Comic relief

He darts around the club, unfolding chairs, with the sleeves of his black and gray suit rolled up. As comedians straggle into the Comedy Studio in Harvard Square, owner Rick Jenkins greets them by name and lingers to listen to their responses when he asks, “How are you?”

The glow from the inverted lights along the wall reflects upward and descends upon the room while the orange ceiling lights illuminate the oriental decorations in the attic of a Chinese food restaurant.

The tackiness charms as audience members scan the room. On the club’s tables, a bubbly plastic coat faintly warps the words of the newspaper clips underneath that testify to the club’s successes, of which there are many.

Improper Bostonian’s Best of Boston issue describes the club as a resurgence of fresh ideas. In another article, Frank Smiley, senior segment producer of “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” is quoted as saying, “I consider it the greatest comedy club on Earth … It’s a return to smart audiences.”

Veteran club performer Tim McIntire attributes the club’s success to its unique comic atmosphere.

“The studio prides itself on nurturing ‘non-hacky’ material and performers,” McIntire says. “I enjoy the very creative environment. It’s one of the few places where you can try and fail – or maybe even come up with something new that’s really cool.”

COMEDY-TURNED-NEWS

Jenkins takes a seat in his club – his creation – and bursts into impromptu dialogues with himself as he speaks. His voice twangs in arcs, and his smile betrays a forthcoming joke as he talks of a life intertwined with comedy.

“I look at comedy as that spoon full of sugar that allows you to look at something bigger,” he says. “I think it hit me at that age where I was looking for a way to understand the world. It just gave me a perspective. And it still does.”

Jenkins may very well be an observer of – and participant in – a large shift toward a reliance on those daily doses of humor, which can also provide many Americans with their daily source of news.

Young people are “abandoning mainstream sources of election news and increasingly citing alternative outlets … as their source for election news,” according to a recent Pew Research Center survey on campaign news and politics. The study showed comedy programs are beginning to rival mainstream news outlets for young audiences.

Of people under 30, 21 percent say they regularly learn about the campaign and candidates from comedy shows like “Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” the report said – twice as many as four years ago. The study also said today’s youth is much more likely than older generations to learn about the 2004 campaign from late-night talk show hosts like Jay Leno or David Letterman.

However, the report found that people of all ages who regularly learn about the election from entertainment programs are less informed about campaign developments, campaign events and key aspects of the candidates’ backgrounds.

Jenkins, who at 42 sits comfortably outside the budding CNN-spurning, Comedy Central-turning generation, says he watches and listens to “absolutely everything.”

Jenkins claims to have an encyclopedic knowledge of comedy, and that might be an understatement.

“I’ve pretty much read every book,” he says, seeming not arrogant but disappointed there aren’t more books to read.

Of all news shows, Jenkins, who flips between CNN and CNBC and browses The Boston Globe, The New York Times and Variety every day, said he prefers “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” because “it doesn’t seem to be taking out all the intelligence in order to seem fair.”

And good stand-up comedy, he continues, can be as legitimate as network broadcasts, as long as the facts are correct.

He says non-comedic news is blurring the line in an attempt to be more entertaining.

“Do you really need to watch CNN if they are jump-cutting like MTV?” Jenkins says. “And the comedians have gotten better at blurring that line, too, by making the really well-informed analytical observations that they’re getting their jokes from.”

But some media experts, such as Boston University Journalism Department Chairman Robert Zelnick, believe this trend is no laughing matter.

“Political humor has been with us since jokers with pointy shoes spent the day making monarchs guffaw,” Zelnick said in an email. “Punch-lines can unmask the pretender, puncture the pompous, help us forget the pressures of daily life.”

But Zelnick says joke-centered news cannot convey the kind of information or analysis that people get from more traditional news sources.

“To anyone who claims to inform himself or herself by watching Leno, Letterman or Stewart, I say, ‘The joke’s on you, dummy,'” he said.

LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE

But Jenkins does not condemn the incorporation of comedy into the media. Instead, he classifies humor simply as a conduit for information.

“Comedy to me is like a language – it’s just a way of communicating with people,” he says.

Across the river from Jenkins’ Comedy Studio, BU professor Laura Ress teaches a writing course titled “Comedy and the Comic Impulse.” She is currently working on her second book, an exploration of how the comic personality has ascended the social ladder from the time when only servants could be funny.

Ress says she’s still trying to figure out why comedy has become a higher priority in people’s lives.

“I just finished a year-long research project – and I didn’t find anything,” she says. “I’m still working on it.”

While she can’t quantify how much humor any one person needs, she has discovered that comedy plays an important role in many people’s lives.

“We all have fears,” she says, citing Robin Williams as a comedian who sometimes makes light of serious, scary or controversial issues to make them less so.

She says comedy, for many people, “is a way we find to reassure ourselves. I remember seeing an Inuit painting of someone playing soccer titled ‘Playing Soccer With Your Demon.’ The idea that you can just kick a ball around with the things that scare you – I think that’s a great image for the comic view of life.”

Jenkins rejects the “comedy as a cover for despair” approach, but still says comedy is an important coping tool.

“For me, comedy is really more the tool I use to understand everything,” she says. “If you can put something into a nice tight little joke, you pretty much understand it.”

BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG NAMES

One could say Jenkins is on both sides of the comedy market, interacting with and then even supplying some of the comedians and writers on late-night television.

“The big night was the first time the Conan O’Brien producers came to the club,” Jenkins recalled. “We put on 10 performers, and they put three on the show within a month.”

NBC’s talent-scouting system, HBO and the Montreal Comedy Festival also come looking for talent about once a year, Jenkins said.

“I think the purpose this club has is to get you a place where you can be unique,” he says. “I mean, this is a small, 50-seat place, and in eight years we’ve gotten at least a dozen people on television.

“There’s no way that should happen,” he added. “But because we’re trying to do more – you know, encouraging people to strive for more in their career, it’s come about that way.”

And at the Comedy Studio, comedy is seen as a means of acknowledging alternative outlooks.

“Tonight,” Jenkins offered as an example on a Saturday in late March, “I’ve got 10 comedians and all of them see the world entirely different from each other. And you’ll find some funnier than others, but there’s something unique each time.”