From sfweekly.com
Originally published by SF Weekly Mar 24, 2004
©2004 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.

Vlad the Mad
The hardest-working angry young russian comic in town
BY TOMMY CRAGGS

Kid walks into a bar, right? It's an open mike at a dive in the Mission, or maybe it's a bar in SOMA or a pub in Palo Alto, but anyway it's always the same -- clinking glasses, clacking billiard balls, a guy at the microphone with last week's Viagra bit. A workout room, in other words, a place to fine-tune a dick joke. The kid goes up, slouching, ears like a pair of open car doors, a clammy, constipated look on his face. "I came from Russia when I was 5 years old," he says, "and it's hard to remember what Russia was like, especially when you're just a little ..." -- and here he holds his left hand about waist high, as if to measure out the height of a child -- "... drunk." The set continues in this vein, gloomy stuff about growing up fat, fatherless, and Russian, and he's getting a few thin laughs early on, and he's feeling OK, and then, somewhere around the cock-ring joke, the crowd goes cold. The kid nose-dives. Glasses clink. Crickets chirp. Two blondes up front start to heckle. He looks at his watch. What do I got here -- a minute? He savages his own material. That sucked, he says. Painful, he says. Then he tucks the microphone into the stand, steps off the stage and out of the bar, slouching, and drags himself home in a beat-up Civic with a window that won't shut. And you know what the funny part is?

The next night, he goes out and does it again.

Vladimir Khlynin walks into the Beale Street Bar & Grill one Thursday in February. "Vladimir Khlyninininin ... Khlyninininin ... Khlynininininin ... Khlynininin ... Khlyninininininin," goes a guy named Bob, cranking the name like a stubborn engine. Bob is the host of this very informal open mike. "Khlynin-khlynin-khlynin-khlyn-khlyn-khlyn. Khlynin." Khlynin moves past the stage to the tables near the bar. "Vladimir Khlynin, ladies and gentlemen," Bob says to the five or so ladies and the six or so gentlemen in the room, everyone either a comic or a friend of a comic, it seems. "That's something about Vladimir we can actually say: 'Vladimir Khlynin, from the Last Comic Standing show.'"

Khlynin (rhymes with "linen") is a doughy, adenoidal guy with a broad face and a caterpillarlike monobrow, 20 years old as of mid-March. He looks much younger than that, though, and in fact he's still doing a credible bit about getting his first driver's license. The introduction here seems to embarrass him a little, and he smiles faintly as he climbs onto a stool. "Congratulations to you, Vladimir," Bob goes on. "He can't talk about it -- NBC contractual agreement -- but he went to New York, which is awesome." Khlynin has heard a lot of this in the past few days. After all, it's not often a San Francisco open-miker with a shit job at Safeway gets to leave these bush leagues, even temporarily, for a brick backdrop in a New York cellar.

A week earlier, Khlynin competed in the semifinals of the talent-search portion of the NBC reality show Last Comic Standing 2, which optimistically bills itself as "The Search for the Funniest Person in America." (In January, Khlynin was one of only three comics to emerge from the regional tryouts in San Francisco, an impressive feat for someone just a few months into his comedy career. "To have that kind of confidence and material at this stage is pretty amazing," one of the talent scouts told a Chronicle reporter afterward. "It's exciting to discover someone like that.") He didn't advance, but the trip was still fruitful: He wangled three minutes of stage time at the famed Comedy Cellar, and his Last Comic Standing set, at a packed Hudson Theater, drew the kind of snowballing laughter every comic covets. He has a minidisc recording of the act, and after one of his jokes, he says with pride, "You can hear people clapping."

Not so at the Beale Street Bar & Grill, where at this moment Khlynin is trying out a new joke. "A couple days ago ... I tried to get some shitty head shots from Kinko's," he says, reaching what has to be a milestone in any young comic's career -- a Kinko's head-shot joke. "And that's a hard place to get anything done, you know what I mean? I think the staff is way too busy." A beat. "Printing out-of-order signs." That gets a few tepid laughs. "All right," Khlynin apologizes. There's a trace of a Russian accent in his voice. "That's new. Shit."

