Photographs by Alan Spearman As Joey Hack by night, he yuks it up with The Wiseguys - John Reynolds (from right), Lindsay Acord, Warren Grantham and Alex Bragg - in preparation for a date at Kudzu's Bar and Grill. As the businesslike Robert Joseph Leibovich by day, he works on labor and employment law at his offices in a high-rise building downtown.

Heard the one about the lawyer who does standup?

By Lawrence Buser
buser@gomemphis.com
March 10, 2003

By day he's Robert Joseph Leibovich, a businesslike labor-and-employment lawyer in the downtown high-rise offices of one of the city's top law firms.

By night he's Joey Hack, a smart-mouthed, bourbon-swilling, cigar-waving wise guy in dark glasses and cheesy suit who has prowled the stages of area comedy clubs for the past four years.

"The skills in comedy are similar to those you need in the courtroom because you have to think quickly on your feet," says Leibovich, adding that audiences are similar in both venues.
"At a club, they're just jurors with a two-drink minimum."

There are differences in the two jobs, of course.

"If someone says they're from Bug Tussle, Tenn., it's funny in one place," he says, "but in the other it's 'Oh, yes, nice to meet you.' "

He created Joey Hack several years ago when a law firm colleague who thought Leibovich was funny around the office dared him to try his stuff at an open-mike night at the old Loony Bin comedy club in Overton Square.

Joey Hack is rude but not mean-spirited. He's a combination of Don Rickles and Henny Youngman. He's a Vegas Rat Pack kind of guy with a New York accent. His act is PG-13. The bourbon is actually Diet Coke.

His shtick, which opens with Dean Martin crooning Volare, went over so well Leibovich quickly earned a job as regular emcee at the club, which closed two years ago. He insists the closing was not his fault.

"A lot of it is simply confidence and attitude," says Leibovich, 36, who worked in television news production before becoming a lawyer. "You have to tell people you're being funny. You have to sell it. The first time you bomb, you take it personally but then you learn to blame it on the audience."

Drunks and hecklers? Not a problem, he says. "You have a mike and they don't. You're going to win every time."

Leibovich likes to spar with audiences that typically are not aware of his legal profession, which includes conducting corporate training seminars on leadership, motivational techniques and labor law.

"Clients love the fact that he can take a topic like the Family Medical Leave Act and make it something hilarious and interesting that supervisors would want to come to," says Young & Perl law firm colleague Anne McGrew Conrad, who coaxed Leibovich onstage after watching clients respond to him.

"I kept telling him, 'My gosh, if supervisors are rushing to come out you should get out there (on stage) and tell some of your really funny stuff.'

"A lot of training is really improv. You've got to get up there and relate to the audience you find that day and he's great at that."

Leibovich, who also has performed at Bally's Bonkerz comedy club in Tunica among other places, is not the first local lawyer to either do standup comedy or to discover it's not easy being funny on demand.

"It's actually the most frightening thing I've ever done as far as anything that doesn't involve physical threats or violence," says lawyer Wayne Emmons, who has performed at clubs for years as Cousin Bubba and who has television hopes for his Judge Bubba. "It's frightening to stand up there in a spotlight with 100 or 200 people in the audience and do 15 or 30 minutes of comedy."

Leibovich also has been in two John Grisham movies, The Client ("reporter with bad mustache") and The Rainmaker ("attorney carrying file in hallway") and has done Bill Clinton impersonations for an evening of lawyer skits called Entertaining Motions.

He is with an improvisational comedy troupe he founded called "The Wiseguys, Comedy You Can't Refuse," which performs on the first and third Tuesday of the month at Kudzu's at 603 Monroe.

At a rehearsal last week members spent two hours romping through nonsensical, off-the-cuff routines with characters that included a snowman with a rash, a melting snowman without a rash, a one-legged kangaroo and a superhero named Wedgie Boy.

Members must quickly play off one another's lines and characters, ad libbing their way through unlikely topics such as a world yeast crisis and the lesser-known quotes of Saddam Hussein.

"Does this beret make me look fat?" Leibovich barks in a thick accent, mimicking the Iraqi leader and drawing laughs all around.

"Joe has the ability to keep everybody moving in the same direction without stepping on their ego," says Martin Norris, bartender and manager at Kudzu's and a Leibovich fan.

"He can adapt to the audience and to me that's what makes him so interesting, to see him go in and out of character."

Leibovich says he enjoys the comedy routine but has no plans to leave his law career to pursue the club life full time.

"My day job is my priority," says Leibovich.

"The comedy is a hobby."

And he doesn't do lawyer jokes.

- Lawrence Buser: 529-2385