Cover Story: Shtick happens — 3 local Jews keep’em laughing

Betsy Salkind could not attend her family's Passover seder last year.

"I had a yeast infection," she sighs.

She's just keeeeeding. Salkind likes to make jokes, and she's got a million of them.

So does the thoroughly salacious Adam Sandel, who says he pushes himself everyday to "be more dangerous," in part by finding humor in San Francisco's quixotic gay bar scene.

And so does Alicia Dattner, a self-described "self-loathing egomaniac," conspicuously pierced through her lip, and equally piercing in her own comic pensées.

Salkind, Sandel and Dattner are young Bay Area-based comedians who happen to be Jewish (all three eschew the label "Jewish comedian," since their material ranges far afield from Jackie Mason territory).

They represent the tip of a slowly melting iceberg, working in a local comedy scene that has shrunk considerably since the glory days of the '80s and '90s.

Chalk it up to high real estate prices, the dot-com implosion or TiVo. Whatever the reason, today Bay Area nightclubs devoted exclusively to comedy are almost as rare as a Noah's Bagels outlet in Tikrit.

There is work to be had. Comics still find audiences at the Punchline and the newly re-opened Cobb's at the Cannery, as well as the Marsh's Mock Café on weekends. There's Kung Pao Kosher Comedy and Funny Gyrlz, two annual events founded by longtime Bay Area comedy czarina Lisa Geduldig. There's the annual Comedy Day in Golden Gate Park. And then there's the bimonthly QComedy Showcase at the GLBT Center.

But there's not much more.Comedians scramble for open mike slots at converted nosheries and laundromats. Others have given up altogether, joining the Bay Area comedy diaspora in search of that elusive sit-com development deal in Hollywood or success in the laugh dungeons of Manhattan.

"San Francisco was the place to hone skills before you went to L.A. or New York," says Dattner, who is known professionally by her last name. Now she wonders if the local scene can remain the same reliable Triple-A farm club for the big show.

Salkind isn't too worried. In fact, she bucked the trend, moving to the East Bay a few months ago from Los Angeles, where she enjoyed a surge in her stand-up, theater and television career.

"San Francisco is a great theater town," says Salkind, lithe, dark-eyed and disconcertingly pretty. "I love the clubs here."

As enthusiastic as she is about her new home, Salkind concedes her husband's new job with a California nonprofit health insurer was the main reason for making the move north and not her own professional opportunities.

Though the Bay Area will always remain dwarfed by L.A.'s metastasized sprawl, Salkind also appreciates the rich local Jewish scene here, below the radar though it may seem from the outside.

"I always lived in places where there were no Jews," she says, referring to her childhood growing up in rural upstate New York, suburban Connecticut and the genteelly gentile Commonwealth of Virginia.

Though a lifelong ham, Salkind was not one of those kids who knew practically from birth that they were destined for a stand-up career. But being quick on her feet didn't hurt. "If you told the right joke," she recalls, "you'd avoid a beating."

A math whiz, Salkind attended MIT, graduating with a degree in the laugh-a-minute field of management science. A clue to her future came when she gave an oral presentation at a graduate seminar, all the while doing her impression of the prissy former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Salkind does a wickedly dead-on Brit accent).

She got a standing ovation...and an F.

Salkind later worked as a bank examiner for the Federal Reserve in Boston before chucking the whole Alan Greenspan thing to do stand-up.

She refined her chops in improv troupes with names like The Other White Meat, Guilty Children and The Terrorist Bridesmaids. Then it was off to Los Angeles, where she worked the clubs, appeared on "The Tonight Show" and even served as a staff writer on "Roseanne" (she was hired for the final season after la Barr caught Salkind's hilarious impression of a matzah-eating squirrel).

She even did a little time writing jokes for Mr. Comedy himself, self-help guru Tony Robbins.

From there she earned raves for her one-woman show "Anne Frank Superstar," a biting satire of Hollywood's knee-jerk reflex to exploit even something as sacrosanct as the Anne Frank story.

That play, a currently-in-development spin-off animated series based on 10-year-old Ethyl (the lead character in "Anne Frank Superstar"), and her stand-up work all continue to jostle for space on Salkind's day planner.

She is either an impressive multitasker or in desperate need of Ritalin.

Even more hyperactive is Sandel. The thirtysomething gay comic came out not too many years ago, following several years toiling as a playwright, college English professor and "Ozzie-and-Harriet"-style family man (he has three young kids).