The set unravels from there -- "I'm bombing," he announces, followed a few jokes later by, "I give up" -- which is what will happen with a small crowd of fellow comics who know just about every pause in his act (and who, in general, seem to laugh hardest not at the joke itself, but at the throwaway line shooting down the joke). Afterward, though, he isn't troubled. "That was fun," he says, surprisingly sanguine for someone so determined to ride five minutes of funny to a better life.

Khlynin lives with his mother and four siblings in a Western Addition apartment at the dead end of Buchanan Street. He shares a room with his 21-year-old brother, Dmitryi, who works at a video-game store in Hayward. Half the room is covered in garish video-game posters -- Grand Theft Auto, Metal Gear Solid, and the like. The other half is bare. "This half is mine," he says one recent Wednesday, gesturing to the blank walls. It's late afternoon, but the apartment is dark and dreary, except for the flickering of Dmitryi's video game. Khlynin reaches into a drawer and fishes out a stack of minidiscs; he records nearly every set on disc, then dissects it back home. If it's a good one, he'll listen to it again and again, as many as 20 times in all. "You've got to record every set," he says. "Here's the terrible thing if you don't record your set -- you might have said something brilliant, and you'll forget it. Or you'll leave a word out the next time, and the joke's gone."

Khlynin takes his comedy very seriously. His career is 10 months old, and in that time he estimates he's done more than 200 sets, making him quite possibly San Francisco's hardest-working comic. He tries to hit six open mikes a week: The Rose & Crown in Palo Alto on Monday; the Luggage Store or maybe the San Jose Improv on Tuesday; the Uptown Bar or Sea Biscuit on Wednesday, unless he's lucky and gets a spot in the Cobb's Comedy Club showcase; Brain Wash, and sometimes Beale Street, on Thursday; One World Cafe or the Mock Cafe on Friday; and Java Source, where he's the host, on Saturday. He writes five jokes in a good week, and he always keeps a small notebook with him in case anything pops into his head.

Preparing for a recent show at the San Jose Improv, Khlynin pulled out a folded sheet of yellow paper, a master list of all his jokes, each graded "A," "B," or "C": "Piss," "Fat," "Bike," "Unibrow," "Eye contact," "Virgin," "Just like my father." ("'Bike' goes with 'Fat,'" Khlynin explained, "and it's a callback for 'Piss.'") Khlynin tends to open with "Piss": "My mom," he'll say, "she had a special way of potty-training me. She'd stand in front of the toilet and make this sound, 'Shhhhhhhh,' you know, to make me go pee. And I confronted her. I was like, 'Mom, I'm finally potty-trained, but now I can't be in the same room as somebody whispering.' And she was like ..." -- he drops his voice to a whisper -- "'I promise I won't tell anyone. '" There's a pause. "'All right, I did it again, bitch.'"

He likes this joke because it sets up much of his material, for one thing establishing his mother as a foil. "That joke will not work if I don't call her a bitch," Khlynin says. "It will not. I've tried it, like, seven times without saying 'bitch,' and it does not work at all. Nothing. Silence. It's kind of wrong to call her a bitch, but it's a joke. It's not like I'm saying, 'Hey, Mom, how's it going, bitch?' I don't hang my hat up and go, 'Hey, bitch.'" At the Hudson Theater in New York, he got three stair-step laughs with "Just like my father": "I grew up without a father, and it's kind of messed up. My mom was telling me, 'You're just like your father -- you're just like your father, Vladimir.' When she told me that, I slapped her. [Surprised laughter.] Then left her for another woman. [Surprised and wha? laughter.] Because I'm just like my father. [Latecomer laughter.]"

It's not hard to see where Khlynin finds much of his humor. He writes from the spleen, mining the insecurities and frustrations of a 20-year-old living with his mom, labeling muffins at Safeway, trying like hell to get laid, and -- though he downplays its significance -- popping pills to ward off the effects of an autoimmune disorder he may never shake.

The results, predictably, are uneven. At Java Source one Saturday, Khlynin read from a two-page monologue about Safeway -- weird, angsty stuff, not much in the way of funny, but there, in a small room with six other comics and a screaming espresso machine, it was somehow affecting: "They reward us for not getting hurt. A reward for not getting hurt. Why not just give us a reward for putting up with Safeway shit? Or for not punching a customer in the face? That deserves a reward. It pays good -- everyone says that. Everyone says that it pays good. Being a hooker pays good also, but hookers don't stock shelves. ... I'm ashamed every time a man comes up to me. Oh, you're lucky you're working. No, I'd be lucky if I were retarded and didn't have to work here. But the sad truth is, even Safeway hires the retarded." The comics sat there, blinking. "That's the truth, people."

