Try to make me go to Rehab and I'll say como no, no, no?

Robert Nott |

5/8/2008 - 5/9/08

Rehab can be a very funny place, but as Paul Rodriguez sees it, it's still serious business. The Latino comic spearheads the comedy documentary Paul Rodriguez & Friends: Comedy Rehab, which is being filmed in front of an audience at the Lensic Performing Arts Center on May 16 and 17. His "friends" are comics Gene Pompa, Shayla Rivera, and Manny Maldonado. (Improvisational comic Jeff Garcia originally was part of the group, but he had to bow out because of a commitment to Comedy Central, so Maldonado stepped in.)

"We're calling it Comedy Rehab, but it has nothing to do with drugs," Rodriguez said. "This is for people who have been around a long time but haven't had their moment in the sun. We're looking at comics who everybody in our business recognizes as talented but who are like that guy in the Billy Joel song, where you walk into a bar and see him and say, 'Man, what are you doing here?'"

What they're doing is making people laugh. The film, directed by Gabriela Tagliavini, will shoot over two nights, incorporating about 30 minutes of material from each comic (who will basically perform the same act both evenings). The film will also capture backstage moments.

Rodriguez, who produced and performed in the 2002 stand-up comedy film The Original Latin Kings of Comedy, came up with the idea after running into producer David Valdes at a film festival last year, during the Writers Guild of America strike. "We didn't want to do another Comedy Central special," Valdes said. "Spike Lee's The Original Kings of Comedy got into the seriousness of comedy and talked to the comedians about who their idols and role models were. It set the bar for this genre as a whole, because he asked them serious questions, and you got to know the performers and appreciate the art that comedians have."

To start off, Valdes invited the comics to his house for dinner, with the camera rolling. As the group talked about the source of comedy, Rivera offered hers as "the truth and how stupid we are about it, things that are embarrassing, like sneezing and peeing your pants. That is funny to me. For example, empty-nest syndrome. I guess there are parents who, when their children leave the house, get depressed. Mothers go into their kid's room and lie on the bed and smell the clothing. That's insane to me.

"So you throw in cultural differences," said Rivera, who studied aerospace engineering before she began doing comedy. "Empty nest happens with white families more than Latino families, because in Latino families the children never leave the house, and there's no bedroom to go into because the boy is sleeping on the couch in the living room with the rest of his siblings. That opens a big window in comedy: the difference in cultures. But it has to be based on truth."

Pompa admits he looks elsewhere for comic fodder: "I lie. ... I lie my ass off. I do take something that happened in real life, but I basically add lies to it to make it funny. If you leave it alone, it's not that funny."

As an example, Pompa built a routine out of the fantasy of having a threesome with his girlfriend and another woman. In his routine, the fantasy became a reality after his girlfriend agreed to the setup — provided that he propose to her afterward. Instead, after a steamy night of three-way sex, he told his girlfriend, "Look, I'm not that comfortable marrying a lesbian." In another routine, he says he took a date-rape pill — but, to his dismay, no one took advantage of him.

Nothing is off limits for these guys in terms of subject matter. "I would not censor anybody regardless of how distasteful their material was," Rodriguez said. "Those limits should be self-imposed."

Pompa agreed, recalling the atmosphere in comedy clubs after Sept. 11, 2001. "It was all about 9/11," he said. "The quickest, the fastest, the most horrific. There's a competitive edge to comics when it comes to getting the topical stuff out there as quickly as possible."

Of the four, Maldonado — who set out to be a sports announcer but ended up adding shtick to his play-by-play delivery — is probably the most physical of the comics. One of his routines involves performing drop kicks onstage as he demonstrates how his wrestler mother disciplined the kids. He delivers jokes in a rat-a-tat style that gives his audience little time to breathe. But that's what they want, especially when they're paying $25, $35, or $50 a pop, he said. "When it comes to the attention span of Americans, we aren't a patient group. We want bam, bam, bam, joke, joke, joke. We always wanted to be entertained."

Regardless of the speed of delivery, Rodriguez said comics have to be good storytellers. "Something funny has happened to everybody on earth. We run home and try to tell the first person we see what we just saw; we try to explain this hilarious thing. But they just look at us, baffled. Finally we say, 'Well, I guess you had to be there.' And what a good comedian does is take you there. He transports you to that place where the lady fell. He finds the words so you can be there."

Rivera, Pompa, and Maldonado all said they are excited about performing with Rodriguez at the Lensic. They may be asked to explain, for the camera, what makes people laugh, why there's a need for comedy, and how they develop their material. Rodriguez and Valdes are counting on producing a quality product that will make its way into theaters or cable television.

"We are all looking for that second chance," Rodriguez said. "We're like Samson at the pillars, asking God for one last bit of strength to knock them over: 'If they could just see me this time, I'll make the All-Stars!' And if not, we'll end up in Wal-Mart for $1.99. That's where comedy goes to die."

details
Paul Rodriguez & Friends: Comedy Rehab
8 p.m. Friday & Saturday, May 16 & 17
Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St.
$20-$45, 988-1234