Byron Allen, Former Stand-Up Comic, Runs the 'Walmart of Television'

Jon Lovitz is in a duck costume. “I am the duck!” the former Saturday Night Live star announces. “Stand back, or I will quack you upside the head.” Bill Bellamy, a comedian best known for his days as an MTV VJ, looks on in bemused dismay. The puns progress: “You know how I’m holding my suit together? With duct tape!” Lovitz shouts. “What’s wrong, you don’t like a wise quacker?”

It’s nearly six o’clock in the evening, and the comedians have been going since 9 a.m., shooting episode 27 of a slapstick sitcom called Mr. Box Office. Bellamy plays a Hollywood star who, after an altercation with a paparazzo, is sentenced to six months of teaching high school in inner-city Los Angeles, and Lovitz plays his wacky agent. It’s an inoffensive, family-friendly show produced on the cheap: While most sitcom episodes are reworked and filmed over the course of one week, today’s goal is to capture an entire, unrehearsed episode in less than 10 hours. “Oh, this is crazy,” Bellamy says during a quick break. “Nobody does this. It’s unheard of.” Compared with even the worst-performing network sitcoms, the show reaches a minuscule number of viewers. “It’ll be on in L.A. at six in the evening on Saturday, or other parts [of the country] at two in the morning,” Lovitz says. “Hardly anyone sees it.”