Marty’s comedy club sits at one end of a strip mall on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, above a cleaner’s and a take-out pizzeria. The entrance is up a side street and easy to miss. In the club, color eight-by-tens of past performers line the walls. Many of these photographs suffer from red-eye; some of the faces have penises drawn on them. On a low countertop near the front door, a clipboard holds a sign-up sheet with the heading funny and funny looking. For five dollars, a stand-up hopeful can perform a set in Marty’s…