Dispatches: Searching for Jerry Seinfeld

• Share

A young comic is doing a bit about his genitals when a cry comes from the crowd: "Hey! Hey! I'm really getting sick and tired of all this!" An earnest man in shorts runs up to the front of the room. "I'm just sick of all this blaspheming," he says, "all this talking about your genitalia."

After undergoing a few more minutes of such abuse, the comedian surrenders the stage to the heckler, who suspiciously wears a clip-on microphone and who begins preaching to the crowd. "I'll tell you what this is," he says. "It's another example of this liberal Jew-run media ... in cahoots with the lesbian dentists' cartel. In Ecclesiastes 14:8 it says, 'The Lesbian Periodontists shall ... ' -- I'm paraphrasing here ... "

Moments like this are the point of Montreal's 11-year-old Just for Laughs comedy festival, which this year featured 200 comedians, appearances by comedy legends George Burns, John Candy and Michael Richards (Kramer on Seinfeld) and not one but two acts involving naked guys dancing with balloons. The festival attracts around 600,000 people, but the performers are not nearly as interested in the crowds as they are in the 400 scouts from Hollywood and New - York City who roam the venues in search of the next Roseanne Barr or Jerry Seinfeld. The industry types perform a very important function. At every hotel bar you see the same clusters of people: a couple of comics, a couple of managers and an executive; the executive is there to pick up the check.

But they can also make somebody's career. "The hope," says Scott Schneider, manager of talent relations for the cable comedy network Comedy Central, "is you'll find the next new big talent that you can exploit." This year the consensus among the development executives seems to be that there are some fantastically funny, very exciting, very, very unique talents here, but none you would necessarily want to put on after Home Improvement.

Take David Cross, for example, the 29-year-old comic from Los Angeles whose version of Ecclesiastes is unfamiliar to most readers of the Bible. Cross's blasphemy and his predilection for overly evocative images ("A great big steaming platter of baby kittens" springs to mind) don't seem suitable for a vehicle on ABC called, say, Cross My Heart. Nor does Lea DeLaria seem quite ready for her own show. She begins her act by announcing, "It's the 1990s and it's hip to be queer and I'm a big dyke." As David Tochterman, vice president of talent and development for Carsey-Werner (Cosby, Roseanne), puts it, with dead seriousness, "The time may not be right for somebody with Lea's ability to be showcased properly on network television."

Anything is possible in show business, however. Cross is close to signing a deal with a major television-production company. And DeLaria says, "This guy came up to me and said he was with ((Fred)) Silverman's people, and he said, 'You know, we're thinking of redoing C.P.O. Sharkey . . .' "