Growing up a self-described shrimp in Los Angeles, Sandel also remembers having to use his wits to avoid harassment from the bigger kids, i.e., everyone else on planet Earth. "I could out-quip them," he recalls with pride.

Thankfully, Sandel went on to enjoy a growth spurt, graduating from UCLA with a degree in theater arts and subsequently embarking on a career as a playwright of average height. He had several works produced at regional theaters around the country.

All seemed well, but despite appearances, Sandel was living a lie. By the time he and his wife split, he had set up shop in Santa Cruz, a town whose gay community was, as he observes, exceedingly small. "Kind of like six inches of separation," he says. "Well, maybe seven or eight. You really have to beat the bushes to find the gay men [in Santa Cruz]. Of course most of them are in the bushes, but that's another story."

Relocating to San Francisco two years ago was a smart move professionally and sexually for Sandel. He found work writing for the Examiner and teaching composition, literature and mythology at local community colleges. He even co-wrote a musical ("Dream World," an adaptation of Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream" set in outer space...really).

"I've never had fewer than three jobs at a time," he says. "Thornton Wilder once said, 'If you live hand to mouth, you might as well be ambidextrous.'"

About 18 months ago, he was doing a freelance assignment for the Examiner on how local comics were dealing with Sept. 11.

Watching showcase after showcase of underwhelming comedy, Sandel came down with a bad case of "I can do better than they can" syndrome.

At the urging of fellow comedian and comedy host Nick Leonard (who has mentored many local greenhorn comics), Sandel put together a six-minute routine. He tested it at open mike shows and the QComedy Showcase, finding himself blessed with a healthy measure of beginner's luck.

"I knocked 'em dead," he says. "In gay venues, I do a lot of social satire about gay culture here. I like working for gay audiences because they need it. Straight comics tend to do jokes about dating and their kids, which gay people don't relate to. What I do is a community service."

Sandel soundbyte No. 1: "Did you hear what Sen. Rick Santorum said, comparing homosexuality to incest, adultery and bigamy? I felt so dirty when I read that because I'd just finished having sex. So I turned to my brother and said, "You'd better get out of here before one of my wives comes home."

Soundbyte No. 2: "I love lesbians. There's just one thing that makes me a little bit uncomfortable. They don't want me. But they want my sperm. You've seen the ads: 'Gay Sperm Wanted by Lesbians!' You know why they need gay sperm? Because they need the gay gene. They need a child to tell them, 'Mom, the macrame has got to go!'"

In addition to the clubs, Sandel occasionally performs at Laguna Honda Hospital, a senior care facility that counts aged gays and lesbians among its residents. Says the comedian: "They always tell me not to clean it up but to do my filthiest routines. For the shut-ins, this is a real mitzvah."

For Dattner, the mitzvah factor is a prime motivator as well. "Comedy can save the world," she proclaims. "It disrupts the hegemony. It's subversive; nothing else can break into the fixed-thought process like comedy."

If that sounds like she's given this a lot of thought, she has. Unlike her two colleagues, Connecticut native Dattner did have a strong inkling from an early age that stand-up comedy was her thing.

Turns out she was the Lisa Simpson type in school — clever, smart, kiss-assy — though not so thrilled about having to go to Hebrew school, even though her stepmother is a rabbi. "My favorite part about Judaism was the food," she says.

Dattner took more interest in making people laugh. She became a devotee of Comedy Central by age 12, perhaps inspired by her grandparents, in particular her grandpa. "He was the king of corn," she remembers, "telling the kind of jokes that make you want to curl up and cry."

Later, at Hampshire College, she began developing her stand-up skills at a weekly comedy night on campus. At one point, feeling cocky and confident, she took a semester off to come to San Francisco and work the improv/open mike scene.

"It's such a nice town to start a comedy career," says Dattner. "I could perform six nights a week, two sets a night, hang out at the Punchline."

Jokes from her current set: "You ever spend all day on the Internet? Like on Friendster? [You] finally turn off the computer, and think, 'Damn, I've wasted so much time ... I'm going to watch some TV.'"

Or: "Show business is hard — you've got to have integrity. I really believe you should treat people right on the way up. Because on the way down, you have to sleep with them again."

Though she doesn't run from her Jewishness, Dattner doesn't see herself as symbolizing the face of new Jewish comedy today.

"You don't want to represent the entire ethnicity," she says. "On the other hand, there are too many Jews in comedy for it not to mean something. Our culture is rich: it's about learning, education, intelligence. Having been oppressed, to survive we have learned how to make fun."