"He's fearless onstage," says Tom Sawyer, an owner of Cobb's Comedy Club in North Beach. Indeed, when people discuss Khlynin's act, they tend to talk about his stage presence, which may have something to do with his talent for making gloominess and despair look like shtick. "He's a lot more accessible," says Kurtis Matthews, who runs the San Francisco Comedy College and worked with Khlynin last year. "He tends to be a bit dark and morose, a little depressing, but he is who he is. Behind what he's talking about you see this kid, which is what puts the audience at ease."

"With comedy," Khlynin says, "you can't be all flowers and hugs and shit. I can't be married and have two children and live in a big house and go, 'Man, my life sucks.'" It's led some people to call him "The Angry Russian." "That's what I've heard," he goes on. "'Vlad, you're a fucking angry guy, you shouldn't be saying that kind of shit.' Well, they haven't gone through what I've gone through. They don't know the shit I've put up with."

Khlynin was born in Moscow, but remembers little of his time in Russia. His father, also Vladimir, was a lawyer, his mother, Olga Kvitko, a schoolteacher. They divorced in 1985, and four years later -- as the Soviet Union eased restrictions on emigration -- Kvitko and her sons joined the tens of thousands of Soviet Jews fleeing to America. Today, Khlynin has only occasional contact with his father, who lives in British Columbia, goes by a new name, and suggests Khlynin call himself "Angel Blazer" onstage. Kvitko's favorite joke of her son's is the one in which he talks about killing his father during a rare visit. "His father came to visit, and he made a joke out of it," Kvitko recalls. "'I would kill him, but I can't. I have to take him sightseeing.' That's the idea, and I loved it. It's so unusual -- he has so much anger inside of him, but he makes fun of it."

After leaving the Soviet Union, the family moved to the Bay Area, and it wasn't long before the boys were watching Star Trek and pro wrestling. Khlynin was a cheeky kid, a smartass in school, and a petty shoplifter. Once, he recalls, his mother found out he'd pinched a pair of sunglasses; she whipped him with a jump-rope all the way to the police station. "The teachers called me when he was in the seventh grade," says Kvitko, who now works in the city's Department of Human Services. "They said he's disruptive, a clown, and all the kids concentrate on him instead of [the teachers]. That's where it started. He wants to be a clown, he told me. I said, 'That's fine.'"

Life turned serious for Khlynin about three years ago, when, sluggish and unable to walk even a few blocks without cramping, he was diagnosed with lupus, an immune-system disorder in which the body attacks its own cells and tissues, affecting the skin, joints, blood, and kidneys. No cure has been found. "It's pretty serious shit," says Khlynin, whose treatment includes steroids and anti-malarial drugs for his complexion. "I went to the doctor, and they said if I had waited two or three more weeks I would've been in a coma." Over the next few months, he lay in bed and cried a lot. "I don't think I would've killed myself," he says, "but I felt like ... I didn't care if I lived." He pauses, then archly changes the subject. "On the other hand, I love going to In-N-Out."

Kvitko suggests her son's illness led him to comedy. "That's why he wants to look at life and laugh about it," she says. "If you get serious about it, it makes your life completely miserable. Comedy makes him forget about it."

Khlynin disputes that (his reason for taking up comedy: "I don't feel like I can do anything else"), but there's little doubt that his illness has contributed to his generally bleak outlook on things. He's often tired and moody, which he attributes to his lupus medications. "It sucks," he says one evening as his car totters down the highway to Palo Alto, where the Rose & Crown is hosting an open mike. "Sometimes I don't even think of it, then I think, 'Fuck, how can I be living with this shit all my life?'" He's tried to write a lupus joke; it's the kind of thing a comic might riff off of for whole sets. "Angry stuff, swear-word punch lines," Khlynin says. "It just doesn't work. It's too close to me. Not close like, 'Oh, I'm gonna cry when I say it.' I can't make it funny yet."

