Comedian Joe Lowers, Las Vegas Sun, Feb ,18, 2005

Columnist Lisa Ferguson: When Lowers hits the road, the road hits back Lisa Ferguson Friday, Feb. 18, 2005 | 8:38 a.m. Aword to the wise: Don't get into a car with Joe Lowers. The comedian, who headlines the "Laughs at The Beach" show Saturday at The Beach nightclub, has had his well-being jeopardized on several occasions while riding in automobiles, evidenced by the "Dead Vehicles" photo link on his Web site, www.joelowers.com. There you'll find a snapshot of a minivan Lowers totaled a few years ago by hitting a deer while driving to a stand-up show in Indianapolis. Rather than cancel the gig, he had the van towed to the hotel where he was staying and went on with his performance. Far more horrific, however, is the photo of a barely recognizable Mazda MX6 sports car. Five years ago the Philadelphia native and his wife, Jennifer, were driving through West Virginia on their way home from a show when they were involved in a serious wreck. "A tarp fell off a semi (tractor-trailer)," he explains. Jennifer was behind the wheel and mistook the debris for a log she assumed had fallen from a truck that had previously passed the couple's car on the highway. "She swerved to miss it ... and we rolled the car" between six and eight times, according to eyewitness accounts, Lowers says. Jennifer broke her ankle and suffered injuries to her arms and legs in the accident. Joe fared much worse: His head was cracked open and an ear was nearly severed off; his left hand and several teeth were shattered. "I woke up with my head pinned between the (car's) roof and the door," he recalls, "and (emergency workers) told me to shut my eyes -- they were cutting the roof off." Drifting in and out of consciousness, Lowers says, he remembers being flown by helicopter to an area hospital and waking up beside Jennifer in the emergency room. "My wife blamed herself for (the accident for) a while, and it was pretty hard on her," he says, "but I kept telling her ... there's many things she could have done so that we would have lived, and she did one that saved our lives." Following a brief hospital stay, Lowers and his wife eventually made full recoveries. More than a year ago, the couple moved to Las Vegas, where he is working to make his mark on the local comedy scene. "These are some of the reasons I live in Vegas now," he says, reflecting on the car wrecks, "because I'm afraid I'm gonna die on the highway just going to make people laugh ... I wanna make 'em laugh, but I don't wanna do it that bad." Las Vegas "is the only place where the audience comes to you," Lowers insisted recently from his southwest valley home. "This is the only place where I can perform every single night and there will be different people" in the audience. Lowers, who holds a degree in advertising, began his stand-up career 11 years ago. "I knew when I started comedy that I was gonna be a prop comic. I just knew that I was gonna make things." Toting the hand-crafted items onstage with him was another matter: "Everybody has a trunk or whatever, and I thought a bowling bag would be funny." The gag evolved, and he began wearing onstage baggy bowling shirts, shorts and a pair of "borrowed" bowling shoes (he'd failed to return to them to the alley from which they were rented -- "I lost a good pair of tennis shoes," he jokes). "When I put that shirt on ... I felt funnier, so I felt more comfortable" during sets, Lowers recalls. "I immediately got laughs because of the way I was dressed, which put me at ease to go into my material." As he's become a more seasoned comedian, he's ceased wearing the getup while performing shows in Las Vegas. Likewise, the bowling bag's contents have lessened: "It's almost empty now. It used to be packed full of stuff. I've slowly taken things out." In fact, Lowers hardly relies on props anymore: "I've just gotten away from them because ... I've become more of a prop myself." Interestingly, he credits the car crash in West Virginia for having "made my show 100 percent better." Forced offstage for two months while recovering from his injuries, Lowers says his comedy skills "got kind of rusty," and he forgot most of the jokes in his act. When he finally took the stage again to perform, "I ended up having to do some improv, which I had always kind of wanted to do but I was afraid to do." Turns out, that addition changed his entire show, which these days is heavy on audience interaction and unbridled zaniness. For his signature bit, "I go out in the audience and I heckle myself," he explains. "I've gotten into big fights with myself (onstage), and what happens sometimes is people get up from their seats and go to the seat that I was sitting in to yell stuff at me." Lowers is also known to prowl the audience prior to shows, eavesdropping on conversations and collecting sound bites that come back to haunt showgoers during his sets. "I've gone into the bathroom before a show, and I'll see a guy go to the bathroom and then not wash his hands. Then, I run out and watch where he sits down, and I go onstage and tell his girlfriend that he didn't wash his hands." While "Laughs at The Beach" is his most steady local gig, 40-year-old Lowers says he also frequents several open-mike shows staged at bars throughout the valley. Meanwhile, he continues to (gulp) take to the road for out-of-state gigs. "I'm still traveling, but my goal is to eventually not travel as much," he says, adding that he would like to land a job headlining or hosting a production show at a local casino, "where I could show up every night and have 100, 200 people there" to entertain. On the other hand, he contends, "If I make it no farther than I am right now, I consider myself very successful, because I'm doing what I want to do: I'm making people laugh." Out for laughs Online comedy resource Shecky magazine (www.sheckymagazine.com) reports that Kevin Knox, a regular at The Comedy Stop at The Trop, is battling cancer. A recent article on the site links to the Web site of Boston club The Comedy Studio, where a post explains the disease has attacked Knox's lymph nodes, and that the Beantown native is seeking "alternative" treatment in Florida. Dana Carvey headlines through Sunday at the Mirage's Danny Gans Theatre, with Bay Area comic Mark Pitta in the opening slot. Show times are 9 p.m. tonight, 10:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; tickets are $70. Bill Maher is scheduled to play the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay on March 5. Tickets for the 8 p.m. show range from $32 to $52. archive