Three native-son comics come back for the 2nd annual Rhode Island Comedy Festival

09:49 AM EST on Thursday, March 31, 2005

BY BRYAN ROURKE
Journal Staff Writer

Al Ducharme is talking from his New York City apartment. We think we hear his wife in the background.

Illustration / Charlie Hall

Tom Cotter, Scott LaRose and Al Ducharme are all set for the 2nd annual Rhode Island Comedy Festival.

No, he says, that's the maid. Check that; it's the gardener.

Finally, Ducharme decides it's the nanny. "I don't have children," he confesses. "I just like having a nanny. I like to be changed once in a while."

Well, let's let Ducharme freshen up a bit. Tom Cotter's on another line.

He's speaking from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. He's sitting in the Split-Rock Grill, eating the Lumberjack Special.

"It's pancakes," he says, as though we thought it might be quiche Lorraine. And, he adds, the pancakes have blueberries -- as though that's supposed to impress us.

Hold on. Scott LaRose is calling from California. Not only is he a native of Rhode Island, as are Cotter and Ducharme, but he happens to know both of them, which naturally raises the question: how?

"Al Ducharme and I were lovers in 1989," LaRose says. "We met in Woodstock. Al was 3. I was 4. It was our first love."

No foolin'

For a serious answer about what's going on with these guys, we consulted Rhode Island's resident comic, Charlie Hall.

"They're April Fools coming back to their roots," he says.

We fool you not.

Hall's second annual Rhode Island Comedy Festival, today through Saturday at the Columbus Theatre in Providence, features not one, not two, but three nationally known home-grown professional goofballs.

It must be the water, you say.

No, LaRose says. "It has to do with the place being so small and everyone knowing everyone. It's wonderful. It's like being raised in a circus."

Ladies and gentlemen, in the festival's main ring, witness the humor-defying return of Rhode Island's Comic Triumvirate!

In the festival's other rings are an amateur comedy competition; a kids' comedy show; a show of local acts, including Hall's Ocean State Follies; an improvisation show by three different companies; a vaudeville show; and an exhibit of comic art.

But we're now going to try to learn about the comic trio, who served in each other's weddings, and who fondly remember their first meetings.

"Well," Ducharme says, "Tom was a male prostitute and I was driving one night . . ."

"Al was selling drugs the time I met him," LaRose says.

Corralling cats is nothing compared with corralling comedians and asking them why they do what they do.

"Comedians, in general, are not normal," Cotter says. "We're weird people. . . . It's the tears of a clown thing. We're disturbed. We're in and out of rehab and on our fifth wives and still cheating . . ."

"It's instant gratification. That's the best part of being a comedian.

"A person in the corporate world gets called in once a year for an evaluation. I know right away when my jokes bomb."

Bombs away

Now we take you back in time.

Cotter is sitting in Periwinkles, a Providence comedy club. It's 1986. Maybe it's 1987. It's hard to tell. Inside the club, both years look alike.

Cotter sits in the back. Week after week, month after month, he's watching, studying the performers, wanting to take the stage.

But it takes him a while to do that. "I didn't have the testicular fortitude," he says now.

Let's just call it stage fright.

"I was too nervous to get up," Cotter says. "I had the stuff written. I was prepared for months, if not years."

What, you ask, could possibly prepare a person for a life of stand-up comedy?

Being the youngest of six children.

"I really needed attention," Cotter says. "I became the ham of the family."

This initially disappointed members of the dignified East Side Cotter family.

"My father thought I would be a lawyer," Cotter says. "Instead, I'm going to bars and talking about my private parts. That was difficult for him, but he's coming around."

Lots of Saturdays

Cotter grew up near Brown University, where his father graduated and, after completing Tufts University Medical School, served as Brown's football team doctor.

Tom Cotter, now 40, was groomed for a life of law. In 1982, he graduated from Moses Brown School, where, for some reason, his penchant for comedy wasn't fully appreciated.

"I was constantly in the dean's office and on Saturday mornings had to work like a migrant worker," Cotter says. "I had a permanent reservation on Saturday morning to scrub something."

