Todd Glass is pointing at an elderly woman sitting in front of him who bears a strong resemblance to Mother Teresa. “Stand the fuck up, you piece of shit!”

The woman looks away and pays no attention to Glass who continues to berate her. “Yeah, I’m talking to you! Stand the fuck up you lazy fuck!” Glass finally turns his attention to the audience, in particular anyone who isn’t up on their feet in the dimly lit Improv Comedy Club in Hollywood. “If you thought what happened on September 11th was bad stand up! If you think racism is wrong get on your feet!”

Glass is screaming into a microphone with a Mafioso voice to a crowd of about 50 people with the stage light directly placed upon his round Fred Flintstone face and his fashionably messed up hair. He is sweating profusely through his undershirt and his white and blue striped dress shirt. His wrinkled jeans and black sneakers are in constant motion as he turns from one side of the room to the other pointing at the crowd to stand up.

The Saturday night crowd at the brick laced Improv, which has about as much elbow room as an apartment closet, know they are watching a comedian, but can’t quite seem to tell whether to laugh or be nervous as they are told to wave their table candles in the air from side to side and sing Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” along with the 34-year-old Glass, a tradition he tells the audience he started years ago when performing at a college. The impromptu karaoke session, however, continues to go bad as audience members continue to forget the words to the song or refuse to sing along altogether.
“We’re not leaving until we get this right,” he yells as he instructs the house DJ to play “track two” again. “Just follow my lead.” By the third try the entire crowd is on their feet, singing along with Glass and waving their candles in the air. Glass then rips off his shirt and throws into the audience, drops the microphone and walks off the stage as the audience cheers. As Glass walks off the stage he high-fives members of the audience and gets his sweaty shirt thrown back at him.

Outside of the Improv, Glass puts his shirt back on but discovers there is a slight problem. “Shit, I ripped the buttons off,” he says as he inspects both sides, unable to close it to hide the white undershirt that looks like its been through a wet T-shirt contest. While he seems slightly upset that his “favorite” shirt has been reduced to a button less coat, it seems like the furthest thing from his mind as he stands on the Melrose Ave. sidewalk right outside the door of the Improv. It is where the comedians mingle before and after sets and perfect the art of telling a joke.

As usual, Glass is holding court, trying out new and old jokes, or bits as comedians call them, on his colleagues, friends and the occasional homeless men that ask him for change. His comedy is a mixture of one-part Don Rickels insults, one-part Rat Pack one-liners and two-parts Steve Martin zaniness and creativity, which makes for an interesting cocktail when it’s poured over any stage, or any sidewalk for that matter. His mind seems to be moving as fast as his lips as he comes up with one story after another, each one being molded in his mind to be used later.

Before Glass goes on stage again for another set – he’s the headliner or top comedian on this night and most comedians perform on stage 2-3 times during a given night for different audiences – he is doing what he has become best known for off-stage as much as he has on stage. Like a quizzical child he asks “what if” questions constantly, each one as wildly ridiculous as the next. Like a sketch from “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the characters are so amazingly unreasonable that one can’t help but laugh at the though of it. He will usually have his best friend and fellow comedian Jimmy Dore help him act out a sketch of the “what if” situation after he introduces it.

“What if a guy was so cold-hearted that the only way he knew how to react to a situation was offer up money,” Glass tells the crowd of three fellow comedians and one bouncer standing in front of the Improv door. The straight-faced Dore then walks up to Glass and tells him his brother just died. Glass then reaches into his pocket and gives Dore and $20 bill as Dore gasps and says, “Hey man, I don’t want your money, I just told you my brother died.” Glass then puts his arm around Dore and laughs, “Look at this guy, holding out for $40. OK, here you go.” Dore then walks away as his comedian friends laugh. Moments later Glass uses the exact same bit on stage and brings up Dore just as he did outside to act out the sketch. Not surprisingly the bit goes over just as well as it did outside.

“My rule is if it makes us laugh it’s funny and will make other people laugh,” says Dore, who met Glass in 1995 while the two of them performed at the Improv. “Todd’s such a good performer that he could deconstruct a joke for you on stage and give away the punch line and still make it funny. I just think the closer you are to yourself on stage the funnier you are. The key to our comedy is to never loose the silliness that drew us to comedy.”

Unlike other comedians, who Glass says try so hard to be something they’re not in order to make the crowd laugh, he does what comes naturally to him. The same bits and stories that make his friends laugh outside of the clubs for free are the same bits and stories that he takes to the stage with him for the paying customer, which separate him from other comedians.

“Todd doesn’t talk down to you or talk with a different voice or act differently when he’s on stage, he’s Todd, the same guy that makes you laugh over a beer after the show is the same guy that makes you laugh over a cocktail during the show,” says Will Lepardus, an aspiring screenwriter who used to watch Glass perform regularly before becoming his friend. “He’s a guy audiences can relate to. His stuff works with college students just as well as it does with the older crowd that remembers some of the great comics like Rickles or (Johnny) Carson.”

***

Glass grew up watching the likes of Rickles and Carson when he lived in Philadelphia with his two older brother and his two younger brothers. His parents always knew they had a comedian on there hands when Glass would perform in front of his brother and family members at parties.

