With stand-up, comedy troupes, amateur night and even a kids' show, the Greenwich Odeum hosts the first Rhode Island Comedy Festival

08:36 AM EST on Thursday, April 1, 2004

BY BRYAN ROURKE
Journal Staff Writer

Special to the Journal / Charlie Hall From left, Doreen Collins-Healey, Charlie Hall, Bruce Kalver and Arlene Kalver as Cookie the Clown.

Stand back. Charlie Hall's having a flashback.

He's returning to the early '70s, to a geometry class at Classical High School.

"Do you remember congruent angles?" Hall says. "They had something to do with triangles, right?"

That sounds right. But their connection to this weekend's first Rhode Island Comedy Festival remains remote.

So Hall, Rhode Island's senior statesman of comedy and founder of the festival, explains by way of a theorem.

Follow the logic. It goes like this.

"To prove triangles congruent, you have to go through certain steps," Hall says. "It's the same thing with comedy. There's a formula. You take two concepts and put them together to make a joke."

Comedy comes down to that, Hall says. Connect one concept to another. Correlate. Extrapolate. Stretch logic to its ludicrous limit.

Now watch it work.

Hall leaves his North Providence home, drives to Leon's & Stitches Metroplitan Bistro in Providence Place, stands on stage and demonstrates his theorem.

"I have two major personality flaws," Hall says. "I'm suicidal -- and I procrastinate."

The crowd laughs. Hall smiles. Let's hear it for congruent comedy!

This four-show festival over three days, beginning tonight, involves a small and silly army of jokers. There will be amateurs and professionals, stand-up, skits and improvisation. There will also be kids' comedy.

Coffee, anyone?

Sit down. Arlene and Bruce Kalver already are.

The Cranston couple is in a coffee shop. She's a clown. He's a magician. But right now you can't tell. Both look completely normal: no honking red nose for her, no black top hat for him.

Together, they're two-thirds of the festival's kids component. Marlene Clark of Connecticut, a ventriloquist, magician and clown completes the show.

At the moment, Bruce Kalver is reflecting on the early '90s. That, he says, is when stand-up was particularly big and when a Providence performance venue called Periwinkles was still in business.

"I was one of the only magicians who worked there," he says.

Suddenly a mound of melting snow comes crashing down off the coffee shop roof and lands like thunder outside the window beside Kalver, who looks to the sky.

"All right, one of a few," he says.

Another mound comes down. Kalver turns heavenward again.

"All right, one of dozens, okay?"

The avalanches end. And Arlene Kalver seizes the moment, offering a corollary to the Hall Theorem of Comedy Congruency: "Timing is everything."

And no, Arlene Kalver isn't clowning around when she says this. She just wishes she were.

"Watching comedy is fun," she says. "Discussing why it works is not."

Well then, have we got fun for you. What follows is not merely a primer on the Rhode Island Comedy Festival, but a discussion about comedy itself, and a close-up look at four of the performers.

Ringside with Collins

"Lay-deez and gentlemen, welcome to the main event," some wrestling-announcer-type voice is saying. "Let's get rrrready to rrrrumble!"

We don't know who's talking either. All we know is, it's a man's voice coming over the sound system at Stitches.

The next thing we know, a petite but buxom blonde is dancing her way through the crowd. And no sooner does she take the stage than she takes from under her shirt two breast-enhancing pads, which from a distance look like uncooked chicken cutlets.

"It's not just the cutlets, but it's the Wonderbra and so much frigging padding," Doreen Collins says. "I could take a bullet."

Special to the Journal / Charlie Hall Mike Petit, left, and Dave Kane as Father Misgivings pray for laughter.

Collins is a comical accident. Two years ago she's driving a friend to an amateur stand-up competition. The entrants are awful. So Collins, 44, storms the stage.

With no prepared routine, Collins delivers some well-received jokes first told by the late red-hot mama Sophie Tucker, winning the competition but not the praise of her friend Charlie Hall. He reprimands her for using someone else's material.

"I didn't know the rules," Collins says. "Comedy is a serious business."

