All Joking Asides

Stand-up comedians are a strange and wonderful breed of performer. With roots in the English music hall tradition, American vaudeville houses and the so-called Borscht Belt circuit of Jewish entertainers, stand-ups tell jokes for a living—or for not so much of a living, depending on where they’re at. The road to success is notoriously long and frustrating. After a while, it seems like actual talent has less to do with success than simple endurance and drive. Who else but a stand-up comedian would set out on a road trip that begins in Nashville and ends in Birmingham, with stops in between that include St. Louis, Omaha, Wichita and Little Rock?

Plying his trade like a minor league baseball player, Keith Alberstadt recently did just that. Nashville-born and -bred, the 29-year-old former Vanderbilt communications major used to be employed doing marketing work for the Commodores athletic department and for the Nashville Sounds. In a way, he’s the prototypical Nashville stand-up: He’s paying dues. Alberstadt is getting out on the road, and since September 2001, he’s been making enough money to support himself solely as a comedian.

Alberstadt is just one of a notable handful of comedy performers who call Nashville home. If nothing else, he and his stand-up colleagues are proving that Music City can indeed be the launch point for anyone who desires a legitimate career telling jokes. “Every town has its community of comics,” says Frankie Harris, a young Nashville comedian. “We have eight or 10 here who have a shot at making a full-time living. We support each other. We want to see each other succeed.”

The quality of stand-up talent in Nashville varies, of course. Some folks are simply funnier than others. But perhaps more interesting are the career levels one observes, especially in a town where music is king and other art forms have to do double-time to grab attention. Some Nashville-based comics such as Tim Northern, Rik Roberts and Danny Storts actually have full-blown careers going, including steady regional and national gigs. Others are still struggling and have to work other jobs to pay their bills. Some do it strictly as hobbyists.

“Everyone who gets onstage here has talent,” says Brian Dorfman, owner of both the Nashville Zanies and another Zanies franchise club in suburban Chicago. “But taking it to the next level is the challenge. The ones that really want to work are the ones who have a chance for a career. It takes 10 years to be an overnight success—going from gig to gig on the circuit.”

Club dates can pay anywhere from $50 a night to $1,000 a week. There’s a pecking order too. You can host (i.e., emcee), feature (serve as an opening act) or headline—the Holy Grail of the stand-up club culture. For most stand-ups, the trick is to keep moving and keep working. Corporate gigs don’t have the cachet of prominent club venues—and they aren’t the pipeline to your own television series—but doing national sales meetings and the like for Fortune 500 companies can net $2,000 and up per job.

It’s been said that Northern, 36, is the funniest person in Nashville. The East Nashville native performed at his first Zanies open mic in February 1993. Nine years later, he now spends about 35 weeks a year taking his act on the road, blending tongue-in-cheek observations with his penchant for wordplay and outright silly puns. Northern’s career has been pretty consistent for a while now, but even a veteran like him can rejoice with the recent news that he’s been taken on by Four Points Entertainment, a management agency that also handles Jeff Foxworthy and Bill Engvall. This development could help Northern branch out from strictly club work to the more lucrative concert and corporate scene.

“I wish more people would check out live comedy,” says Northern, who is one of the few local comics to headline at the Nashville Zanies. “We could use a few more venues in Nashville. We have some pretty fun cats in this town.”

Harris, 27, has been doing open mics since his days as an undergraduate at UT-Knoxville. Locally, he does an occasional set at Zanies, but he also travels, playing for pay or showcasing for club owners. “I think I’ve known since I was 12 that I wanted to be a comic,” says Harris, who’s pretty much followed the typical career path of Nashville stand-ups: start locally, then hit the road in hopes that you can one day work your way up to headliner status. “When people see that you’re not doing it as a hobby, things can start to happen. You can start to be taken seriously. A lot of people don’t understand how it works—they think you’re traveling on a circuit that’s already laid out. But it took me five years to finally start to get regular work. At some point, I’m going to want to look for commercial work and at getting into different kinds of media.”