“My parents had a great sense of humor and they were happy to see me do standup,” says Glass, who suffered from Dyslexia when he was younger. “I didn’t do well in school so they were really happy to see me excel at some thing.”

Glass and television personality Jillian Barberie

When he was 16, Glass, who didn’t go to college after graduating high school, began trying to become a professional comedian when he would go to Comedy Works, a club not far from his home in Philadelphia where some of the biggest names in the business would often perform such as Dennis Miller, Eddie Murphy, Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno.
“That’s how I learned,” says Glass. “It was a good club to learn what good comedy was about. Even when the audience didn’t get it, I knew it was good. Everybody came through there and I couldn’t help but learn every time I went there.”

It wasn’t long before Glass would make an impression on the professionals in the crowd, who couldn’t help but laugh at the jokes and delivery of the local boy.

“To see him do what he did at 20 was hi-fucking-larious,” says Rick Overton, a stand-up comic and actor who saw Glass perform at Comedy Works. “This guys proved that styles come and go but funny is funny because it’s genetic. It was like watching Rat Pack on acid. His timing even then was impeccable. He’ll always be funny because it’s genetic. It comes naturally to him.”

While Glass would never attend college he did end up living in a frat house in Villanova for a couple of weeks before he finally moved out to Los Angeles in 1990, in order to further his stand-up career and with the hope of getting in front of the camera, like the comics he looked up to and often shared the bill with at local comedy clubs like Leno and Seinfeld.

“I had to come out here if I wanted to be on television and get noticed,” Glass says. “I wasn’t going to get on any shows doing standup in Philly for much longer.”

It wouldn’t be long before Glass not only succeeded at the comedy clubs but began appearing in various television shows, such as “Politically Incorrect,” “The Martin Short Show,” “Late, Late Show With Craig Kilborn,” “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” “The Dennis Miller Show,” and NBC’s “Comedy Showcase.” Despite winning over audiences at clubs and performing well on television, however, Glass has yet to “make it big,” as he says. He has been unable to get a spot on the “Saturday Night Live” cast which he has auditioned for twice and attempts at getting his own television show have never materialized despite shooting a pilot for “Todd’s Coma,” a comedy series he co-wrote and co-created with Dore, which had guest appearances by Ben Stiller, Frank Willard, Ray Romano and Sarah Silverman.

“It hasn’t happened for me yet,” says Glass. “Some of my peers think I’m funny, some people in the business think I’m funny but I haven’t had that point yet where someone who could give me a show thinks I’m funny. I wish it would happen but it just hasn’t happened yet.”

Despite not getting a major break yet, Glass is always getting calls from club owners and bookers, who know what Glass brings to the table when he headlines a show or opens up for a “bigger name” as he has done recently for David Spade’s tour.

“He will always bring the funny,” says Mike Jaglin, who books the weekly “Comedy Heaven” show at the Westwood Brewing Company and often asks Glass to perform. “He is a comedian’s comedian. There are no guarantees in comedy, but knowing Todd will make any audience laugh is as close to a guarantee as there is in this business. He’s just that good when he gets up there.”

***

Glass is preparing his monologue for another show he will be performing later tonight at the M Bar in Los Angeles, a quaint hangout better known for it’s food and drinks than it’s comedy shows. “A lot of comedians are critical of the M Bar,” says Glass. “But you can’t go just once, you have to go like three or four times to really appreciate it. They have some great shows and some great audiences.”

He is sitting in the living room of his one-bedroom home near Sunset Blvd. wearing a white short sleeve shirt with the top two buttons undone, cargo shorts and sandals, which are crossed neatly as his feet sit on his coffee table while he unwraps a Bazooka Joe bubble gum. “This is where I get most of my jokes,” says Glass as he reads the two-sentence comic strip and laughs jokingly and rubs his eyes. “Oh that’s good, I think I’ll lead with that.”

Checking his watch he walks over to his kitchen table and grabs a seat and sets a blank piece of paper in front of him and starts writing down keywords, which remind him of bits he’ll do later.

Dad Smoking
Home Depot
Airline Commercial
Angry Guy
Bad Breath
What If – Police, Club Guy, Gym

As he scribbles down the list of words with a black marker, crossing out some and moving up others, he carefully chooses each bit and decides how one will lead to the other, cautious not to give away too much too early in his set.

“If I listed all the jokes I liked on a page from 1-100,” says Glass. “I could start with one, but if this crowd is a little older I could start with 50 or 75, something that is a little more digestible, and then work my way up to one. Some guys might just go up there and tell their favorite joke and if the crowd doesn’t get it, they don’t budge or don’t care. I won’t do that, I’ll assess the crowd. But what I won’t do is go off the list of jokes that I like to get a cheap laugh just because I know a joke I hate might go over. That’s how you become a shitty comic.”

Soon the sun begins to set on the appropriately named boulevard he lives near and Glass looks at his watch and then yells to Dore, “Get the fuck up, you piece of shit, we’re going to be late! ”

Doore gives Glass a look as if he’s crazy and tells him they don’t need to be at the club for another three hours.

Glass laughs.

“Yeah, I know but what if I was that mad and that anal about being early that I would just fucking explode like that for no reason. Think about it. Like what if …”