Then Cotter went to Denison University in Granville, Ohio, graduating in 1986 with a pre-law degree. He spent two college summer vacations working on Nantucket as a seasonal police officer. And after college, he took the law-school entrance exam and worked as a private investigator.

"I could sit outside someone's house at 4 in the morning and stalk him all day and still do comedy at night," Cotter says.

"I really was going to be a lawyer. I told my dad I just wanted to get this idea of stand-up comedy out of my head."

So Cotter brought his head to Periwinkles. And he sat. But Hall, the club's emcee, eventually confronted Cotter, and made him stand.

"His first set was very, very funny," Hall says.

It was there that Cotter met other Rhode Island comedians, such as LaRose and Ducharme. And it was there that Cotter began pursuing comedy full time.

In 1994, Cotter won the Seattle International Stand-Up Comedy Competition. In 2003, he won the Las Vegas Comedy Festival. In 2004, he won the Boston Comedy Festival. He has appeared, among other places, on The Tonight Show and Comedy Central.

Cotter now lives in New York, with his wife and their 2-year-old twin boys, who he says provide him with ample material. But for that matter, Cotter says, all of life does.

So Cotter always carries a notebook.

"People get annoyed," Cotter says. "We'll sit at dinner. They'll say something hysterical or a premise that could become funny, and I'll whip out my notebook and write it down. 'Wait, I didn't know you were quoting me. I thought we were off the record."'

Cotter can't help it. He says he has a horrible memory.

Yet he can't seem to forget Ducharme.

"He said he was going to sleep on my floor for a couple of weeks," Cotter says. "That turned into seven months."

Well-rested

"God, every chance Cotter gets to mention that, he does."

Ducharme can't believe Cotter has dragged the long-term-houseguest stuff out again. Ducharme didn't intend to stay so long. After meeting Cotter at Periwinkles, he lived with him while waiting for a particular apartment to open up; but that never happened, and weeks turned into months.

"I suppose he told you about dropping a barbecued rib on his new carpet, too."

No, Cotter didn't mention that.

"He offered me a rib, thinking I wouldn't take it," Ducharme says. "I dropped it. There was a big stain that wouldn't come out. He pointed that out to everyone who came over."

Ducharme grew up in Cranston, in a blue-collar household. Ducharme, who's now 42, was 13 when he met LaRose. They were standing beside each other in line to enter a high school basketball game. LaRose didn't have the $1 admission. Ducharme covered for him.

"He owes me that buck, by the way," Ducharme says. "Tell him he owes me a buck."

Ducharme and LaRose became fast friends. "I had no confidence when I was young, unlike Scott LaRose, who had more confidence than God."

Both attended Cranston High School West. Ducharme graduated in 1981. His comedy career began in 1986, a year after he graduated from Rhode Island College with a degree in theater.

"There was a comedy boom," Ducharme says. "There were comedy venues springing up everywhere. They didn't have enough comedians. Anyone who had five minutes of material was hired to do a half hour."

Ducharme and LaRose teamed up. They were a comic duo. And their premiere performance was at Periwinkles.

"They showed up in Ann & Hope costumes," Hall says. "I'm not sure which one was Ann and which one was Hope."

No, it was Apex uniforms, bright red button-down jackets -- LaRose had worked there -- and Ducharme and LaRose weren't funny.

"We failed miserably," Ducharme says. "Besides, his ego was so big, there wasn't room for me."

Cut off

After three shows as the Apex guys, including one in Boston, where people had never heard of Apex and where Ducharme and LaRose were mercilessly cut off a couple of minutes into their act, they went their separate ways.

Ducharme, who loves movies and loves doing sound effects and impressions, worked for a while at the G. Fox clothing store, and relished opportunities to operate its public address system.

"I would make real announcements," Ducharme says. "But I'd do different impersonations."

Hey, that sounds like a stammering, slow-speaking Henry Fonda.

"Every employee had a number, not a name," Ducharme says, sounding like the central character in On Golden Pond. "It was like Russia. 'Employee 1592, report to accessories.' "

When Ducharme moved to New York, he took a job in a video store so he could watch movies for free and practice impersonations. But before moving, Ducharme bought a house on Providence's East Side.

