From: St. Paul Dispatch*

Date: August 4, 1983

Headline: TC Comedians Find LA Success

Photo(s): Joel Hodgson: He passed 'acid test' [Hodgson in "high school"-like photo.]

Author: Protzman, Bob

Page(s): B1, B7

Comedians Louie Anderson and Joel Hodgson, Twin Cities emigrants to Los Angeles, are coming home to perform in the Comedy Gallery in Minneapolis the next three weekends. Both of them are coming off the kinds of performances that are needed to keep up their resolve to have major comedy careers.

Hodgson, who performed in First Avenue in Minneapolis Monday night, talked about how pleased he was with passing a sort of acid test a couple weeks ago in a club in San Jose, Calif., where he'd never performed before.

"They asked me to headline at the last minute and I was sandwiched between some really good acts," Hodgson said. "The middle act, who was seven years older than me, was usually a headliner, so he was very, very good. I was eight years younger than the opening act. Here I was, the kid from Los Angeles, who was very different from anyone they'd ever seen, and no one knew me, except that some of them might have heard I was on the David Letterman show or maybe saw me.

"Anyway, there was a lot of pressure on me and I had to work very hard every day at rehearsals and during the show. I feel I did OK, because the audience for the last show wanted me to do an encore, and the club owners told me that's rare.

"It was a very exciting, personal victory for me to go to a place without a lot of press or local help and do real well."

"I don't approach comedy the way a lot of other comics do," said Hodgson, who dresses in formal wear with sneakers, uses "magic," a huge assortment of strange-looking props, and claims to be a spy.

Hodgson, 23, and Anderson, 28, see quite a bit of each other when working the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, which comics call the mecca of comedy.

Hodgson said the club manager began putting them back-to-back because both are from Minnesota and so different, physically and otherwise.

"They'd have this big fat guy get up and then this weird guy," Hodgson said. "I guess together we had kind of an impact, especially since no one gives Minneapolis or St. Paul any credit out there. They think the cities are somewhere near Ohio."

Hodgson said even the biggies from New York appear in the Comedy Store.

Hodgson got to California a couple of months after Anderson, and unlike Anderson, hasn't yet hired an agent or manager, so his career is not quite as active as Anderson's.

"There's a lot of dishonesty out there," he said. "So I'm trying to find one who's honest and one who understands what I do."

Hodgson has had the one show, though, that all striving comedians covet--a national television appearance. He was on David Letterman's late-night show on NBC in February, just four months after arriving in Los Angeles. (Anderson has auditioned for the "Tonight" show, and expects to do so again, but hasn't yet been hired.)

Hodgson's done a show for cable television called "Magic, Magic," which was made for international distribution, but apparently hasn't yet been sold. He's read for a couple of TV sitcoms, but hasn't been hired. But then the shows haven't made it on network schedules either.

"And I'm starting to travel outside of Los Angeles to work clubs in places like San Jose and San Francisco and Detroit and Kansas City," he said.

Do Hodgson and Anderson live the lives of struggling artists in some three-flights-up efficiency apartment with bare walls, doing their laundry daily in the kitchen sink like John Travolta in "Staying Alive"?

"I have an apartment that I really like and probably could stay at for the time I want to be out here," said Hodgson. "I'm just making ends meet, but it's getting better all the time. I'm starting to make enough money in city gigs so I don't have to travel so much to get work."

More important, both men say they are learning and their acts are improving.

"I'm learning how to be proficient," said Hodgson. "I'm learning how to--if I have to--just be *funny*."

Both Anderson and Hodgson are glad they began their careers in the Twin Cities and are looking forward to returning.

"I love it," said Hodgson about the Twin Cities. "But you can't get established here. I'd like to come back here after three years out there. I like the creative community here, and comedy here is a little closer to the arts than in LA, where it's more commercial."

What about the future for them?

"I feel like in a year I can be at the level I want to reach as a comic force," said Hodgson. "I'm happy with myself creatively now, but there's a difference between being creative and being funny."