Friday, April 15, 2005 | 8:32 a.m.
There's no rest for the weary -- or, apparently, Ron Sherwood.
When the Las Vegas comedian says, "A week doesn't go by when I'm not doing a show somewhere," he isn't exaggerating.
Besides taking the stage frequently at venues around the valley, including "Laughs at The Beach" at The Beach nightclub, where he headlines on Saturday, Sherwood also hits the road for stand-up gigs throughout the nation.
"You can't work in Vegas all the time. There's a lot of work there, but it gets distributed through so many comics that you usually don't get to work there as much as you'd like (despite) living there," he explained during a recent call from Tucson, where he was practicing his golf game prior to a stand-up show.
Still, Sherwood gets his fair share of jobs: Aside from "Laughs at The Beach," he regularly plays Funniez Comedy Club at Buffalo Bill's in Primm (he'll perform there, also on Saturday, following his show at The Beach); Riviera Comedy Club, where he's scheduled take the stage April 25 through May 1; Comedy Zone at the Plaza; and the Comedy Stop at the Trop, where he played his first professional stand-up shows in the early 1990s.
Meanwhile, he also serves as the fill-in host of the "X -- An Erotic Adventure" production show at Aladdin and guests at the Celebrity Champagne Brunch on Sundays at the Plaza.
"The more (shows) you do, the better you get," Sherwood explains of his packed performance schedule. Comedy is "an art form you grow all the time. You never get to where you go, 'OK, I'm as good as I can get' ... You always have to practice, and the only way to practice comedy is by actually doing it. It's not like being a musician, where you can sit at home and practice, and then you go out and perform."
New York-born Sherwood knows about which he speaks. Growing up in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., he says for years he was a musician and, starting at age 11, played drums in bands.
A drama major in college, Sherwood did technical work behind the scenes on school productions before eventually taking a job working in lighting and sound at a professional theater not far from his Florida home. The venue hosted such Las Vegas headliners as Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Jerry Lewis, Wayne Newton and Liza Minnelli, whom Sherwood says often toured with their own Vegas-based technical crews.
"I was meeting a lot of the Vegas tech people," he recalls, "and they would say, 'Why are you living here? ... Why don't you come to Vegas? There's lots of work. You can make a pretty good living.' "
In 1979 Sherwood made the move west and found technical work with several Strip production shows. The following year he landed a job handling lights and sound on "Folies Bergere" at Tropicana, a position he held for a decade before switching in 1990 to The Comedy Stop.
That's when "I got this bug that I could be a comic," he says. "I always had a kind of funny personality about me, and I could always make people laugh, but I'd never really watched comics enough to know there's kind of a formula to doing a joke ... So I watched it for a year (and) I thought, 'I wanna give this a shot. I think maybe I could do this.' "
It also helped that Sherwood had made friends with many of the Comedy Stop's regular performers, including then-up-and-comer and fellow New Yorker Ray Romano: "We both had a love of golf, and we were both married with kids, so we had a lot in common."
Before hitting Las Vegas' then-burgeoning open-mike scene, Sherwood says he received advice from his professional comic pals who "wanted me to do my own material, something original, so they helped me set it up."
Armed with an act penned in part by funny lady Maryellen Hooper, he took the stage for the first time in 1992 at a bar in Green Valley.
"For my very first time, it didn't go bad. I had a pretty good set," he recalls. His next show, an eastern Las Vegas tavern, "didn't go well at all. It was horrible, and that's kind of the way it went for a while."
After a year spent making the rounds at open-mike shows, Sherwood says he felt confident enough to ask Bob Kephart, owner of the Comedy Stop, for some stage time, and was awarded a weekly guest spot at the club.
"That was the one (gig) that gave me the credibility to go around to the other (local) comedy clubs and to get into them," he explains. "I kind of went past all the other open-mikers that I started with because of the connections I had."
He also had an unshakable reputation: "It was hard for me to get people to take me seriously (as a comic) because it was always, 'You're the sound guy who does comedy.' "
Sherwood, who declines to reveal his age, says it's only been in recent years that "I have finally gotten to the point where I'm strong enough and I do a good enough job that people are going, 'All right, you're really a comic.' "
In his act Sherwood -- who once opened for Romano about 1 1/2 years ago at the Mirage -- riffs on Vegas from a tourist's perspective as opposed to that of a longtime resident. "I find that I relate to the audience more if I do it as one of them as opposed to someone who lives here," he explains. "It's easier for them to understand what I'm talking about if I look at (the city) through their eyes."
He also jokes about the trials and tribulations of marriage to his wife, Janie, a science teacher at Centennial High School, and raising the couple's four children -- 6-year-old Lily; Julia, 12; Hailey, 19, and 21-year-old Jonathan -- in their northwest valley home.
When he's not performing, Sherwood continues retreating backstage for work. He still runs the light-and-sound boards at The Comedy Stop, and recently began handling the same tasks for "Xtreme Magic with Dirk Arthur," also at Tropicana.
"If I don't fill up a week (with stand-up gigs), I fill it up doing sound," he says. "I like to keep busy."
Out for laughs
Former "Howard Stern Show" sidekick Jackie "The Jokeman" Martling performs at 7 p.m. Monday at the Renaissance Hotel, 3400 Paradise Road. The stand-up show will also include a round of Martling's trademark "Stump The Jokeman" segment, where audience members lob jokes at the comic and win prizes if he doesn't know the punch line. Tickets -- $20 general admission; $50 for VIP seats -- are available at www.tobaccomart.com or by calling 791-1777.
Laugh Lines friend Shuli is starting a new gig: Saturday through May 11, the Las Vegas comedian opens the "Hell Bent 4 Humor" show, starring comic Benny Baker, at the Plaza. Show time is 10 p.m. Saturday through Wednesday; tickets are $21.95.
Dennis Blair, profiled here in 2004, opens for George Carlin from Thursday through May 4 at Stardust. Show time is 8 p.m.; tickets are $54.50.
In the April 1 installment of Laugh Lines, a word was omitted from a joke provided by "Laughs at The Beach" mastermind Shelly McCarty, altering the punch line. The joke should have read: "I'm on a new diet, called the Mirror Diet, that's been working pretty well. You can eat whatever you want as long as you do it naked in front of a full-length mirror. I love it! Of course, I've been kicked out of six restaurants so far."
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