Funnyman.

• Position: Finalentry - Interview

John Lacey, CPA, Ph.D., co-winner of CalCPA's Outstanding Educator Award with Dr. Sara Seyedin, is more than just a teacher. With his brother Mike, he owns the Hermosa Beach Comedy and Magic Club that has seen acts like Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, Rodney Dangerfield and more. But his day job is professor of accountancy at California State University, Long Beach. California CPA caught up with Lacey to see what tricks and advice he might have up his sleeve.

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How did you end up in entertainment?

My brother made me do it! He had the idea of opening a comedy club. I was a doctoral student at UCLA at the time and had no money, but I encouraged him and helped him to find some partners to start the business. A couple of years later I helped him buy out his partners. Several years ago we produced a couple of comedy specials for Showtime.

Is it hard to keep people laughing in this economic downturn?

No. Laughter is wonderful medicine for all that ails you. Like most businesses, we have seen some downturn, but it's cathartic to sit in a comedy club and forget about your troubles.

Can magic turn the economy around?

A magician's business is to fool people. I think we have had enough of that! I often tell people that my job as a teacher is the opposite of that of a magician. A magician tries to make simple things seem complicated so people don't understand what happened. My job as a teacher is to make complicated things easier for people to understand.

Do your students have good senses of humor, or are they all business?

Most everyone has a sense of humor if they just let go. I teach introductory accounting to 120 sophomores at 8 in the morning, so one of my biggest challenges is to keep them awake. I mix humor with my presentation to keep them involved. I use examples that have humorous premises. I use my students' sense of humor to help them to learn and remember. As an example, I found that many students were forgetting to include the beginning inventory when computing the weighted average cost of inventory. I concocted a funny story involving days-old clam chowder at the student union and its relation to the computation of weighted average inventory. The exam scores on the inventory question increased, but sales of soup at the student union went down!

What are the biggest challenges students face in becoming a CPA?

Woody Allen said that 90 percent of succeeding is showing up. I think there is an element of that in our educational...