Comedian Is Comfortable Courting Laughs On Stage

Arnold Mukai, comedian, Smokeless Joe's Comedy Club, Tacoma Sports Center, 2610 Bay St., tonight and tomorrow, 9 p.m. 627-2255.

-- TACOMA

Arnold Mukai has always wanted a job where he was around fun.

He became a Seattle Center ride operator in his teens but decided he couldn't do that all his life. He also worked as a bartender but decided he couldn't do that all his life.

So he became a comedian, turning a first-time appearance at the 1979 Seattle Laugh-Off into a full-time job. Mukai, who performs this weekend at Smokeless Joe's, is comfortable with his 14 years of experience, which he says has allowed him to open up more.

"There's really no replacement for experience." he said. "I'm more comfortable on stage now, and if you look like you're relaxed and having a good time on stage, that's really half the battle. I'm not a comedian who can sit down at a typewriter for two hours and be funny. When I write a joke, it comes out of something funny I say when talking to a friend, and then I just work backward from there.

"I used to do strictly ethnic humor because of my background," Mukai said. "I'm Japanese-American and grew up in (Seattle's multi-ethnic) Central District. I saw a wide variety of people and I used to talk about that. But I thought that I had more to offer than that. I really feel more like a comedian who happens to be Japanese-American than the other way around."

As early as 1985, Mukai's act was described by Seattle Magazine as "coming to grips with a Rene Magritte painting after inhaling a lungful of pure nitrous oxide." He mixes jokes with impressions and bizarre sound effects like a leaking faucet and hair dryer.

The impersonations sometimes work their way into his jokes. At a recent performance for Puyallup and Rogers High School students and their employers ("only the second time I've done comedy in the morning"), Mukai said that people calling in sick to work come down with the "Balboa Flu." Breaking into a Sylvester Stallone-as-Rocky voice, he mumbled, "I don't feel so good."

Despite Mukai's awards and achievements, he said his proudest accomplishment in 14 years of comedy is that he's stayed married. "There's a lot of comedians that can't stay happily married because they're on the road so much. There's some circuits in Canada that go for 10 or 12 weeks, and there's no way I could stay on the road that long.

"What I'd really like to do eventually is a Vegas show," Mukai said. "I'd like to do my impersonations, some music, some jokes for 20 minutes and say, `Hey, here's Frank Sinatra' and be done. There's something about that energy that fills the room in a Vegas show. I want to be that kind of entertainer. I don't want to be the type of comedian that just stands there."

Mukai is still affected by the death of his daughter, who passed away in December 1991 at age 7 after a fourth surgery to correct a congenital heart defect. "I don't want to get philosophical about it," he said, "but what I learned from her death is that you have to make a conscious effort to have fun every day, because you don't know how long you'll be here."

Smokeless Joe's, which opened two weeks ago, claims to be the first smokeless comedy club in the state. According to Tacoma Sports Center general manager Earl Powell, the opening of the club is an attempt to diversify the sports and recreation facility, an airplane-hangar-like building just off Interstate 5 in an industrial section of downtown Tacoma.