Every Wednesday, Cobb's Comedy Club offers what it makes a point of calling an "All-Pro Comedy Showcase," noting that an "All-Pro Comedy Showcase," which features 15 Bay Area comics, is not to be confused with a mere open mike. And every Wednesday afternoon, at precisely 3 p.m., Bay Area comics looking for a slot in that night's "All-Pro Comedy Showcase" pick up their phones, punch in the number for Cobb's, and try to divine by the sound of the ring whether or not they'll get through. "I was like, 'Shit, I should call them,'" Khlynin tells another comic Wednesday evening. By the time he found the number, he says, it was 3:03.

"Yeah," the other guy commiserates. "3:01 is too late. It's gotta be 3 o'clock exactly."

The two of them are sitting in a booth at the Mission's Uptown Bar, Khlynin's consolation that night. All around them, on the stools and couches in the bar's narrow front room, 20 or so comics prepare 20 or so sets that the Uptown's chatting patrons will promptly ignore. Shortly after 8 p.m., the open mike's host arrives with a sign-up sheet, and everyone springs up and swarms him at the back of the room. Khlynin gets the third spot, behind a loopy guy who recounts a recent dream and promises to one day "make that funny" and a lesbian who opens her first-ever open-mike set with a joke about labia.

It's a long way from here to the "All-Pro Comedy Showcase" at Cobb's, and it's an indication of how far the S.F. comedy scene has fallen that there's really nothing in between. Neil Leiberman, a longtime comedy coach in San Francisco, puts a different spin on that. "This is the best training city for comedy in the world," he says, which is a little like Des Moines bragging about its Triple-A baseball team. "There are so many opportunities, so many venues. You can do an open mike every night of the week if you want." You can, but what that often means is trying to get 15 open-mikers at Brain Wash to laugh at the same jokes you told them the night before at Sea Biscuit. (And let's be clear: A San Francisco open mike isn't exactly a meeting of the Algonquin Round Table. There's one guy who tweaks the lyrics of Cole Porter songs to comment on current events. There's another who actually says, "Get it?" after a joke; for a finale he pulls a rubber chicken from his pants and a rubber turkey from his shirt, and squirts himself in the face with water from the turkey's beak.)

Into this world slouched a pissed-off Russian kid with a bad day job. Khlynin was turned on to comedy last year by a co-worker at Safeway named Jason Downs, who moonlights as a comic, and he soon signed up for a couple of classes at the San Francisco Comedy College. Founded in 1999, the college advertises itself as a place for "amazing people from all walks of life to reach their comedic potential and enhance their interpersonal relationships"; anyone, it insists, can be funny. In a beginner's class -- $250 for five weeks of group workshops -- a student learns about "the Joke Diagram, association lists, organic development, characters and POVs"; more important, the college sponsors a number of showcases for its graduates, often in what comics would call an "A" room.

Nine months later Khlynin was dropping his City College architecture class and getting publicity head shots printed at Kinko's. He was traveling a lot, driving 50 miles for a quick set in front of a roomful of empty chairs, then seeing his time shaved by a minute or two. "But I don't care," he says. "It's cool, as long as I'm up there onstage." He was bombing, too -- going up second-to-last at the Rose & Crown, for instance, and struggling so mightily that a blonde in the front tried to help with his punch lines. But that's one thing about going out five nights a week: You can always look forward to your tomorrows.

His mother, meanwhile, can only sigh. "I don't know what to say," Kvitko says. "You need to have some kind of skill in your life, and just doing [comedy] is not enough to pay your rent and buy food. ... He wants to be serious about it, make a living. I don't know if he can. He thinks he can go to New York, become a professional. I don't really believe it."

That Wednesday, at the Uptown Bar, Khlynin is introduced as "sort of like a star at this point -- sort of, somewhat." His set starts off OK, but he seems to lose the crowd early on when he makes a bad gay-marriage joke, a big mistake for someone following a lesbian comic: "For the guys, I think their only problem is they don't know where to put the ring -- on their finger or on their cock." Now the talking at the bar gets louder. He tries the Kinko's joke again. "It seems like the employees are always just way too busy, you know?" He pauses. "Printing out-of-order signs," and with that there's a crash at the pool table, the ker-thwack of a good break -- an open-mike rimshot. He moves on to his Safeway material. "I work at Safeway," he says, "which sucks fat balls." For some reason, that line usually gets a good laugh. Tonight, clinking glasses. A few more so-so jokes, then Khlynin closes with a sigh and a glance at his watch. "Four minutes and 40 seconds," he says. He gestures to someone in the audience. "What's up, man? How ya doing? We'll talk later -- during someone else's set."

