Always Leave ‘em Hurting

I have a memory of my crazy old stepfather chasing me down the street with a 2-by-4 he fully intended to lay across my head, and it makes me smile.

I see him in a pair of ridiculous boxer shorts, his skinny legs pumping madly, his face twisted in rage as he pursues me, and I laugh out loud.

It wasn’t all that funny back then, but time and survival throw new light on old terrors, softening them into palatable lumps of memory.

That’s kind of the way it is with Kenny Kahn, a criminal lawyer who’s been turning his own pain into stand-up comedy.

The best comics are like that, bright people whose humor emerges from dark places in the soul and who never stop trying to deal with them.

Kahn copes with his by getting up on stage and explaining why he was the only Jewish kid in a gang-dominated East L.A. housing project.

“My parents moved us there for business reasons,” he says, setting up the joke. “My dad was a struggling young heroin salesman.”

That was true, you see, and there weren’t really a lot of laughs seeing your old man hustling dope to support his own habit, and living with him zonked out of his mind most of the time.

But Kahn sifts the misery from the memory and feeds it back in a barrage of one-liners that leaves an audience laughing itself silly.

Seeing him on stage in places like Igby’s, looking glittery and predatory, you can understand the irony of him telling you, “The war on drugs is over. Drugs won”--especially if you know that his father died of an overdose.

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Comics have history, they have pain. As if growing up in the violent projects wasn’t bad enough, Kahn got polio at 15 and had to struggle through most of his teen-age years on crutches.

This was made more difficult by the fact that his parents worked with a traveling carnival and he had to go with them every summer, running what the carnies called the hankie-pank games, where customers threw darts at balloons or softballs at wooden milk bottles.

He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do in life, but he knew he didn’t want to be like either of his parents. His dad was a junkie and his mother a whining enabler. “I had the absolutely perfect negative role models,” Kahn says. “I didn’t want to follow either one of them.”

He was student body president at Lincoln High and opened every assembly with a comic monologue, but that didn’t impact on him as a life’s work.

Then, as he tells it, standing on stage with a briefcase, wearing a lawyerly double-breasted suit, a voice came to him in the night that said, “This is Moses. Go to law school. You’ll find your people there.”

So he went to UC Berkeley in the ‘60s where, he says, “I learned torts, contracts and how to go limp when the cops came.”

Kahn began practicing law by defending friends in the commune where he lived, then turned to grown-up stuff as L.A.’s “hippie lawyer.”

Numbered among his clients were people such as magazine publisher Larry Flynt, who got in trouble wearing diapers made from an American flag, and Daulton Lee, the bumbling Snowman from “The Falcon and the Snowman.”

But pain followed Kahn like a bad dream.

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In court one day, defending a guy who’d assaulted a cop, he and his client were arguing about the case when the client suddenly responded to Kahn’s point of view by stabbing him in the chest with an ice pick.

The defendant was shot by a bailiff and everybody lived, but Kahn did more bleeding than laughing at the time. Later, however, he’d say, “The guy was trying to stab me in the heart, but in a lawyer, it’s hard to find.”

No voice came to him in the middle of the night and said, “Be a comic. You’ll find your people there too,” but he finally decided to do it anyhow. He signed up with a comedy workshop and after 10 sessions hit the stage.

That was a year ago and now, at age 54, with a couple of dozen performances behind him, Kahn would dearly like to give up law for comedy. But as a beginning comic, he gets only $50 if he’s paid at all. As a lawyer, he makes about $250 an hour. Simple economics keeps him where he is.

So he’ll go on doing jokes on stage part time, dealing with his pain and edging slowly into new areas of humor, like: “The Republicans now control 54% of the Senate. As Dan Quayle points out, that’s almost half.”

Anger will remain because that’s what gives comedy its edge. Shelley Berman told me once you’ve got to be a little outraged most of the time to be funny, and he’s one of the funniest, angriest people I know.

If Kahn can be that angry and that funny, it’ll be good-by law, hello show biz. I’d probably be there too, but I’m too literal. I can’t stop wondering what step-daddy would’ve done if he’d caught me.