Sandy Kraehling, who is co-owner along with her husband, John, of Pan Latin in Battery Park City, has the gift of rapid gab. It serves her well chatting up her café regulars or regaling newcomers with tales that sometimes lead to punch lines, and other times are stacked with just enough absurdly rich detail to be amusing.

		"I find myself incredibly funny," she says. So it was no great surprise to find her at the café the other night with a microphone in hand, tossing off one-liners (and 10-liners) to a packed house. Kraehling invited neighborhood residents last month to join her for a private party and comedy night at the café in an effort to drum up business on the otherwise quiet corner of Chambers Street and River Terrace. And she invited three other local, first-time comedians to join her. "Oh yeah, he's going to get heckled," said Lambeth Hochwald, whose husband, Brian Kaplan, would be the first to take the stage. Like the moms to follow, Kaplan, who lives in Battery Park City, drew laughs riffing on parenthood. And like the others, he drew a few groans from the audience along the way. "What is this, the Borscht Belt?" he sighed. That one got a laugh.

"Tough crowd," he said offstage. "Can we cuss?" asked Julie Gaines, owner of Fish's Eddy and a P.S. 89 parent, who went on to use the F-word to great effect and brought the house down with a true story about how one of her children inadvertently learned about the Birds and the Bees and, at school, produced a sketch of his parents to prove it. "I can't believe I'm telling you this," she said. Tribeca resident and P.S. 234 parent Amy Sewell riffed on the neighborhood, from hot dads on the PTA ("Ladies, you know what you're thinking as you see him walk across the gym at the basketball game. You're thinking, mm-hmm, I'm going to get him on a committee") to the knock-offs for sale on Canal Street. "Why don't they knock off that Bugaboo stroller?" she said. "No way I would pay $800 for a stroller unless it had a GPS system on it." Kraehling shared stories of her customers and poked gentle fun at tourists' tortured pronunciation of menu items, like café con leche, and their embarrassing use of the "C-Word": croissant. She said she was not certain if she would host another comedy night, but hopes to have other events that can bring a sense of "warm community" to her windy little corner of Battery Park City. "I know it sounds corny," she said, "but I'm a cornball."