Later that night, as he's dragging his Civic to the Punch Line, Khlynin offers a postmortem. "If we would've had some better comics come up front, people would've been listening more," he says. "They were all lost anyway, probably halfway drunk." At the Punch Line, he's waved through the door, and when the opening act suggests everyone raise his glass to comedy, everyone does, and everyone drinks, while Khlynin applauds from the back of the room.

Cobb's Comedy Club in North Beach is a big, clean room with a bar on one end, a bright, cartoony backdrop on the other, and a lot of tourists nursing their two-drink minimums in between. When the club moved into this building last year, several comics, Khlynin included, helped set up the new room. And so on a Wednesday evening several months later, Khlynin is sitting at a table he may very well have assembled, flipping through a stack of notecards -- his jokes and old set lists, some of them annotated and scrawled with reminders not to cuss or touch the microphone stand. It's a big night for him. That afternoon, he managed to get through to Cobb's and secure a spot in its "All-Pro Comedy Showcase," probably his best gig since he returned from New York. A few hours later, the moment he slouched through the club's doors, co-owner Tom Sawyer asked if wanted to host tonight, a paying job. "Sure," Khlynin said. Sawyer asked if he wanted to host Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, too. "Sure," Khlynin said. (Later, Sawyer says he wanted to give Khlynin a shot. "I'm basing it on the kid's chutzpah," he says.)

Thumbing through the cards at the table, Khlynin drops the slacker-insouciance shtick and admits to being excited. "It's a big surprise," he says. Now he needs material -- five to seven minutes of material. He explains that a host, facing a crowd of skeptical people still settling into their seats, "just basically bites the bullet," and that "it's not really about getting laughs." "You're the sacrificial lamb," Sawyer says. As the front section of the club starts to fill up, Khlynin pulls a blank card and scratches out a tentative list: "Piss," "From Russia," "Russian mom," "Louis Armstrong," "Bike."

"I'm gonna have some fun tonight," he says.

But things don't go so well. The crowd's cold -- thin, too, with only about 30 people in the 400-seat club -- and everyone seems a bit puzzled by this Russian kid onstage, who says right off the bat, "I'm 19 years old, and I was born in Russia, and I used to pee on myself when I was a little kid." It's clear his is not a warm-up act; he doesn't have any of the glib mannerisms of an effective MC, and his flat, morose style won't win over a midweek audience still burping dinner. Afterward, Sawyer will say the set was "horrible ... terrible." But Khlynin plods on, and after a few more minutes he says, "All right, you guys aren't going for the Safeway shit, either," and then introduces the next comic. When the showcase is over, he slouches out the door and heads over to the Purple Onion, which is debuting its resurrected comedy show. He seems spooked. "It was OK," Khlynin says of his set. "I ate it. Got three medium laughs."

Four nights later, as the weekend's final show winds down, Khlynin is sitting in the corner of the room, sipping a drink through a straw. His mood has lifted. It's been an auspicious weekend for him, after all. His sets have improved over the past few days. In a moment he'll pocket $250 for three days of work, the equivalent of something like a week's worth of Safeway shifts. And earlier tonight, shortly after Khlynin's seven-minute set, Robin Williams made a cameo, waddling into the club and chatting with the comics backstage; you could hear them laughing during the dead spots in the opener's set. Not two weeks ago, Khlynin was dying at the Uptown Bar with a bad Kinko's joke on his lips; tonight, he was bullshitting with Robin Williams backstage at Cobb's, asking if he wanted to do a guest set. (Williams declined.) Later, Khlynin will say it was all "pretty amazing," but right now, as the final comic of the night finishes his set, that's not what he's talking about. He's talking about what he'll be doing tomorrow, and he sounds excited. "Rose & Crown," Khlynin says. "I got the seventh spot."