Don't think Jerry Seinfeld. Think Rick Rockwell. Think pompous, uneducated and more insecure than Dr. Laura in a lesbian biker bar. These are the performers who make up the majority of the comedy landscape. These are the people Walters has never interviewed.

These are the people I spent seven years on the road with.

I started my stand-up comedy career in college. I am one of a select group of men who can genuinely start my letters to Penthouse, "I attended a small, Midwestern university ..."

When I was a junior, there was a talent show emceed by a comedian out of Omaha, Neb., who later became my good friend and booking agent. After years of hearing me spout off in class and do bad Sean Connery impressions, my roommates put me up to auditioning. It was easy to be funny, gross and prurient in front of my friends, but now I had to actually write material.

Five hundred students packed into a gymnasium to see their friends pluck at guitars and cover R.E.M. ballads. And then I walked onstage, a skinny nerd of a kid who came out and started doing a 10-minute nightclub act. I was going for Dennis Miller, but I think I ended up being Dennis Franz -- pasty and foul-mouthed. I may even have shown my butt, I can't be sure.

"I've never been a good student. I used to think that No. 2 pencils were made out of shit."

"I had lunch at Subway this afternoon. As I got up to the counter, I realized that this is the only place in the world where women ask for six inches."

"I was in a bookstore the other day and I saw this book in the relationships section: 'The One-Hour Orgasm.' Folks, I don't know about you, but I get winded on a five-minute run."

Looking back on it, it was my best show. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't even very funny, but they laughed. Of course they laughed; they were a familiar audience of my peers. I could have come out and done an old Rip Taylor act -- complete with confetti -- and they would have rolled in the aisles. It didn't matter. I mistook it for a sign, and my stand-up career was launched. It was like showing up to the Gold Rush in California -- about a decade too late.

At the height of the comedy boom in the 1980s, it seemed as though every efficiency apartment in every postage-stamp suburb in America had a comedy club. There were, in fact, more than 300 comedy clubs operating in 1986. The Comedy Channel (which, in 1990, would become known as Comedy Central), VH1's "Stand-Up Spotlight" and A&E's "An Evening at the Improv" fired constant salvos of stand-up into every American living room. As you'd expect, most of those 300 clubs had disappeared by the early '90s. Long about the time I arrived on the scene, the era of stand-up comedy was decidedly over.

Many people blame saturation in the comedy market for stand-up's demise. Stand-up comedy essentially committed suicide. With so many little clubs popping up, the resulting syllogism was inevitable: There weren't enough good comics to go around, so all clubs -- big and little -- started booking any comic with a pulse and a dick joke. Audiences started resenting the fact that most of the pulses and dick jokes they were hearing weren't, in fact, funny. Comedy died.

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