Table of Contents
What Others Are Saying About Chris Gethard and A Bad Idea I’m About to Do
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
My Father Is Not the Kindly Mustachioed Man He Seems
Pa
Koozo
My First Kiss
Scared Straight
Virginity
A Bad Idea I’m About to Do
White Magic
I Fought the Law and the Law Most Definitely Won
Nemesis
The World’s Foremost Goat
My Lows at Loews
Breaking Up, Breaking Down
No Worries
Six Red Bumps
Colonic
Jiu Jitsu
Cross-Country
Acknowledgments
Copyright Page
What Others Are Saying About Chris Gethard and A Bad Idea I’m About to Do
“Chris Gethard is comedy in a fighter’s crouch. His stories travel through adolescence and New Jersey with a sweetness and rage that makes you both wish you were there and feel like you were.”
—Seth Meyers, Saturday Night Live
“Whenever I’m feeling down on myself or think that I’m slowly going crazy, I think of one of Gethard’s stories. Then I realize that, hey, I don’t got it so bad after all.”
—Jack McBrayer, 30 Rock
“Chris Gethard tells the amazing stories an eccentric old man would tell . . . if that man had lived his fucking life with any balls. His stories are hilarious and riveting—but more importantly, real.”
—Rob Huebel, Adult Swim’s Childrens Hospital and MTV’s Human Giant
“Chris Gethard stories are like a roller coaster—at times you are scared, shocked, and ultimately exhilarated by the hilarity each story contains—and once you finish one, you wanna hear another one right away.”
—Paul Scheer, FX’s The League and Adult Swim’s NTSF: SD: SUV
“Chris Gethard is one of my favorite storytellers. He’s amazing! He’s always getting into the most unusual situations.... Even normal situations become amazing when you’re Chris Gethard. Seriously, when Geth is talking, I stop and listen.”
—Rob Riggle, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
“Maybe you shouldn’t tell me things like that.”
—Chris’s mom responding to the distressing news that her son might have herpes
To my mother and my Aunt Re,
who while sitting at my kitchen table and
talking into the night taught me that sad stories
stop being sad if you can make them funny.
Introduction
“Would you like to hear a story I’ve never told anyone?” my mother asked.
We were in the living room of my parents’ home in New Jersey. My mother sat in her familiar spot on the couch. My dad was at the kitchen table.
It was Mother’s Day 2010.
Foolishly, I said “Sure.”
“Great,” she began. “It’s about your birth.”
My father interrupted as he entered from the other room. “And I’ve never heard it?”
“No,” she said. She paused, looked at me, and continued. “I’ve never had the heart to tell anyone this story.”
That’s the moment it first hit me that when your mother asks you if you want to hear a story no one’s ever heard, you should probably always say “No.”
“When you were little and the other kids used to make fun of how big your head was,” she told me, “it always broke my heart.”
This meant her heart was broken nearly every single day. My forehead has always been an obtrusive, disproportioned source of embarrassment to me. My childhood nickname was “Megahead.” (In many ways this was a good thing. While “Megahead” made me angry, I preferred it to being mocked about how my last name phonetically spells out the words “Get Hard.”)
“I knew since day one that was going to be a problem for you,” she continued. “Because when you were being born and you started crowning—you know, emerging? The doctor took a step back and said, ‘My God, his head is as big as a bowling ball.’ ”
I froze.
That’s how my life began, I thought to myself. That’s literally the first thing that ever happened to me. It wouldn’t even be fair to measure my life in units of time yet. I was only three inches old and I was being mocked by the medical care professional whose job it was to bring me into life safely.
My mom had obviously thought I would laugh at this story. When she saw that instead I was reeling from it, she tried to make a joke to recover.
“Well,” she sighed, “you’ll never know how many stitches they gave me.”
Her joke didn’t make me feel any better.
“How many?” I asked. I was approaching full panic.
She got very serious as she realized she was digging herself into a deeper hole.
“No, seriously, you’ll never know,” she said. “They refused to tell me.”
That pushed me over the edge. “Jesus, I’m sorry!” I spat out.
I have to say, apologizing to your mother on Mother’s Day for being born is not one of life’s peaks. That can safely be described as a valley.
Before I could say anything, my father jumped in with his own attempt at a joke meant to save the situation.
“Actually,” he said, “you should be apologizing to me for that.”
That’s how I spent last Mother’s Day.