He needed more money. So, with Cotter's encouragement, Ducharme also got a job as a private investigator.

"Ninety percent of the time, it was boring," Ducharme says. "You'd sit in the car and get hemorrhoids and expand your bladder."

Ducharme likes to create scenes on stage, creating his own sound effects and voices for different characters, and serving as his own host. He has appeared on MTV, HGTV and A&E, among other cable channels.

Most of the time, he's traveling the country for performances, for which he likes to find funny spontaneous material. And if it's not as funny as he thought it might be, he goes to plan B: prepared stuff.

"It's the best job I've ever had," Ducharme says. "I wouldn't trade it for anything, except something better."

Pay up

Scott LaRose, you owe Al Ducharme a dollar.

"But a dollar with interest after all these years?" LaRose says. "In Rhode Island, that would be a buck three-eighty."

Just talking about Rhode Island returns LaRose to childhood memories, not to be confused with post-traumatic flashbacks.

LaRose is visiting Ducharme after school. He's at Ducharme's house, standing on the roof, knocking on a second-floor window.

"I did that to freak out his stepmother," LaRose says. "She would say, 'Why don't you use the doorbell?' "

That, apparently, would be too conventional for a comic, as would be disclosing your age.

"I graduated Cranston High School West, 1980," he says. "You guys figure it out."

What we do know is that he's married with a 2-year-old boy and living in Studio City, Calif. (He, however, balks at saying that since it's not somewhere chic, such as L.A. or Hollywood.) In 1984, he flew west for a finalist audition for Saturday Night Live. LaRose didn't get the part, but he did meet Jason Alexander, later of Seinfeld fame. That eventually led to a friendship with Jerry Seinfeld, who gave LaRose a guest role on the show.

"I kissed Elaine with open lips and caught George peeing in the shower," LaRose says.

LaRose found that he loved California. Soon he moved there.

Funniest guy

What LaRose really wanted to do growing up was make movies. So after Cranston West, he applied to a film school, which dutifully rejected him.

LaRose wasn't exactly shocked. He was voted the funniest in his high school class every year, not the most studious.

"My grades were so bad," he says.

After high school, LaRose attended the Community College of Rhode Island for a couple of years, and then transferred to New York University to study theater.

"I was told it didn't rely on grades, but an audition," LaRose says.

At NYU, LaRose's roommate thought maybe LaRose was there to study languages. Once he heard LaRose's mother leave a message on the answering machine: "I sent you a birthday cod."

"Your mother sent you a fish?" the roommate asked.

No, LaRose said, then translated Rhode Island into English: she sent a birthday card.

LaRose was kicked out of school after a year.

"I was 20 years old in New York," LaRose says. "Every night was a party for me. School wasn't important. I was out of Rhode Island. That was important."

While LaRose's tenure at NYU wasn't long, it was productive. He took an improvisation course that he says gave him the confidence and skill to pursue stand-up, particularly improvisation.

"That opened up every single door," LaRose says. "Stand-up was the rock 'n' roll of the late '80s. At 23, I was headlining."

As with Ducharme, LaRose worked in a video store, which gave him easy access to study taped material.

Directing, acting

LaRose directed Linda Blair in the 20-minute short The Blair Bitch Project. He appeared with Adam Sandler in Going Overboard; he played a 7-Eleven worker in the movie Booty Call.

These days, LaRose is focusing on film. He recently directed Comedy Hell, which is about three comics and a serial killer, and hasn't been released yet.

Still, stand-up appeals to LaRose.

"I use anything with a curse word in it," he says. "I do like to curse."

Well, heck, Scott, how would you characterize your comedy style?

"It's high-energy and crazy. I do a porno movie in fastforward. There's nothing funnier than that bit. That always closes and people go nuts."

Following news and watching movies and TV shows is where LaRose finds most of his material. But, like Ducharme, he doesn't like to rely on prepared stuff. He likes improvising.

"A lot of times it doesn't work," he says. "But I go so fast, it does work.

"As an artist, I don't feel like I've given an audience my full unless I've taken the tightrope."