Josh Kornbluth is funny

"Oh, hi! I'm Josh Kornbluth. I hope you're all feeling comfortable."

The unassuming words that begin the film Haiku Tunnel (2001) are much like those that greet visitors to Kornbluth's web site (www.joshkombluth.com) and much like the man himself: straight ahead, friendly, intriguing, and, well, unusual.

For years, Kornbluth was one of those artsy cult figures known primarily in lefty political circles and among urban aficionados of solo theater performance. That was until his film Haiku Tunnel, co-written with his brother Jacob, surprised the hell out of everyone. Who woulda thunk that a film created by, and starring, a strange man who looks like a modern-day Benjamin Franklin in Hawaiian-print shirts would even get made in Hollywood? The Los Angeles Times described the film as a "sly and captivating comedy of imaginative leaps and gently orchestrated pandemonium." And it lauded Kornbluth's "astute comic presence."

Based on what Kornbluth described as his "late-'80s misadventures as a really, really bad legal secretary," Haiku Tunnel at first appears to be a trip through the bizarre corridors of life in the workaday corporate world where bosses give minions stultifyingly long documents about what's expected of them. More to the point, however, the film is an expedition into the extraordinarily peculiar mind of Josh Kornbluth. You don't have to have worked in a corporate law office to enjoy Kornbluth's response to a supervisor's questions about why he's been coming in so late ("I'm having vague personal problems"). And he has a fine appreciation for the absurd nature of corporate speak. ("It looks like a desk in a hallway," Kornbluth's character accurately notes while being shown his new work area. "But she says it's a `room' so it must be a room.") It's one thing for the worker to be gleeful when letters mistakenly sent to the wrong printer are finally tracked down. It's another for the letters to cheerfully respond to being found: "You've come for us!"

At times, Kornbluth's work is reminiscent of Woody Allen's or to a greater extent Spalding Gray's. All three writer-performers let their neuroses loose. But while Allen and Gray are almost apologetic about their "issues," Kornbluth exults in his.

As Kornbluth tells me over breakfast at his "office," a local Berkeley cafe and eatery, his creative journey so far has been an ambling one. Kornbluth was born in New York City in 1959,and his parents split up when Josh was six months old. Like most children of divorced parents, he spent time shuttling between two households. But while other parents were encouraging their children to become doctors or lawyers, Kornbluth's communist parents basically "told me that I was going to grow up and lead a revolution."

Kornbluth attended the Bronx High School of Science and decided that he wanted to become, of all things, a mathematician. That eventually led him to Princeton, where he joined the student anti-apartheid movement. Those Ivy League days were also inspiration for his monologue "The Mathematics of Change." He says he was a "cocky student who'd excelled at math all through high school," but he promptly hit the wall during the first semester of calculus.

Kornbluth left Princeton after a couple of years and began to focus more on writing. He headed to Chicago in 1980 to work as a copy editor at In These Times, but was still searching for the sight medium for his voice. A fire was lit after he saw one performance by Spalding Gray, who is perhaps best known for the monologue turned-movie Swimming to Cambodia.

"I had no idea someone could do that kind of performance," says Kornbluth. "It just blew me away."

He wanted to figure out how he could do something similar. After moving to Boston, he began by convincing some friends in a band to let him do a monologue in between musical sets at a club in Cambridge. The piece, he says, was "mostly about what my dad told me about communism and sex." He found those first performances both "exhilarating and scary. They had their ups and downs, but I was really into it and I wanted to pursue it more."

Kornbluth moved to San Francisco in 1987 and, among other things, tried more traditional standup comedy. In those days, his act was complete with punch lines, and Kornbluth took on issues such as "what it's like to play Monopoly with communists." He also played guitar and harmonica during the act, and could turn any phrase into a Bob Dylan song by just adding the words "didn't you" at the end.

"But I didn't like standup," he says. "I didn't like the format of it, I didn't like the time limitations, and the limitations in people's minds about what they were expecting."

In the spring of 1989, Kornbluth did a performance at Enrico Banducci's Hungry Id on Broadway in San Francisco's infamous North Beach District, the same neighborhood that brought you beatniks and topless dancing.

"They had an opening, and they just let me do it," he says. "I typed up a press release and I did flyers, but I didn't have a show yet." Each performance was based on what was happening in his life. No props, no set, no other comics to improvise with. The piece that developed was eventually titled "Josh Kornbluth's Daily World."