By Brooke Bates   bbates@dnronline.com

Bill Del Gallo relies on a few planned jokes and a healthy dose of improv for his comedy shows at The Pub. " width="325"> Bill Del Gallo relies on a few planned jokes and a healthy dose of improv for his comedy shows at The Pub. Courtesy Photo

Ten years ago, Bill Del Gallo set his VCR to record the stand-up comedy showcase, “Comedy Central Presents.” He watched the tape over and over, mimicking the jokes of Lewis Black, well aware that “the biggest faux pas is to steal stuff from another comedian,” he says.

Now Del Gallo is lacing his own life stories with the tried techniques of stand-up comics. Since a local comedy opportunity opened at The Pub last December, Del Gallo has become a regular riot-maker.

Building a laugh factory
Bill Royer, co-owner of The Pub, remembers seeing comedy shows at Harrisonburg’s Four Points by Sheraton, which became Holiday Inn. Last year, he started talking to his girlfriend and The Pub’s co-owner, Terri Life, about bringing comedy back to the ’Burg.

During one of their conversations, E.J. Edmonds, a Washington, D.C., comic who had recently relocated to the Valley, walked in with the same vision.

“I was looking for comedy and there wasn’t any,” Edmonds says. “So I made some.”

As Laugh-and-a-Half Entertainment, Edmonds began booking a comedy show at The Pub. It has run every other week since December, the next show runs from 9-11 p.m. on July 31.

Meanwhile, Del Gallo was selling cell phones at Wal-Mart. A female customer came in and, after hearing a few of his one-liners, told him he should come to The Pub.

“I thought she was asking me out on a date,” says Del Gallo. She was actually inviting him to take the stage at open mic night.

“I was shaking. I was sweating bullets. I had four Jäger bombs in me,” he says of his first performance. Edmonds noticed his nervousness, but saw the funny underneath. After several routines, Del Gallo and another local comic, Adam McHenry, earned invitations to participate regularly and Del Gallo became Gene Gallo, the comic.

Before each show, Del Gallo spends a couple days planning how to open his 10- to 15-minute set. After, of course, he loosens up and lightens the mood with a Jägermeister shot onstage.

Though he keeps a joke book in his pocket — in which he jots down funny comments about kitty litter or inappropriate insults for his ex-fiancée — his routines aren’t scripted.

“People can tell if you thought it out or if it’s real,” he says. “You have an emotional connection with people when they know it’s real.

“Nothing’s funnier than real life. Some of the best shows, I only tell three jokes and the rest is improv. Half the time, I’m just hitting on women in the crowd.”

Still, it’s hard to tell “where the true story stops and the elaboration begins,” he says. It’s a tactic he learned from his father, who told him, “Sometimes, to make sense out of life, we make things up to help us understand it. Like Santa Claus, The Bible and pro wrestling.” Then Del Gallo finishes the story with a poker face. “I said, ‘What? I didn’t know pro wrestling was fake!’ ”

Obviously, his onstage persona is a bit of an act.

“Gene Gallo is like doing a character on TV,” he says. “The person I am onstage is very far from me. … It’s my 15 minutes, and I’m grabbing it.”

Dirty jokes
That’s coming from a former youth pastor who has lived in Broadway since 1989. To find the town, he says, drive 20 minutes and listen for banjoes.

He has no problem making fun of himself, but he has learned how close people hold religion and NASCAR here.

“I’ll never be brave enough to do a NASCAR joke in the Shenandoah Valley,” he says. “This is my home. People know where I live.”

That’s not to say he doesn’t push the boundaries of decency. “I’m a rated R comic,” he says.

Drinking stories are usually a reliable source of laughs — you know, “Last night me and my friends drank some tequila and ended up in Tijuana,” he says. His drinking stories and his Jäger-fueled tellings of them are no exception.

“One of my friends told me, ‘Every time I go to one of your shows, I feel worse about myself for the things I laugh at.’ ”

He admits to having a foul mouth and a sick sense of humor. “But it’s not [that] I want to be vulgar or obscene,” he says. “I like catching people off-guard.

“Everyone can learn to tell jokes,” he says. “The hardest thing to learn is to get the crowd to react to you and to react to the crowd.” Del Gallo says he got plenty of experience leading people on as a salesman.

While stand-up isn’t quite his full-time gig, Del Gallo is looking into some fall shows in northern Virginia and Baltimore. Eventually, he hopes to take his act to the Miami-Orlando region of Florida.

But right now, it’s about the laughs.

“As long as I’m making [the audience] happy and I’m laughing at my own jokes,” he says, “I eat it up. … It’s like a drug.”

Watch Gallo's performances in Time Waisters: Local Vibe.