The Color of Humor, Hope

Self-centeredness, I suppose, is a necessary armor in show business, as essential to the frail entertainer ego as a shell to a clam. In stand-up comedy, it’s critical. The audience, after all, arrives with the cruelest expectations: Make me laugh. Make me laugh right now.

But there was something different in the air as I recently watched a group of comics perform at the Comedy Store in West Hollywood. Calling themselves “Funny Ladies of Color,” these women have banded together like a dozen nutty cousins in a profession that lionizes individuality and dog-eat-dog competition. They seem devoid of the insecurity-driven back-stabbing you might expect among stand-up performers.

“I love them all,” said the group’s co-founder, Cha Cha Sandoval. “We’ve turned into the best of friends.”

And although you could argue that comedy in the last few years has become more accessible to women of all shades, this group has the sense that they are opening doors still closed. What they dream of, besides becoming household names, is their own TV show, a kind of all-female version of “In Living Color.”

Sherri Shepherd, an African American legal secretary and Funny Lady of Color, says she has regularly been bumped off stages by male comics. But she doesn’t bash men in her act; instead, she jokes about the travails of being single and broke.

Shepherd wondered if the audience had seen the movie “Indecent Proposal,” in which a married woman is paid a million dollars to sleep with a rich man.

“Y’all see that?” asked Shepherd. “I’da slept with that man if he’d taken the boot off my car and paid my rent!”

Lydia Nicole, who grew up in Harlem and had a bit part in “Indecent Proposal,” says she has been told by entertainment industry scouts that the show is just “too ethnic.”

“I’m half black and half Puerto Rican,” Nicole tells the audience. “Out here, that makes me Mexican. In Miami, it makes me Cuban. In Mississippi . . . it makes me dead.

“My father was a pimp, my mother was a prostitute. Out here that makes me . . . an actress.”

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Working stand-up takes faith. Not just in the future, but in the present. A stand-up has to believe in life after death. After all, that bright white light at the end of the tunnel was probably first noted by a comic, staring at the spotlight after flopping. Fortunately, no one died on stage the evening I saw Funny Ladies of Color.

The troupe has what can only be described as a liberal interpretation of the word color : Four of the 11 women on stage were white. Of the four, two (including Levin) were Jewish, one was Armenian American and one was Italian American.

I don’t know what the Census Bureau would say, but Funny Ladies of Color producer Sharona Fae (Jewish, and the daughter of Holocaust survivors) puts it like this: “It is really a color situation. The thread that transfers through all of us is, obviously we are women, but we are coming from those ethnic backgrounds and have that . . . Ellis Island mentality.”

Most of the women have day jobs (waitress, stewardess, retail clerk, computer processor). Others eke out a living at acting and stand-up. But they all have that brazenness, that certainty about what they want.

Cynthia Levin answers without hesitation or a shred of self-consciousness when I ask her about her goals: “I have always wanted to be a movie star.”

Alexis Rhee, who is Korean-born, teaches violin, which she incorporates into her act.

“People think Korean store owners are stuck up,” Rhee says. “They are. Usually between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. on Saturday nights. . . . I gotta play.” She lifts the violin to her chin and saws out a tune.

Sandoval, a former stuntwoman who was raised in East L.A., has created her own act around being a “Jewcana”--half Jewish and half Latina.

Her trademark bit is a song called “I am a Mexican Jew.” (Sample lyrics: “I’m a hot-blooded lover, but I’m usually not in the mood. The day I got bat mitzvahed, I also got tattooed.”) She tells the audience that Mattel ought to introduce a new doll, Barrio Barbie: “No husband. Ten kids. Works at McDonald’s. You know who’s gonna be mad? Malibu Barbies. (They’ll say) ‘Those East L.A. Barbies are taking our jobs!’ ”

“We are all struggling,” Sandoval says later. “That’s what makes us so close. I don’t know how to explain it, but I just feel like it is my time.”

Will you know these names one day?

That’s what they hope. That is what fuels them.

In the meantime, they have each other.

“We’re kind of like the Joy Luck Club,” Sandoval says. “Only the X-rated version.”