27 minutes of material,” Jeni said. “I’d been in the business for seven years. If you don’t have 27 minutes by that time, think of something else.”

For the upcoming show, “I pretty much had to start from scratch,” Jeni said.

“If you’re working [stand-up] 250 days a year, you don’t have to put pen to paper” to come up with the material for a special. “You’ll just improvise bits. But if you only work about a third of the year, you don’t have that luxury. I had other things going on.”

From scratch is probably the hardest way to patch together a routine. From inspiration to publication to satisfaction, the process is laborious.

In picking Cerritos for the taping, Jeni went against an industry belief that performers don’t do specials in the Los Angeles area because the audience pool is jaded; those entertainers say the crowd won’t be as enthusiastic as elsewhere because show-business events are old hat.

Yet over the past five years, Jeni has consistently performed in Orange County, developing a following.

“I knew that if I could get a good promoter and get fans to come see me and take that out of the equation, it would save me from packing, and I could sleep in my own bed up to the day of the show,” he said, laughing. “Cerritos is just a nice venue, about 1,200 seats. Big but not overwhelming.”

Jeni will tape an early and a late show Saturday and blend them into a final product.

“I’m picky about editing,” he said. “I’ll make lots and lots of edits just to pull things together. Sometimes the spots between bits are longer than you want. If you fumble around for 20 seconds, why have that in the show? You also have four, five, six cameras . . . to give the home audience the best seat in the house, especially for the sketches.”

By putting himself in the best light, Jeni knows he’s increasing his market value and exposure. And that doesn’t hurt these days.

“There was a time when, doing one HBO comedy hour, that person got pretty well known,” Jeni said. “In the 1970s, a comic doing one good ‘Tonight Show’ spot could be working all the good rooms in Vegas the next week. Today you can do 10 [spots], and no one will still know you because there’s so much more noise, so much more clutter to cut through.”

For Cerritos, Jeni said he has gone back to basics, subscribing to the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Storyteller. He’ll focus on bits rather than weave a theme.

“I find, unfortunately, that finding a theme is not that earthshaking of an insight. ‘Life is difficult.’ It doesn’t make the show any funnier, and it’s not something no one else ever thought of. For the most part, it’s dangerous . . . like a porno movie with a plot. You want to be titillated. Plot and dialogue are annoying and weigh it down. ‘Shut up and take your clothes off.’ Most people watch comedy because they are in the mood to laugh, and laugh a lot preferably.”

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BE THERE

Richard Jeni appears Saturday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive, Cerritos. 7:30 and 10 p.m. $17-$25. (800) 300-4345.