And it's also a man's world, Collins says. Female comics are rare. And pretty ones are even rarer.

"Your appearance can intimidate people," Collins says. "So I try to denigrate myself almost immediately when I get on stage, before anyone else does."

That brings us back to breasts. Collins has some, two to be exact. And she often includes them in her act.

"I learned more about cleavage and breast enhancement from men," Collins says.

Collins is talking about her days as the host of a weekly drag-queen brunch in Providence.

"A couple of those queens were prettier than me," Collins says. "But I was real!"

COLLINS' STORY would be too far-fetched for fiction. Her early years were in New Jersey. But she grew up in Connecticut, mostly, and attended school irregularly. In fact, she was expelled from one high school for absenteeism.

"That didn't make sense to me," Collins says. "Riddle me this, Batman: You're kicking me out of school because I don't come? Darn."

As a teenager, Collins wanted to be back in New Jersey, so she briefly ran away from home. Instead of carrying several changes of clothing, she wore them.

A man picked up Collins hitchhiking and told her she was safe; he wouldn't rape her.

"I said, 'Buddy, I'm wearing eight pairs of underwear, four pairs of pants, six shirts and two jackets. If you can get all that off and still have any energy, go for it."

Naturally, you have questions: Wasn't Collins kind of warm under all those clothes? And who said she's pretty?

Judges at the Mrs. Rhode Island pageant, that's who. They said so two years ago. Collins won the contest's swimsuit and evening-gown competitions. But by the interview competition, Collins couldn't contain her wisecrack nature anymore.

"What brought you here today," an earnest pageant interviewer asked her.

"A cab," Collins said. "How about you?"

Next!

"I wasn't interested in winning," Collins says. "I just wanted the tiara."

BY AGE 5, Collins was smitten with the stage, acting, dancing, singing, doing whatever would get her in the limelight. That same sort of performance promiscuity drives her today.

A few years ago, Collins attended an audition to promote an exercise product called Butt Blaser. The company was looking for a male model.

"I'm not proud," Collins says. "I'll audition to be a man."

Collins got the part.

"I had one close-up," she says. "There's a little piece of white lint on my butt. Couldn't anyone pick that off?"

Collins is married with two children.

"I'm not telling you my hair is really blond and God gave me this nose," she says. "I'm not telling you I'm 6 foot 2 and I'm just slouching. I'm short. I'm old. I'm wrinkling. When my kids draw my picture, they say, 'Wait, I've got to put in the lines.' "

Collins does not perform under her married name, which is fine with her husband.

"He says, 'If you suck, I can say I don't know you.' "

In her one-hour Boozical show, which Collins developed with Hall and her brother Billy, she tells stories, sings songs and satirizes celebrities.

"It's not Shakespeare," Collins says. "I want people to show up and leave saying that was fun."

The comic Kalvers

Call the kids. Arlene and Bruce Kalver have something to show them: comic magic.

Arlene is Cookie the Magic Clown. Bruce is headmaster of the Revlak (that's his name spelled backwards) School of Magic and Wizardry, which has no enrollment. It's just a catchy claim.

One Kalver clowns around; the other performs 19th-century legerdemain. Both incorporate comedy for a reason.

"Every magician uses misdirection," Arlene Kalver says. "It's part of magic."

"Weren't you Miss Direction 1984?" Bruce Kalver says.

Magic brought the Kalvers together. It was 1976. At the time, Arlene was a theater major at the University of Rhode Island and manager of a Cranston community theater group, which hired Bruce to teach magic tricks.

Bruce Kalver learned magic from his late grandfather, Samuel Woolf, who was an assistant to Harry Houdini. Kalver, now 47, began performing professionally at age 10.

"Coming up with comedy for kids is difficult," Bruce Kalver says. "Comedy to kids is a knock-knock joke and why did the chicken cross the road."

Arlene Kalver, who's fortysomething, also comes from a performance family. Her grandmother, Nellie Cohen, her mother, Georgette Elbiom, and her aunt, Helen Teplitz, were all on radio.

