HEN Joey Gay heard that Pips Comedy Club in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, was for sale, he discovered his life's purpose. All the elements of his past - growing up with an embarrassing last name in a rough part of Brooklyn, learning to be funny to ward off schoolyard bullies, running a strip club for five years and doing standup for eight - everything had been leading up to this.

Pips, a shoebox of a space sandwiched between Lundy's and Randazzo's, two of the borough's venerable seafood palaces, was born in 1962, just as comedy clubs were coming into their own, and at 43 years old, it is generally regarded as the country's oldest comedy club. In its heyday, Pips jump-started the careers of Rodney Dangerfield, David Brenner and Andrew Dice Clay, and was a stomping ground for a string of heavy hitters that included Joan Rivers, Andy Kaufman, Woody Allen, George Carlin, Billy Crystal, Robert Klein, Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno.

But in recent years, the club had fallen on hard times, and late last summer, the owner decided to sell it to a man who planned to turn it into a Greek restaurant. Mr. Gay, who at 35 is eight years younger than the club, couldn't bear the idea.

"I felt like I was the only Yankee fan, and they were tearing down the stadium," said Mr. Gay, who talks like a raspier version of Joe Pesci and radiates an old-fashioned formality that reminds people of a 1930's film star. "The bluebloods of American comedy started here. That means something to me."

Mr. Gay got in touch with Louis Torelli, a restaurant manager who was his best friend in sixth grade at St. Rose of Lima Catholic school in Midwood, where the boys grew up. Along with a partner, Mr. Torelli had been planning to open a Subway franchise. Mr. Gay persuaded them to put their money into Pips instead.

They bought the club in September, and now they face a formidable challenge. Its remote location, on Emmons Avenue at the end of the Q line, makes it relatively inaccessible, especially for Manhattanites. Though the club has a long history, it is a history few people know or care about. A-list comics have long since stopped performing there, and the Jews and Italians who populated the neighborhood when Pips was the center of New York's comedic universe have been replaced by new immigrants, particularly Russians, who are less likely than native English speakers to want to see comedy in English. Perhaps most crucially, two decades of bad word of mouth seemed almost impossible to overcome.

Damion Sammarco, a friend of Mr. Gay's and his co-host at a Lower East Side open mike, thought it was a bad idea all around. "Joey used to always talk about how if he had a couple hundred thousand dollars, he'd buy Pips," Mr. Sammarco said. "And I'd say to him: 'Joey, if you had a couple hundred thousand dollars, I'd do everything in my power to stop you.' "

Where Even Bartenders Heckled

Pips, which occupies a century-old storefront along what was never a very picturesque section of the waterfront, was founded in 1962 by a onetime standup comic from Brooklyn named George Schultz. Mr. Schultz had named his German shepherd Pip, after his favorite Dickens character, and when he bought the club, he named it Pips, too.

The early rosters were studded with unknowns, though they wouldn't stay that way for long. In the lineup, for example, was a childhood friend of Mr. Schultz's named Jacob Cohen who had tried comedy without success as a young man and was working as an aluminum siding salesman. When he took another shot at comedy, he changed his named to Rodney Dangerfield, landed on "The Ed Sullivan Show," and, with "I don't get no respect" as his signature line, became a star.

Other early performers included Joan Rivers, who, since she had no car, showed up only when Mr. Dangerfield gave her a ride. "He would literally take both hands off the wheel to write down jokes, pad in the left hand, pencil in the right hand," Ms. Rivers recalled. "I stopped going because I was afraid to ride with Rodney."

David Brenner, who went on to be a regular guest host on "The Tonight Show," got his first paying gig at Pips, and his rise to stardom, combined with his loyalty to Mr. Schultz, gave Pips its early momentum and attracted other top-flight comics. Largely thanks to his efforts, Pips became something of an Algonquin Round Table for a generation of comedians.

At the same time, Pips was pure Brooklyn, the only club, as "Goumba Johnny" Sialiano, the host of the morning show on WKTU-FM, remembers, "where you could get heckled by the bartender."

Outsiders learned quickly what a tough room it could be. "It was pretty rough for an Irish Southern chick," said Brett Butler, who later starred in the 1990's sitcom "Grace Under Fire." "The guys had their elbows on the table, looking at me like, take your clothes off or get outta here."

"Keeping it Surreal" in Midwood

As Pips was becoming a launching pad for a brilliant new generation of comics, Joey Gay was growing up in nearby Midwood, in a working-class Irish-Catholic household, the cherished baby in a family that included five older sisters. His mother worked as a nurse, and his father, a counselor for the Board of Education, regularly took side jobs to help support his brood.

As the son his father had yearned for, Joey was the prince of his family; as one of his sisters put it, "When Joey was born, it wasn't a christening, it was a coronation."

St. Rose of Lima was a different story; there, Joey was picked on relentlessly. "With my last name," he said, "you either learn to box or talk. I learned to talk. If a kid was bullying me, I couldn't knock him out. But I could say something that made him look like a jackass in front of everybody."

He was kicked out of Edward R. Murrow High School in his sophomore year, not for causing trouble but for doing no work. (Years later, during a standup routine, he recognized in the audience the man who had booted him and picked him out of the crowd, saying: "I'd like you to step into my office. I'm sorry I can't call your parents.")

At 22, after two years at a community college in upstate New York, Mr. Gay found himself back in Midwood, where he had an epiphany. Late one night, he and some friends were returning home when they ran into a bunch of guys wielding box cutters and bowie knives. A fight broke out, and two of Mr. Gay's friends were stabbed; although they survived, the knives perforated their lungs. "I thought, the people around me are getting stabbed, shot," Mr. Gay said. "I realized I can't spend my life on a street corner. I was going to have to figure out how to make some other life for myself."

