LOS ANGELES - Courtroom drama is usually nothing to chuckle about — unless it's in the Laugh Factory and Tom Arnold or Sinbad are the lawyers.
Entrepreneur Jamie Masada was sitting in his venerable Sunset Boulevard comedy club one night when a patron screamed so loudly at a comedian's joke that the guy sitting next to him claimed his hearing was damaged. Next thing the club owner knew, Masada said, he was being named in a lawsuit.
"It was so ridiculous. I thought, 'This is a TV show.'"
Not long after, the "Supreme Court of Comedy" was born.
The show, which launched last month on DirecTV, is taped at the Laugh Factory.
The premise is the same as shows like "The People's Court" or "Judge Joe Brown," with a twist: The plaintiffs and defendants are represented by comedians acting as their lawyers.
"They are real people with legitimate small claims disputes," says Ronit Larone of DirecTV, adding that the show's producers comb through hundreds of cases to find ones involving things like a a guy who sued a house-sitting friend for allegedly absconding with his sex tape. Arnold and Sinbad squared off against each other in that episode.
In another, Paul Rodriguez defended a man against charges of taking his former girlfriend's clothes and wearing them at a club, where one of her friends saw him.
Comic Dom Irrera presides over each episode as the judge.
"We spend so much money on these cases, and they really belong in a comedy club, not a courtroom," Masada said of his idea to take them to TV.
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