In the Mood

Laughter is contagious, but producing laughs on command is very difficult—just ask Mike Royce ’86. For the last two years his job as warm-up comedian for ABC-TV’s Spin City was to keep studio audiences laughing—not while they watched the actors performing a scene for the first time, but after they had witnessed the same scene and the same jokes over and over and over again. (It can take three to four hours to film the 22-minute show.) About 200 people fill the seats each episode, primarily to see stars Michael J. Fox and Barry Bostwick; instead, they spend most of the time watching and listening to Mike Royce. To fill time, Royce pulled material from his 11 years as a stand-up comedian and explained to the audience the importance of laughing again and again at the jokes: live laughter is much better than a laugh track.

Royce was so well received that the producers hired him to write a Spin City episode this spring. He earlier had written for the MTV comedy series Apartment 2F, and last year he helped TV comedian Ray Romano, star of the CBS situation comedy Everybody Loves Raymond, write his book Everything and a Kite. In June he turned in his hat as a warm-up comedian (for now, anyway) and began working as a writer for Everybody Loves Raymond.

— Penny Bianconi

Photo by Harry DiOrio — © Syracuse Herald-Amdrican