HOW TO SUCCEED IN FUNNY BUSINESS: LOTS OF TRYING

One minute’s worth a month: that’s about how much exceptional material an aspiring comedian can hope to write and refine for his or her act. And there are hundreds of would-be comedians putting in long hours in an effort to add more minutes to a routine and to polish that routine, hoping their efforts will lead to the big time--working in television and film, appearing on “The Tonight Show” or headlining at a key comedy club.

Orange County residents Pat Hanifin and Jerry Miner are two aspiring comics whose long hours are beginning to pay off.

Nearly four years ago, Pat Hanifin sold his business--Hanifin Sportscenter, at that time the largest surf shop on the West Coast--and turned his attention to his new career as a comedian. To hear him tell it, the switch had more to do with a desire to leave the surfboard business than any burning ambition to step on stage and tell jokes.

“I’d seen comedians on TV mention the Comedy Store in Hollywood, so I went up there a few times and thought it looked pretty neat,” Hanifin, a 36-year-old Balboa Island resident, explained in an interview. “I went a few more times, really enjoyed it, then started thinking, ‘I’d like to do that.’ And I was really tired of the surf shop. So even though I’d never had any big dream to be a comedian, I decided I wanted to do comedy.”

Hanifin’s seemingly casual attitude doesn’t jibe with the way he commenced his comedy career or the way he advances it now. For example, he said the day he completed the sale of the surf shop, he bought a video camera and recorder, set up the equipment in his house, and then holed up for the next three months writing and practicing an act. He also enrolled in some comedy workshops, which helped him learn how much he didn’t know: “I discovered I was pretty naive about it. I realized I was not writing what you should for stand-up comedy. What I was writing was more like a play, with me acting out all the parts.”

He has since come a long way. He’s now a popular mainstay at Newport Beach’s Laff Stop, Orange County’s all-comedy nightclub, where such big-name comics as Robin Williams and David Letterman have appeared; he has performed at virtually every stop on the Southern California comedy circuit, and he says he’s being considered for a role in a forthcoming NBC TV sit-com. Hanifin attributes his success in the funny business to a dead-serious work ethic--diligently writing new material (which includes a weekly session with other comics and writers) and performing nightly, often at three or four clubs each evening. Because the Laff Stop is the only local comedy club, he is required to venture outside Orange County several times a week in order to accumulate what he feels is sufficient stage time.

In mid-December, a reporter accompanied Hanifin on what he described as a fairly typical evening. He started in Orange County, performing at the opening of a new video studio in Fountain Valley, then moved on to the Comedy Store in Hollywood, Bert’s Deli Smoker in Sherman Oaks, the L.A. Cabaret in Encino and the Variety Arts Center in Los Angeles. Little wonder Hanifin has put nearly 100,000 miles on his ’83 BMW, or that he’s pretty facile at writing driving jokes.

He believes it is important to maintain that kind of frantic performing pace--even if it often yields only small amounts of stage time and even smaller amounts of money--because he is positive that the more he performs, the more he improves. “You can sit home, try to write everything on a piece of paper and perform once a week, but I just don’t think you’re ever going to get much better that way.”

He’s equally adamant about leaving the tacky, more offensive material to other comics. “I want my act to be pretty clean,” he said firmly. And it is. About the “dirtiest” it gets is when he describes the unsuccessful attempts to housebreak his new puppy: After finding a mess on the carpet, Hanifin rubbed the puppy’s nose in it, at which point the dog looked up at him and said, “Hey, you’re really sick.”

Beyond stylistic preference, Hanifin thinks it’s wise to keep his routine PG-rated so that it would be appropriate, as is, for “The Tonight Show.” He was quick to add, however, that he probably won’t even seek a slot on the program for a while. “I’m about two years away,” he said. “I mean, I can go on and do a strong six minutes, but you really should have a backlog of half a dozen of those sets, and I don’t yet.”

Like other comics, Hanifin invariably evaluates his progress in terms of time. “I think to get near the top--I don’t mean Las Vegas, $70,000 a week, but where you’re walking in as a headliner anywhere you go, you’ve done a few ‘Tonight Shows,’ people know who you are--I think it’s about a six-year process.”

Which, if he’s on schedule, will mean two more years of toiling and--if he continues to log all those miles--probably one more car.

Jerry Miner drew some of his first laughs for the wrong reasons. “When I was hired as doorman at the Laff Stop,” he said, “people laughed when I said I wanted to become a comedian.”

As it turns out, Miner may have the last laugh. Last December, 18 months after he was hired as doorman and only a year into actively pursuing a comedy career, he opened for stand-up star Jay Leno at the Laff Stop. “Leno came up to me afterward and said, ‘You have some pretty funny stuff.’ Then, when he found out I’d only been doing it a year, he said he thought I was a lot better than he was when he’d been at it a year,” Miner recalled during a recent interview.

Considering Miner’s age--23--the Newport Beach resident would seem to have a bright and funny future. Actually, although the concerted effort toward stand-up is relatively recent, Miner has dabbled in comedy for some time: five years ago, he and some classmates at Golden West College performed in an improvisation group patterned after “Saturday Night Live,” which led to an appearance on a local cable-television special; a year or so later, he accompanied two comedian friends to the La Jolla Comedy Store and performed at the club’s open-mike night.

These experiences convinced Miner that stand-up was right for him, but he was less certain about how well his jokes would stand up against the competition. Which is why the doorman job--essentially a glorified usher position--proved valuable.

“When I got the doorman job, all I did for six months was watch,” he said. “I saw that most guys go after the same areas: Denny’s, Delorean, cocaine, AIDS, herpes--all that stuff that’s so typical. My ideas were different--I didn’t have jokes about that kind of stuff because I wanted to stay totally clean and be different.”

His doorman dues-paying and novel sensibility have served him well: His goofy-cum-poignant observations about everything from promise rings to peace talks have made him one of the stronger and better-received emcees at the Laff Stop. He also pops in periodically at the La Jolla Comedy Store, but other than his stage time there, he has performed very little outside the Orange County area--something he hopes to change as he plots his strategies for 1985.

Discussing his game plan, he was quick to dismiss the multiple night-multiple club approach practiced by Hanifin, saying he’s “not going to go that way--I’d just get burnt out.” Also, unlike Hanifin, his immediate goal is to land a spot on “The Tonight Show.” Toward this end, he intends to log some performance time on the road; enter both the Los Angeles and San Francisco comedy competitions, which can provide a critical boost to a comic’s career, and try to land bookings at the prestigious Hollywood Comedy Store.

If he is successful with some--much less all--of those aspirations, the Laff Stop may find a slew of would-be comics clamoring for Miner’s then-vacated doorman job.

Now, that would be funny.