The Paul F. Tompkins Show has been playing to sold-out crowds at the Largo nightclub in Hollywood, California for over a year now. Look at this:

L.A. CITY BEAT - February 2004

"HE'S DYING TO ENTERTAIN YOU"

by Carl Kozlowski

Monday nights in the clubs are pretty boring, right? If you’re looking for entertainment, you’re probably better off flipping on Fear Factor or Everybody Loves Raymond, watching a video, or curling up with a good book and some music.

Paul F. Tompkins is changing that. As the Rat Pack-stylin’ ringleader of the anarchic carnival “The Paul F. Tompkins Show,” he brings together comedy acts, musicians, and special guest stars such as Jack Black and ex-Conan O’Brien sidekick Andy Richter in a twisted variety show that always ends with his own elaborate, brutally funny faux death while singing the Irish tavern chestnut “Danny Boy” in a style best described as a combination of Elvis Presley meets Slim Whitman.

Over the last two years, a growing cult audience of Angelenos has gathered on the last Monday of every month at Fairfax nightclub Largo, eager to see Tompkins’s truly different thing. It’s a throwback to the do-it-all days when acts dressed in dapper suits, tossed back martinis with aplomb, and still left people gasping for air with jokes that took dead-center aim at life and leaders between songs and sketches that were memorable in equal measure.

“I was a huge Steve Martin fan as a kid, and I loved SCTV, Monty Python, and Jonathan Winters,” says Tompkins, 35, over drinks at one of his haunts, the Chateau Marmont. As a child, he would stay up to watch The Tonight Show. “I loved that people were laughing, and that it [was] like a party. It took me a long time to get to that point with this show, but I think I’m getting there. It’s nothing to be stressed over; it’s all going to be a party. So far, it always has been.”

Tompkins grew up in Philadelphia, the fifth of six kids in a rollicking Catholic family. His father was a 35-year railroad veteran, and his mother was the receptionist for her brother’s piano-tuning company. Young Paul was so certain that comedy was his true calling, he dropped out of Temple University after one semester – “before I could even declare a major!” – and started a comedy duo with an older friend. That fell apart, but Tompkins’s career goals didn’t, and he eventually found himself in Los Angeles, on the cusp of the alternative-comedy scene that also spawned the careers of Janeane Garofalo and the fellows behind HBO’s Mr. Show.

Although he was confident about his choices, Tompkins’s parents were a little less comfortable when he moved to L.A. in 1994.

“My parents didn’t really relate to this as a career at all, until they saw me on Conan for the first time in 1997,” he says. “Even after I started working as a writer for Mr. Show, my mother was telling me it wasn’t too late for my uncle to teach me how to tune pianos.”

That’s a cute anecdote, but, like any performer, Tompkins has endured a few bumps. In 2000, he was an ensemble cast member of the quickly failed NBC sitcom DAG with David Alan Grier. Despite drawing praise from critics, fans, and the host himself, he wasn’t invited back this year to continue the news-satirizing segments he’d done on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. He also recently missed out on a role in Martin Scorsese’s upcoming film The Aviator. But, as more and more people take note of Tompkins’s face and work, he feels it’s just a matter of time before his star rises beyond the club scene.

The key has been finding himself and feeling comfortable in his own throwback persona. “With standup, it takes a long time to get to the point where you are yourself on stage,” he says. “After doing it this long, I’m the most myself on stage, talking about what I care about and expressing it in the way I want to express it. When I started getting into the so-called alternative-comedy scene, I realized it didn’t have to sound shticky or jokey, but could still be funny, and that was very exciting.”

Largo owner Mark Flanagan, who first had included Tompkins among the regulars of an earlier weekly standup show, felt the comedian was flexible enough to have his own night. “He’s not just a guy who does standup and tells jokes; he sings and acts as well,” says Flanagan. “He gets behind things he thinks are really good.”

Indeed, “The Paul F. Tompkins Show” isn’t like anything else in town. It starts off with a fake “warm-up” set by his sidekick, “Todd Carlin” – a hippie character, played by Todd (Gruber) Allen, who is supposed to be George Carlin’s nephew. Then the show’s house band kicks in with a Booker T. & the MG’s vibe, and Tompkins runs onstage to sing a song about the evening’s program.

“It may sound improvised, but it isn’t,” Tompkins says. “We always manage to pull it off, no matter how late the guests change and how many words have to be adapted,” he adds, laughing.

Tompkins then performs an extended monologue about life and occasionally politics; his January show featured a particularly vicious deconstruction of President Bush’s State of the Union address, mocking G.W.’s Mars-exploration and steroid-fighting plans. After a musical set by Jill Sobule, Tompkins joined her and the band for a run through the Rolling Stones’ classic “Dead Flowers” before delving into the heart of the matter – a sketch with the special guest star.

Tompkins’s attitude that “the star of the show is the show” is what attracts such names as Black and Richter. During January’s manic extravaganza, an unannounced Richter pretended to be a shy, nerdy sound-effects technician discussing the ways he picks up normal, everyday noises before gradually revealing that his favorite sounds to record are those of people dying hideous deaths.

At the end, Carlin entered, holding an iguana as Tompkins sang “Danny Boy,” then throwing the lizard at Tompkins’s throat. While the host hit the stage floor in faux agony, Richter re-entered with his sound equipment to capture Tompkins’s dying breaths – and the audience’s resounding applause.

“This is a place where we can go with no pressure and just have fun, and do something completely out of character and unexpected,” says Richter, who’s known Tompkins since moving to L.A. after leaving Late Night with Conan O’Brien in 2000. “It’s great just to get out of the house and still get laughs and be creative, especially now that I have a kid.”

On the musical end, Tompkins has hosted such luminaries as Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann and Michael Penn, and Colin Hay of Men at Work fame. He credits as his inspiration Jon Brion’s long-running Friday-night “freeform” music shows at Largo.

“You can follow a preplanned thing, but, after a while, you want to just go skeletal in structure and get to the laughs naturally,” explains Tompkins. “Audiences trust me to find the laugh and that there will be a payoff, and there is.”