Leave ’em laughing

He grew up in a turbulent Jersey City home that had a lot of neuroses, in a turbulent neighborhood with a lot of crazy people.
“My mother was always screaming,” he recalled. “There was always something going wrong.
“She was 80 last year. She’s outlived Marlon Brando,” he said.
Lamb was the 10th child in a family of 14. “Though they aren’t all this good looking,” he said.
His father was a manager at Ford, which is where his family believes he picked up the principles of mass production.
Lamb’s upbringing also meant exposure to the neighborhood Irish “wise guys.” The storytelling Irish tradition combined with a lot of silliness — some of it subtle, some of it not — is at the core of his standup routine.
“People always told me I had a way with words,” Lamb said. “And some of the other things people have said to me are, ‘You need to get help.’
“And I’ve been getting help,” he added, laughing.
He likes comedians such as Bill Cosby who have a way with words. “A lot of the black comics are very funny, because they talk about what’s real,” he said.
The urban experience makes for better material, in his view, that the suburban; in the latter there’s nothing much to complain about.
Other influences are Monty Python, National Lampoon and Mad magazine. And he admires comedians Rodney Dangerfield, Andy Kaufman, George Carlin and Lenny Bruce, though his own work has relatively little bad language or sexual material.
Lamb, who’s long held down a job as a civil servant, first won attention with his cartoons, which have appeared in several New Jersey papers. That wasn’t enough for him, though.
“I wanted to do standup, but I was afraid to get on stage. I was absolutely terrified,” he recalled. “I was very sensitive, socially sensitive that way — worried about what people were thinking.” Although, he added it’s a requirement to be afraid.
He went to a class given by Tim Davis, who trained comedians at the club Stand Up New York.
“Pat has natural comic timing,” Davis said. “And he’s a cartoonist, so he sees the world in a skewed way.”
But it’s not all innate. Comics are made, just like brain surgeons, he said.
Now based in Arizona, Davis helps people from all walks of life to overcome stage fright.
He cited Jerry Seinfield’s comment that if people don’t laugh, it’s not because they don’t like you, it’s because they don’t like the joke.
“A stand-up comedian has to bomb a lot,” Davis said.
With Davis’s advise under his belt, Lamb was now ready to try and prepared to fail in the most unlikely venues.
“I’ve played biker bars where it said on the door ‘no colors,’ meaning biker colors because they’d had fights there,” he said, recalling audiences that screamed at him in between pool shots.
“I’m an adventurer by nature,” he said. “In some places, they weren’t expecting comedy; it might be an open mike for musicians. I could do 10, 15 minutes [without laughter] and eventually not worry about it. At first I’d really be shaken.”
The next stage was what Lamb has coined the “hot baloney” clubs, an alternative comedy circuit in upstate New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Long Island. Out-of-town clubs allow an inexperienced comic plenty of time on stage, in contrast to the city, where three minutes is often the norm.
“I’ve done that, I’ve succeeded; now I want to take Manhattan,” Lamb said. “But I’d settle for the Bronx.”
Lamb has gotten some radio spots on small stations in the city, though the Holy Grail is to be a full-time comic who gets to appear occasionally on Letterman or Leno.
But there’s no shortage of competition on the New York scene.
A few nights ago, Lamb went before a 20-something crowd at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Chelsea. He’d rushed from an open mike held earlier, where he performed well, he said. He was less happy here because his quirky, laid-back routine came up after the most successful act of the night, a high-energy performance by a “Saturday Night Live” writer.
“I was following a guy who did very well,” he said.
Lamb said that on a 1-10 scale in terms of performance and audience reception, this was a 6.
“I meet resistance sometimes,” he said, adding that his approach is more European, stressing the craft over the quick hit.
“I do a lot of high-risk stuff and no one else is doing it.”
Though his audience was sympathetic and friendly, the material worked with just a minority on this night, it seemed.
In some ways, Lamb said, the Manhattan crowds are easier and generally more docile. They go in wanting to laugh. This means, too, that the content very often isn’t that memorable.
A stand-up comedian can work an audience the way a preacher might speaking in tongues. At the UCBT, one young comic, whose material became increasingly incomprehensible, skillfully primed the audience to laugh every few seconds.
Lamb has certain disadvantages in such surroundings. He doesn’t do observational or situational humor, which is the standup staple. Nor does he do political jokes, even though he’s been active in gubernatorial campaigns for the Democratic party in New Jersey.
The Bloomfield, N.J.-based comedian does, however, deal with dating and relationships, a familiar standup theme. He talks about going out a woman who had 15 personalities, which meant he could divide the check 16 ways. He speaks of a recent break-up. They had what’s called a toxic relationship — she was also from New Jersey. His thinks of his home state as a “series of interconnected smells.”
The city of his youth features a lot in Lamb’s conversation.
Journalist Helene Stapinski’s brilliant and funny memoir “Five Finger Discount” portrayed a Jersey City where most people, it seemed, were on the take in one way or another. Lamb argued that people in his old neighborhood would be rather offended at such a characterization. “It was very Catholic, very religious,” he said. Nonetheless, he said, for decades the city had an ambiguous relationship to bad behavior. It would look down upon it and yet elect a mayor, Frank Hague, who could afford homes on Park Avenue and in Florida on an $8,000 salary.
Other than a brother-in-law mobster, now deceased, the Lamb family has kept on the straight and narrow. His siblings are nurses, lawyers, accountants, state troopers, teachers and Wall Street brokers. As his mother’s parents came from Clare and Cork, it could be said to be an immigrant success story, one that can be attributed in part, he said, to the discipline instilled by a Catholic education. [His father’s Irish roots went back to the Famine.]
Lamb hopes that the family will one day also claim to have a professional comic in its ranks.
The venues are getting bigger, he noted. There are, of course, the usual ups and downs.
“When it’s working it’s great; it’s wonderful,” he said. “When it’s not, it’s ‘how can I get the hell out of here fast enough.'”
That’s an improvement from the days he asked himself: “Where do I crawl into a hole and die?”
It helps to think of it as being like a political campaign. And just as Ronald Reagan became the champion of conservatism, he wants to become the champion of silliness.
Lamb said he knows his material works, it’s just a matter of seeing it through.