That refrain has been heard again and again from Jewish comedians as they try to explain why Jews and comedy have always gone together. Countless books, dissertations and salon.com articles have been written, plumbing the mysterious connection between the two.

Sandel tends to wax highly poetic on the subject himself. "Comedy is to Jews what jazz and blues are to black people," he says. "It was a way we dealt with suffering. Comedy has to come from outside the system. That's what the Jews did; they bedeviled the system. Today, American comedy is Jewish comedy."

Adds Salkind: "Comedy is a pretty intellectual sport, an outsider's art from people not in power. How better to disappoint your parents?"

It's hard to picture Salkind as a disappointment to anyone. She's done well for herself professionally, but even if she hadn't, she's very good at what she does.

While occasionally mining familiar comedic ground, she can also be strikingly original, even borderline outrageous. Her pantomimed impression of Andrea Yates (the vacant-eyed Texas woman who drowned her five children a few years ago) is as disturbing as it is howlingly funny.

She's also quick with the one-liners. Among her many bon mots: "I'm getting an abortion. I don't need one, but I feel that as an American, I should exercise that right before it gets taken away."

Or: "I've always wanted to give birth — to kittens. I figured it would hurt less, and then, when you're done, you'd have kittens."

Sprawled out on the couch in her new home, iced tea in hand and her real-life kitty scurrying about, Salkind doesn't come off as the quintessential Funny Girl, but then again, comics rarely do.

She's serious and studious, a vegetarian, a radical animal rights activist and politically to the left — past even her husband, Michael Johnson, who once worked for Ralph Nader.

Says Salkind: "I see doing comedy as an incredible opportunity to talk about things you don't normally talk about. If you're not offending anyone, you're not doing it right."

Dattner feels the same way, on stage and off. Her film school degree led to a day job as a film editor, and she has on her resume an edgy short film, "Comedy: The Other Black Gold." The short about the world of stand-up comedy, which she wrote and directed, is meant to bloody the nose of society. She even screened it at the San Francisco Underground Film Festival earlier this month.

"I'm into the underground and the underdog," she says. "I always ask myself, 'How do you not sell out? How can real people make movies or do comedy?'"

(Dattner defines "real people" as those who don't have a lot of money.)

The answers to her questions may be found here in the Bay Area, historically a fertile breeding ground for visionary art. For Jewish comics, despite the dearth of local venues, this still might be the place to be.

Dattner loves to find a perch at her nearby coffee joint, notepad in hand, to sketch out new material; or hanging out with fellow comics after a Punchline show. "It's eight people around a table," she says, "all unemployed, giving each other advice."

Sandel echoes the sentiment: "In L.A., you always do something to lead to something else. What I like about the arts in the Bay Area is that people love what they're doing and they love doing it here."

Even Salkind, an L.A. partisan if there ever was one, basks in the haimish quality of the region. "The Kabbalah Center in L.A. is like a Vegas showroom," she says. "It's a huge pick-up scene. When I went there, I was very suspicious about the sweet and sour pork."

For Sandel, nothing beats the 10 minutes on stage. "I approach stand-up as an athletic event," he says. "You put it together, you rehearse, then you get up there and give it your best shot. Maybe it goes well, maybe not. But it's all about the rush of getting up there."

He no doubt speaks for Dattner, Salkind and anyone else who ever mounted a stage to crack up a roomful of total strangers. There's just something about that relationship that drives the funny among us to keep on yukkin.'

As Salkind says in her act: "When I tell people I'm a comedian they often say, 'Are you funny?' I say, 'No. It's not that kind of comedy.'"

Where they'll perform

Adam Sandel and Betsy Salkind will be performing at 8 p.m. Monday, Nov. 24 at QComedy Showcase, in the LGBT Center, 1800 Market St., S.F. Tickets: $8-$15 sliding scale, available at http://www.harveymilk.org. Information: http://www.qcomedy.com.

Sandel information: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Salkind is performing at 9 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 22 at the Russian River Resort, http://www.russianriverresort.com, and will perform in January in San Francisco and L.A. Information: http://www.BetsySalkind.com

Dattner is performing at 8 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 16 at Waves,

65 Post St., San Jose, (408) 885-9283; 8 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 18 at Bazaar Cafe, 5927 California St., S.F., (415) 831-5620, bazaarcafe.com, free; 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 22 at Blue Rock Shoot, 4523 Big Basin Way, Saratoga, (408) 867-3437; and 8 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 25 at Venue 9, 252 Ninth St., S.F., (415) 289-2000, $8-$10. Information on future gigs: http://www.monkpunk.org.