The Kalvers are longtime dinner-theater performers, and for two years worked the cruise-ship circuit, which isn't as exotic as it sounds.

"You're stuck on the ship," Bruce Kalver says. "And you're living with your audience."

Card tricks are a specialty of Bruce Kalver, who says he once performed 13 hours straight without repeating a trick.

Kalver puts a deck of cards on the coffeehouse table. Name a card, he says. Three of clubs is the response. And when Kalver pulls the deck from its box and fans the cards, one is reversed and a different color than the rest: the three of clubs.

Bruce Kalver's kind of magic travels well, in his pockets. Arlene's clowning, however, needs an appropriate venue.

Several years ago, Arlene Kalver was in makeup, costume and a car accident. In the hospital's waiting room, kids kept coming up to her. They wanted her to make them laugh. She wanted to make them disappear.

"I said, 'Did you have any business cards?' " Bruce Kalver says. "She didn't find that humorous. She was not a humorous clown that day."

Hail Hall

If you don't know Charlie Hall, you don't know Rhode Island humor. Hall, 47, has been poking fun at the foibles of his native state for years -- in illustrated books, in stand-up performances and, most especially, in his Ocean State Follies. It's an ongoing roast of Rhode Island politics and its pseudo state institutions, now in its 13th year.

In the show, a person immitating Ray Charles in a Powerball commercial asks, "Where else can you buy a dream for a dollar?"

Hall answers. "How about the Foxy Lady?"

Framed photos in Hall's home show his career accomplishments. He has appeared with Ed McMahon, Joan Rivers and Jerry Seinfeld. In that picture, Seinfeld is making a funny face and pointing to Hall's hair.

"He thought it was a toupee," Hall says. "It's not."

Hall's wiry-haired head has appeared on national TV on MTV, Star Search, Caroline's Comedy Hour and Evening at the Improv. There, he performed with Damon Wayans, Roseanne Barr and Bill Maher.

"There is so much luck and work involved in making it," Hall says. "And so few make it. They do a set on TV and wait for their phone to ring."

Hall remains in Rhode Island, where he says he likes being "a big fish in a small pond." But many local comics who Hall has mentored and encouraged -- Tom Cotter, Al Ducharme and Brian Frates, among others -- he has sent off into the big pond of comedy, with appearances on The Tonight Show and Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

"I'm just nudging them on stage," Hall says modestly. But when challenged he adds, "Okay, maybe I am great."

If nothing else, Hall has a great sense for comedy. He knows what works. He recalls a comic who performed in Providence and whose whole act was expletives.

"I said, 'I hate your act. It's filthy. It's dirty. You're going nowhere,' " Hall says. "Six months later he had his own special on HBO."

Now that comedian, Joe Rogan, hosts the TV show Fear Factor.

HALL GREW UP in Providence's Mount Pleasant neighborhood, graduating from Classical High School and then from the Rhode Island School of Design. There, he majored in illustration. He played goalie for the school's hockey team, the Nads, most noted for their fans rallying cry: Go Nads!

It was at RISD that Hall embraced performance comedy and all its glamour.

"You're up there and you hear some lady yelling, 'Where's the mustard? Can we have some more mustard please?' " Hall says. "They don't realize how loud they are and that they're disrupting the show."

A show is one thing, life another. In Hall's case, it's comic.

"I think of everything I do as a sitcom," he says.

Hall walks into a doughnut and coffee shop. No, it's not the same one the Kalvers are in. But the coffee-comedy connection is becoming suspicious.

"May I help you?" the woman behind the counter says.

"Yea," Hall says. "Do you sell coffee?"

Hall's face is straight; the woman is wincing. It's as though she's just met the dumbest person on the planet.

"Yes," the woman says. "We sell coffee."

"How about doughnuts?" Hall says. "Do you have those?"

As good fortune would have it, yes, the doughnut shop sells doughnuts.

Comedy is work, Hall says. So he practices on people wherever he can. He tests his theorem. And he performs allegory math.

"People say, 'Do you always have to be on?' " Hall says. "I'm not being on. I'm proving triangles congruent."