A & E

Not that long ago, when it was cheaper to put 100-year-old Napoleon brandy in your gas tank than regular unleaded, Ty Barnett told his audience on Comedy Central's "Premium Blend" that he was in favor of high gas prices because they might reduce the number of drive-by shootings.

Analyzing comedy can be akin to shaving a cat. But Barnett is happy to discuss the science of delivering the laugh, as well as what it cost him to learn it.

"You ever see a comedian say something and they hope you laugh?" says Barnett, who opens a three-night stand tonight at the Pittsburgh Improv in Homestead. "Then you see a comedian say something and they know it's funny. It's the craziest thing."

Those comedians, he might add, are Richard Pryor, Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle. Seeing Chappelle's show confirmed what he'd been shooting for in his stage act: Make the audience wait. Dole out the jokes. Timing, timing, timing.

"What solidified it for me was watching Chappelle in San Francisco," Barnett says. "The thing I noticed about him was that he had these long pauses. But the audience was with him. By the time he shared what he had to say, they lost it. I said, "That's comed. ... It kind of came across where I didn't feel I had to be making you laugh every second."

A native of Chicago, he began telling jokes in high school art class with a friend. He says kids came from other classes to listen to them. He moved to the West Coast, where he held down a day job and worked open-mic nights at local clubs.

Slowly and painfully, he developed what he says are the three phases of comedy: talking about it, performing it, and perhaps most important, "the believing part, when you actually believe in what you're doing."

The audience will go with you almost anywhere if they believe that you believe what you're saying, he says.

In 2002, he was voted "Up and Coming Comedian of the Year" at the Las Vegas Comedy Festival and was voted outstanding performer at the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival. Gigs on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" and "Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson" followed. Then came his biggest television gig to date, as a contestant on NBC's "Last Comic Standing." He made it to the final two before Josh Blue was declared the winner.

"What I learned was I could never go to prison," he says of living in the house with the other comics and cameras in every room. "They take all the freedoms that you enjoy in the world away from you when you're filming. They took our phones, our iPods and computers. That was weird."

He lives on the West Coast, although he performs with a cutout of the Chicago skyline in the background. He loves Chicago, he says, but he won't move back there unless he can live in a house like Oprah's.

"Personally and professionally" he says, "I feel like I'm in such a better place than I was years ago."

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