Stand-up gal: from cocktail waitress to club owner, Wende Curtis knows the comedy business. Now she wants to spread the laughter beyond Denver with a new club in Greenwood Village, where she's adding fine dining to the menu.

• Author: Cote, Mike
• Position: Cover story

"Saturday Night Live" cast member Darrell Hammond takes the stage at Comedy Works. He seems a bit under the weather, and during the course of his one-hour set--punctuated by dead-on impressions of Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson--he polishes off two cans of Red Bull.

It almost looks like a product placement: a high-energy drink for a high-energy act. But club owner Wende Curtis is the one who made sure Hammond had two cases of the beverage waiting for him.

Curtis also knows how Hammond likes his coffee, that he's a bit on the shy side and that he wants to sleep in one of the most expensive beds in town.

"He wants the Brown Palace," she said a few days later. "I pay him good money, but I sell out, and I make money. And he says really good things about us."

Like much of the entertainment business, the comedy circuit is a small world, and reputation means everything. Curtis is about to bet her good name--and a major financial investment--will lead to success beyond downtown Denver in September when she opens a new club at The Landmark, an upscale residential, retail and entertainment project in Greenwood Village.

Curtis will own a three-story, 21,000-square-foot building that will include a comedy club with seating for more than 400 people--compared with the Denver club's 280-seat capacity. It also will include a restaurant that will feature Southern cuisine and a tapas bar on a floor she will lease to a third party.

Curtis has worked outside the confines of her Denver base before. Last September, she capped three years working as a consultant to help open a comedy club in New York. But she acknowledges that the new club has rattled her nerves.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"What I owe on my business is not very much; it's like a small mortgage on a house. I could pay it off in a year," Curtis said during an interview at Comedy Works. "Now, I'm about to take on way too many commas in debt."

It hardly dampens her enthusiasm for the project, which will expand Comedy Works employee ranks from about 55 to 150. Curtis has been meeting weekly for construction updates with her representatives on the project, part of the Landmark's $75 million restaurant-retail-entertainment component.

"Boy, did I learn to surround yourself with the right people and to do it right," Curtis said. "It's got my stamp on it every step of the way, but there's a lot of stuff I don't know. It doesn't mean I take everyone's word for it. I just get a lot of different opinions and advice."

A WOMAN ON THE RISE

A large black-and-white print adorns a wall in Curtis' office at the basement home of Comedy Works in Larimer Square. An update of Charles C. Ebbets' classic 1932 photo, "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper," it depicts about a dozen construction workers sitting on a steel girder hundreds of feet above the streets of New York.

The twist is these workers are women.

But it's the mixed message and the comic touch of David M. Allen's "Women on the Rise" that catches your eye. The blue-collar crew includes one woman who is checking her makeup, and any of these babes would attract catcalls from male construction workers.

Comedy is not pretty, Steve Martin says. Curtis might tell you otherwise. It's her life, her business, her family. And after running the club for more than 14 years and owning it for five, she's not shy about saying she knows how to do it right.

"I think I've always been a leader," said Curtis, who joined the club as a cocktail waitress about 20 years ago. "I was a bossy kid. When I was 10 years old, I was producing a little beauty pageant in the neighborhood. I think I always knew I would run the show."

Curtis may call the shots, but a collaborative approach has been the lifeblood of her business, which generates more than $3 million in sales a year and was named by USA Today as one of the top 10 comedy clubs in the country. She rose up through the ranks and has done pretty much every job at the club so she understands everyone's role--and appreciates what they contribute to her business.

The Kansas native studied acting and directing at Colorado State University in Fort...