Comedian HSN Host Keaney Talks Shop

You might not think that selling steam mops on Home Shopping Network would be a ton of laughs.

But stand-up comic Helen Keaney can find humor in just about anything, even her new career as a HSN show host. She says there are similarities in working for HSN and performing at comedy clubs.

"You have to keep people entertained or they will leave," says Keaney, who is performing at the Tampa Improv at 7:30 p.m. Sunday. It's a one-time show to try out some new material including some behind-the-scenes material based on her HSN adventures.

Keaney, who has impressive comedy credits, hasn't headlined a club since she joined HSN last summer.

"I had done stand-up comedy for years, and I found that it was getting hard to travel because I have a 9-year-old daughter," she says. "And I was watching HSN all the time. And I thought it was time I stopped buying."

She says HSN seemed like the perfect place for a shopaholic. And she jokes she had to learn how to stay on air for four hours without a bathroom break.

"So far, I've enjoyed it," says Keaney, who relocated from Los Angeles to Tampa with her husband and daughter. She says her primary focus is HSN but if the Improv gig is successful she may do some other clubs in Florida.

A native New Yorker, Keaney started out at the Manhattan Punchline, The Comic Strip and the Boston Comedy Club in New York. She appeared on A&E's "An Evening at the Improv," Lifetime's "Girl's Night Out," VH1's "Stand-up Spotlight," NBC's "Friday Night" and Comedy Central's "Make Me Laugh."

She was host of seven cable TV series including Comedy Central's "Short Attention Span Theater," Discovery Health's "Sex Drive" and the Style Network's "You're Invited."

"I do a lot of material about being a mother and a wife," she says. "It's clean PG-rated stuff. I don't play to the rowdy crowd out for a late night. I'm more for people who can read." Check tampa improv.com for ticket information.

SYFY GUY: The Sci Fi Channel is getting a new name. It will become Syfy on July 7. The new name is pronounced the same as the current, but the spelling change allows the network to trademark the name.

Sci Fi president Dave Howe said that "Sci Fi," the network's name since 1992, is too limiting for all that the network offers.

"If you ask people their default perceptions of 'sci-fi,' they list space, aliens and the future," he says. "That doesn't capture the full landscape of fantasy entertainment: the paranormal, the supernatural, action and adventure, superheroes."

"Sci Fi" also was too generic to be trademarked.

"We couldn't own Sci Fi; it's a genre," says Bonnie Hammer, the former president of Sci Fi who became the president of NBC Universal Cable Entertainment and Universal Cable Productions. "But we can own Syfy."

Sci Fi's parent company, NBC Universal, apparently bought the rights to "Syfy" from Michal Hinman, a Tampa journalist and sci-fi buff who had operated the SyFy Portal Web site (for fans of all things science fiction) since 1998.

Hinman says he sold the name to an undisclosed party in February for an undisclosed but substantial sum.

He says that he is certain the purchase, made through a New York attorney, was for NBC Universal. "We owned the rights to 'SyFy,' and this offer to buy it came out of the blue," he said in a telephone interview Monday morning.

His SyFy Portal has been renamed Airlock Alpha, found at www.airlock alpha.com.