The next year, he bought a topless bar in Chesapeake, Va.

The bar was called J. B.'s Gallery of Girls, and Mr. Gay proved to be a natural at managing it. With his flashy clothes and even flashier cars - at one point he simultaneously owned a Chrysler LeBaron, a convertible Thunderbird Super Coupe and an Infiniti I30t - he also became something of a local celebrity. He started dating strippers, and got arrested for public drunkenness.

It was a miserable period of his life, largely because the dangers he had fled in Brooklyn had followed him to Virginia.

"Everybody on both sides of the bar was crazy, violent and on drugs," he said. The clientele included ex-cons, bikers and convicted murderers, and on four occasions, Mr. Gay pulled the .38 he carried, expecting to have to shoot somebody; each time he talked his way to a resolution.

Five years into that life, in 1997, his father died, prompting yet another epiphany. As the only men in a family of six women, the two had developed an extraordinary closeness; the loss of the father devastated the son. It also made him realize that he didn't want to spend the rest of his life running a strip club. "I thought, 'This ride's going to be over someday, and what am I doing?' " he said. And so he decided to sell the bar and become a comedian.

"My Paycheck Was Getting on Stage."

As Mr. Gay was inching closer to Pips, Sheepshead Bay was sagging ever downward. The gangsters that had flourished there for decades had tightened their grip on the area, so much so that as John Mulrooney, a comic who played there in the 80's, recalled, "The club's motto was 'Where the mobsters meet the lobsters.' " The owner of the clam bar next door was shot to death just before one of the shows, and Pips customers who got out of line discovered that their cars had been smashed while the police looked the other way.

By 1991, the year Mr. Schultz died, the club was rapidly losing whatever cachet it had left. Soaring crime combined with a recession kept people in at night, often glued to comedy on cable or "Saturday Night Live." Especially with Pips unable to match the rates of clubs springing up in Manhattan, star comedians no longer felt the need to take the train out to Sheepshead Bay to make their bones.

In the last decade, the club has done little advertising and has not significantly changed its pay scale or its roster. In the process, the club deteriorated from a world-class launching pad where producers discovered new stars to a tired hangout for local Russian teenagers.

Then the trajectories of Pips and Mr. Gay came together. In 1999, Mr. Gay was still struggling to find his comedic voice and working odd jobs as a maintenance man and a night watchman while making the open-mike circuit. Then one night, during a guest spot at Pips, something clicked, so much so that the owner, Ray Garvey, let him return to do the weekend. It was Mr. Gay's first booking.

Still, with only 10 minutes of material, he needed a place to hone his act, and it was at this point that Mr. Garvey made him an offer: Mr. Gay could have extra stage time in exchange for cleaning the premises and answering phones. Two weeks later, Mr. Gay moved into the apartment over the club.

Soon, he was booking road gigs and earning enough to support himself and move to Park Slope. And last summer, when he learned that Pips was about to become a Greek restaurant, he acted.

In the Land of the Mook

"Welcome to Pips. My name is Joey Gay."

Pause for laughter.

"Laugh it up, people, I'm used to it. People ask me if this is my real name. I'm like: 'No, this is a stage name. I chose this name.'

"I'm single because nobody wants to be Mrs. Gay. It's not the kind of thing you write over and over in a notebook, is it, ladies?"

The occasion was the grand reopening of Pips last October. In the hope of again making the club a destination for Manhattanites, Mr. Gay and his partners spent $200,000 renovating the cramped and dingy space, almost as much as it cost them to buy the place.

The paint on the purple walls is so fresh you can smell it, the twin spotlights are brand new, and the electronics are up to date. There are elegant touches: the polished chrome latticework that holds the spotlights, the mahogany grid behind the bar for the liquor, the framed photographs of comedy legends who have passed through the club.

Though the space seats just 110 people, it feels expansive. Through the windows, clubgoers can watch teenagers cruise along Emmons Avenue in their SUV's, Russian disco blaring from their stereos. Sheepshead Bay glimmers in the moonlight.

On the club's tiny stage, Mr. Gay was in his element. "Only in Brooklyn could Pips survive," he continued. "You are in the land of the mook. You know what a mook is? A mook is the type of guy who names his baby daughter after his ex-girlfriend so his tattoo will have significance again."

The crowd laughed. It was a feel-good moment. But how long such moments can last is uncertain. The economics of running a club like Pips are far trickier than they were in its prime. Even under the best of circumstances, a tiny room like this would have trouble competing with the growing number of large Manhattan clubs able to pay top dollar for talent.

"They would have made more money as a Greek restaurant," Mr. Sammarco said of his friend's decision. "It remains to be seen whether this is the dumbest decision of Joey's life."

So far, Mr. Gay seems to be doing everything right. The club is attracting more name-brand comedians, among them Mr. Mulrooney, Louis Ramey and Jackie Mason. According to Mr. Gay, it is also making money, even during the winter doldrums.

"They're getting a lot of good new talent in there," said Julian Eyre, a firefighter who has been a Pips regular for years. "You walk in there, you already got a smile on your face, 'cause you seen Joey up there cracking jokes, bouncing around, going from table to table. Joey's always going to make you laugh, that's a guarantee."

Handling talent seems to be Mr. Gay's forte, and in fact he sees a link between his former and current lineup. "Strippers are the same as comedians, equal parts self-doubt and egomania," he said. "The best comics are like the most beautiful strippers. They're the most damaged."

The real test, of course, will be whether the club can attract customers regularly. "When I sold the topless bar," Mr. Gay said, "I swore I'd never own another club of any sort. It's barely organized chaos."

Jay Dixit writes for The Washington Post, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone.

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