Teacher takes a second swing at comedy

Apr 17, 2009 (Times-Herald - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- SIX | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- Derrick Leonard doesn't have to hop on Roar at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom to know what a roller coaster ride is like.

He has his career.

Leonard, a Vallejoan via San Francisco, Reno and San Jose, joined the stand-up comedy ranks in the 1990s as the yuks-for-bucks boom hit its peak. As stardom and fortune eluded the now-48 year old, he adjusted to a younger audience: High school students.

"I gave comedy a good, hard seven years," Leonard said. "Then I started to get my teaching credential. I had no intention of being a teacher. I was going to go into full-time writing. I was ready for a change."

Leonard's mother was a teacher, however, "and I did hear her stories and it seemed a lot more satisfying than a lot of lines of work."

So he scrapped life on the road and took a job teaching. Though word, apparently, leaked slowly.

"I wasn't trying to get work (as a comic) anymore but I would get calls. It was lingering," Leonard said. "It was like making the all-stars after you've peaked. You're not good anymore, but they keep voting you in from what you did five years ago. Word finally gets out you're not playing the game anymore."

Leonard tried to escape the comedy the way Al Pacino tried to escape the mob in "Godfather III."

"Just when I thought I was out, they dragged me back in."

Two years ago, he eased his way back, though he's kept is job teaching English and Spanish at a private school in San Francisco.

The rust, said Leonard, is wearing off.

"It's like a sport," he said. "It takes a while to get back to where you were when you were fully immersed in it and at the top of your game. Right now, I'm going out once or twice a week, which isn't like going out five times a week."

Leonard takes his act next Thursday to City Lights Cantina, where he's tossed his sombrero into the ring for the 10 p.m. benefit show for ailing stand-up Grace White. The 8 p.m. show is sold out.

Leonard, and a host of other comics and sax player Andrew Beal, are performing gratis. And don't expect him to ask for gas money. He lives right up the road, a home he's owned since he relocated from San Francisco nine years ago.

A University of Nevada at Reno graduate with a journalism degree, Leonard was raised in San Jose.

"At the time, it was one of the fastest growing cities in the country," he said. "You'd go to sleep with a field in front of your home and wake up and there would be all these tract houses."

The move to Vallejo right after Sept. 11, 2001, was simple math.

"Houses were affordable," Leonard said. "I traded my pick-up for a house. Plus, the guy wanted 100 bucks."

Leonard likes the city he's adopted.

"It's one of the few towns in the Bay Area where you have your own ferry terminal," said Leonard, a weekday commuter.

Leonard learned to never get overconfident whatever job he has, especially doing stand-up.

"You can never get cocky in this business," he said. "You're one set away from tanking it. So arrogance is out the window when you're a comic."

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