Chris Bliss, Las Vegas Sun

Columnist Lisa Ferguson: Bliss tossed successful juggling career for comedy Lisa Ferguson Friday, Oct. 1, 2004 | 8:44 a.m. Dropping the ball isn't typically something most jugglers want to do -- unless, of course, you're Chris Bliss. After a decade spent touring the globe as the opening act for some of the biggest rock acts of the '80s -- including Eric Clapton and Michael Jackson -- Bliss let his shiny orbs fall where they may in 1988, when he abandoned his juggling career in favor of stand-up comedy. In the years since, Bliss -- who headlines Monday through Oct. 10 at Riviera Comedy Club -- has appeared several times on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno"; at international comedy festivals; and comedy clubs throughout the country, among other venues. Ironically enough, "I never wanted to be an entertainer," Bliss, who learned to juggle in his late teens, contended during a recent call from his Scottsdale, Ariz., home. "I never thought twice about it, and mostly knew what I didn't want to do and I tried to do something else." What he didn't want to do was study comparative literature. So in the early '70s he dropped out of college, packed up his juggling devices and hit the road with a fledgling rock band performing his act -- set to rock 'n' roll tunes and bathed in black light -- during breaks in the music. After several years spent "kicking around" with the band and working odd jobs, he was offered to tour arena-sized venues as the opener for the music group Asia. That gig led to a slot opening several shows on Jackson's "Thriller" tour; and a similar spot on the 1984 "Victory" tour, which reunited onstage all of the Jackson brothers. "I never thought juggling would take me anywhere," Bliss recalls, "and it took me all over the world." All the while, he claims, his celebrity bosses urged him to consider giving comedy a shot. Following the "Victory" tour, Washington, D.C.-bred Bliss moved to Los Angeles, where requests for his talents all but dried up ("You know how much L.A. loves a juggler," he jokes). He was offered a job performing in the "City Lights" production show at the Flamingo in Las Vegas, but passed on the opportunity "to do 12 minutes a night for the rest of my life. That sounded like a prison sentence." After touring with singer Julian Lennon in 1986, Bliss recalls, "I said, 'I've gotta do stand-up.' " Making the calculated career switch took some doing, however. "As a juggling act, I'd tried to fit in everywhere and please everyone." Upon entering comedy, "My first decision was that I'm gonna try to find out what's funny to me and then make it funny to other people. "The other decision was, I will use the juggling as a crutch to buy me stage time, but I am going to move it to the end of my show and eliminate it as soon as possible, because I didn't want to be what they call the 'juggling joke book,' " he says. Bliss has done exactly as he promised: His stand-up act includes a good bit of political comedy and social commentary. "I need to do stuff that I'm passionately connected to, so I have to be committed" to the material, he says. "I'm not really one who's gonna get up and say, 'Hey, the Republicans are full of it because of this; and the Democrats are full of it because of this.' I have a point of view, so the point of view ends up coming through." Most of the jokes he writes are born from "whatever it is that's bothering me, and usually it's where I think that something not true is being propagated in one form or another, and I have to put my finger on, for my own self, what about it is not true ... Basically, I'm trying to find a funny way to say the emperor has no clothes." But it's the method in which he skillfully weaves the bits together -- he sails, for example, from school violence, teen suicide and pointing the finger at Hollywood for such incidents, to American history, immigration practices and the Civil War, before eventually landing on, of all subjects, professional soccer -- that makes it interesting. "In my head, I'm on a bit of a mission," Bliss explains, which is to "really try to connect the dots different from the way they've been connected in people's heads, or just are disconnected in people's heads." "Americans are not necessarily the best-educated people on Earth, but we're very well informed. People don't necessarily know how to assemble that information -- there's a lot of content, but not a lot of context. So I sort of try and provide an interesting context," he says. "Humor is a great way to bring down a wall or get around a wall. It hits people from an odd angle, so it gets around people's defenses. That, to me, is the value of it and the challenge of it." Bliss says he's "willing to alienate an audience, and I don't mean gratuitously, I mean, with an idea or a subject matter that they're not comfortable with ... I'm willing to find out where their area of discomfort is and push it a little bit further than that, and then I have a little bit more room to roam in, and by the end of the night, I think people are gonna say to themselves, 'That was different and also funny, but a good show.' " They may also ask, "Hey, wasn't he supposed to throw some stuff into the air?" As promised, 51-year-old Bliss long ago trimmed juggling from his act -- well, almost. While he opts against tossing items during Las Vegas performances, he continues to include brief juggling segments in shows he plays at private events and aboard cruise ships. "To me, it's the icing on the cake," he says, "and after 45 or 50 minutes of (comedy that) can be kind of cynical and dark sometimes, you offer this thing that's pretty joyous." Out for laughs Roseanne Barr takes the stage at House of Blues at Mandalay Bay tonight at 8:30 p.m. Tickets range from $25 to $40. Todd Glass -- whose presence has graced both the second and third seasons of NBC's "Last Comic Standing" -- opens for David Spade at 9 p.m. tonight and 10:30 p.m. Saturday at The Mirage. Tickets are $70. The "Hollywood Comedy Tour" pulls into the Lounge at the Palms for a pair of shows at 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. Saturday. Celebrity roaster Jeffrey Ross, Jeff Richards of "Saturday Night Live" fame, and Bobby Lee of "MAD TV" share the bill. Tickets are $25. Suzanne Whang -- host of the popular series "House Hunters" on cable's HGTV, who was profiled here in March -- and her alter ego, a misguided comedian named Sung Hee Park, play The Improv at Harrah's through Sunday.