By Howell J. Malham Jr.
Chicago Tribune 11/24/1993
Every so often, the kingdom of comedy is graced with a gifted, naturally refined performer who can effectively demonstrate the transcendental powers of the medium while making it look deceptively easy.
Here , then, is John Caponera, a formidable and resourceful comic who calls upon his treasured South Side nuances to make his routine soar into a dimension ruled in tandem by sarcasm and negativity.
Playing to a sold-out Thanksgiving Eve crowd at Zanies, Caponera stepped up to the microphone and, in his best Comiskey Park drawl, summarily encouraged the house to keep right on boozing. "Dat's right folks, get drunk and drive home as fast as you can," he said with the facetiousness of a drill instructor. "Actually this drunk driving stuff isn't funny. In fact, they say a man gets hit by a car every 30 seconds...I don't know who this idiot is but he must be in terrible pain."
As he paced and mugged in between his situations, Caponera never let the set droop, not even when his microphone temporarily died. For a better part of the evening, he pounded the loyal locals with vived characterizations of people everyone knows; the kind of people, he says, who always carry tape measurers in their back pocket.
"I had this foreman when I worked for this trucking company and he knew everything ," Caponera said as he donned a baseball cap with the bill flipped upward and nibbled on an unlighted cigarette. Once in character, he proceeded with the skewering: "He'd stand their all day and say stuff like 'Hey John, I'll tell you what's wrong with the Middle East...I'll tell you right now. There are too many Arabs..."
Caponera left Chicago eight years ago and is headed for Los Angeles, hoping for a shot at something tastier than just playing one-room comedy shops. His "butt kissing" eventually paid off: NBC debuts his new sitcom "The Good Life" in January.
His stretch on the coast, however, has not rounded out his incredulous Chicago edge. "Hey if a disaster doesn't involve me, I go on with my life. I was golfing during the L.A. Fires at the Malibu Country Club and you could see the smoke coming over the trees and ashes were falling all over the course and I couldn't help but thinking there's people just outside those trees going "Man, we just lost everything ," and I'm thinking, should I use a seven or an eight iron to get to the green. It was the weirdest felling. Maybe I should go with the seven iron because the wind is blowing that smoke pretty damn good. But at the same time you feel bad you know....cause I took an eight on that hole and don't you hate that?"
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