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.”

For those who have managed to break out of the club scene, stand-up comedy has often served as the route to a huge entertainment career in America—more often than people realize. Bill Cosby, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal—the list goes on, all started as stand-ups, though we hardly think of them that way anymore.

Like Harris, Danny Limor has his eye on something bigger. A Nashville native, he does some way-out surrealist-style humor, along with wry observations about his family and the world around him. He spent some time in L.A. a few years back attempting an acting career, and he intends to go back. “I never thought I could do stand-up,” says Limor, “but Tim Northern encouraged me. ‘Write five minutes of material,’ he said. So I adapted some screenplay stuff I’d been working on. I’ve been doing it for about two years now, and about a year for actual money.

“My plan is to work in town for a while, then return to L.A. and get into the Groundlings [the group that spawned Phil Hartman, Pee Wee Herman and other comic legends]. But what I really want is Saturday Night Live.”

The gulf between wanting and getting can be huge, however. Sometimes the stereotype of the clown who’s crying behind the laughter isn’t too far off. “It’s such a hard pack to break out of,” says Nashville resident Leslie Norris. A former Florida beauty pageant queen, she has worked in the stand-up business since the ’80s, after a stint as a singer with Disney took her to Los Angeles. She made four appearances on the syndicated Star Search TV series, did guest shots on network sitcoms and cable-TV stand-up specials, and has played at Caroline’s in New York City and various venues in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. She’s also played the Nashville Zanies, though her work nowadays is mostly composed of corporate gigs.

The female stand-up’s plight can be particularly discouraging, she points out. “Some people don’t think women are funny. Stand-up is about living life. Well, women often don’t come into their own until about 30. Yet our society pushes us out at 35.”

Dawna Kinne, 42, hails originally from Alaska and made her way to Nashville by way of New York City about two years ago. A veteran stand-up with 10 years of professional credits, she also has a solid take on the “female problem,” noting that audiences have “fewer visual expectations of a man. They’re more tolerant of a man’s look. But talent scouts will tell a woman that she doesn’t have that ‘camera-friendly’ look. So if you haven’t got the look, you gotta have the material. Still, it isn’t always about being funny. TV people, in particular, look for marketability.”

Beth Donahue began her career as a stand-up 16 years ago. Now 40, she’s since balanced comedy with work as a radio personality, which brought her to Nashville seven years ago. Still grabbing gigs, where she entertains crowds with her singular display of bawdy, in-your-face kvetching about relationships, sex and the world at large, Donahue has her own take on the rigors and realities of the comic’s life. “I think that if you’re really funny, you get treated really well, whether you’re a man or a woman. I’ve never encountered problems with discrimination, because I think I’m funnier than most guys anyway.”

Carla Rhodes has one of the more interesting burgeoning careers in the Nashville area. By day a design major at MTSU, Rhodes, 20, offers a three-pronged attack of comedy shtick. She is, first and foremost, a very good ventriloquist (self-taught, no less) whose stage compadres include clever puppets of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and David Bowie. This routine has made Rhodes a favorite as an opener at otherwise strictly music clubs. She also tells jokes and supplements her act playing guitar and singing original comic numbers such as “I Like Animals,” a silly but catchy tune that caught the attention of the nationally syndicated Dr. Demento radio show. Rhodes is a precocious yet charming and likable go-getter who has traveled to London and New York City on her own to gain exposure of any kind, even if it’s only through open mics. “Long term,” she says, “I see myself doing theater gigs and more or less finding my own audience. Or television, maybe.”

Nashville also has a raft of gifted comic moonlighters. By day, Dan Whitehurst doesn’t kid around—he’s a Metro Police detective on the armed robbery beat. But by night, he is a poised stand-up whose laid-back, cynical delivery is peppered with sarcastic gags revolving around marriage, relationships and the ironies of the world. Rick (“Wey Funny”) Wey is a longtime trucking-industry employee with a polished stage demeanor and some funny material. He’s played at Zanies and he gets gigs out of town, yet considerations of family and working a full-time job have created somewhat of a stumbling block in his pursuit of bigger things. Talented newcomer Matt Sterling, who makes his living in independent video production, has been doing stand-up about nine months. His unique style includes strange but heady forays into visual gags, such as a spoof of the film Memento wherein he removes his shirt to reveal a body painted with handy reminders of “things to do.” “The traditional stand-up rules are difficult for me to adhere to,” Sterling says. “I don’t do typical club work.”

And then there’s the unusual case of Tucker Forrest, a pseudonym for Bruce Wood, the local environmental activist who recently launched his campaign for Nashville vice mayor. Forrest’s been doing stand-up for seven years. Relegated mostly to local open mics, he has a distinctive comic delivery, representative of the axiom that if you don’t say funny things, you need to say things funny. His stock in trade is usually simple, silly wordplay, yet his delivery, reminiscent of an idiot savant, is definitely ear-catching. He’s offbeat, funny and very noticeable when he takes to the stage.

For all of these comedians, no matter their level of seriousness, one important resource is a Web site, nashvillestandup.com, which offers profiles of local performers, a schedule of upcoming performances and news about what’s happening in the Nashville comedy scene. The site is operated by Chad Riden, who does Web design for a living, but has been pursuing comedy since his days as a broadcasting major at UT-Knoxville. Along with sometime partner Jesse Perry, Riden also runs the regular Tuesday-night open mic at The Cantina in Cummins Station, which is presently Nashville’s only steady venue where comics can show up, be greeted with open arms and try out new material to an appreciative if often modest audience. Perry and Riden also run a comedy Web-zine, www.mangydog.com, an outlet for comic stories, gags and online video projects.

Another local project of note is Stubby’s Place, a new cable-access series produced by Glen Weiss, a photographer and post-production editor for WTVF-Channel 5. Weiss has gathered together a cast of Nashville actors and comedians to shoot 13 episodes of a variety show that revolves around life in a comedy club. “I see it as a stepping-stone for myself and the others,” says Weiss. “We have the potential of a viewing audience of 150,000 people. We also think we can raise the bar for local cable programming.”

Ultimately, for any aspiring Nashville comedian, all roads still lead to Zanies, a nationally recognizable name. Zanies owner Dorfman “is integral to the comedy scene here,” says Kinne, “if not for the mere fact that comics dream about being onstage at Zanies. Brian has done a lot to promote comics like Keith, Tim and myself wherever and however he can. His name as a reference is very important outside of Nashville. He gives us whatever he can to keep us going in between road gigs.”

No matter what the level at which they’re working, one thing remains true for nearly all of the comics who call Nashville their home: Stand-up remains a cottage industry, and the scene here offers proof positive. “The ones who really want to make it, they do it themselves,” concludes Dorfman. “There’s a vast talent pool here. But success depends on how hard you work.”