That story verifies a suspicion I’ve long held—that my life has always been semi-ridiculous. Having lived the kind of life I’ve lived, I wasn’t surprised at all to find out that’s apparently been the case literally from the start. It figures that even my birth would be weird.
On paper, I appear to have it made. Everything about my upbringing seems to subscribe to the good old American dream. Raised in the suburbs, parents still married, good grades—if anyone should have had it easy, boring, and normal, it’s me.
But right from the start I was perceptive enough to recognize that the traditional idea of a “normal life” doesn’t really exist. There are cracks in its armor that anyone can see from a mile away. For example, the seemingly idyllic suburb I was raised in was actually filled with maniacal weirdos. My unfractured family in fact put on stunning displays of rage and lunacy. From a very early age, I’d see and experience things that would make me think This isn’t right and I have a feeling life is in general more messed up than anyone is letting on. This type of thinking bred into me an unfortunate blend of curiosity and defiance.
What I’ve come to realize is that most people, when faced with a situation that seems ludicrous or dangerous, instinctually take action to avoid it. I, on the other hand, have always wanted to charge headlong into outlandish situations at first sight of them. The weirder something is, the more I want to know about it. The less likely it is for a guy like me to be a part of something, the more I want to get involved. My philosophy has always been “Why say no to anything?” The only things you have to abandon in order to live by it are common sense, a command of reason, and social acceptability. Not a bad trade.
In the early part of this book, you’ll see what I mean about the foundation that my early life laid out for me. I’d wager that if you had the same male role models I did, you wouldn’t quite know how life is supposed to work, either. By the time I describe my adventures as a young adult, you’ll have learned how I’d developed a personality that got me into car chases, prison (voluntarily), and many other ill-advised pursuits. Then you’ll see how things only snowballed from there.
Sometimes when I tell people these stories, I get the feeling they think I’m crazy. Over the years, I’ve come
to realize that they’re probably at least a little bit right.
But to me, it always seemed that everything and everyone around me was crazy, and that not embracing or addressing that realization would actually make me the weird one. Pretending everything was okay all the time, when life is so odd and often so harsh, seemed more damaging than not.
As a result, I’ve made a lot of foolish decisions. Many people hear about the stuff I’ve pulled and call me an angry person. The stories you are about to read will definitely reflect that. Others have called me depressed, and I am unable to argue with that diagnosis. Still others have viewed me as standoffish or socially awkward. I’m probably guilty on all counts.
But I don’t think any of those individual labels hit the nail on the head. To me, they’re mere extensions of what I really am and always have been—confused.
Just terribly, terribly confused. About why things work the way they do and why we all pretend that things aren’t weird in one way or another almost all the time.
Unless, of course, it’s just me.
But, listen, I’m working on this impulse of mine to dive into the middle of situations both awkward and strange.
Less than two weeks ago, I took the R train from my neighborhood in Queens into Manhattan. It was early afternoon on a Wednesday. At first, everything about the experience was perfectly average.
As I sat in the largely empty subway car, I had my face buried in my BlackBerry, because lately I’ve been addicted to playing poker on it. This activity helps pass the time, and also helps me maintain the social norm of public transportation in New York City, which is to never make eye contact with anyone, ever.
“EXCUSE ME LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I NEED A MOMENT OF YOUR TIME,” I heard from the other end of the car. This is not an unusual sentence to hear on a New York City subway. But the aggression and volume put into this particular delivery caused me to look up wide-eyed.
At the other end of the car, the homeless guy responsible for the disruption prepared to launch into his spiel. He didn’t look particularly crazy by the standards of New York City homeless people. But he soon proved that looks can be deceiving.
Apparently, I was not the only person to react to him with surprise.
“Oh, this cunt doesn’t have the time for me!” the homeless gentleman continued. “Bitch gonna roll her eyes at me.”
“Cunt” is one of the few words that can slice through the thickest of skin. At the very least, it makes any situation more awkward than it was before. I was born and raised in New Jersey, where profanity is considered a quaint regional dialect. Now I live in New York City, where just days ago I witnessed two women going for the same taxi.
“Fuck you, bitch,” yelled the woman who lost. “Karma will fuck you in the face.”
That didn’t faze me at all. Most things don’t. But for some reason the word “cunt” still does.
The impact of the word was even more pronounced when I saw the woman he had directed it to spring out of her seat and head toward my end of the car. Imagine anyone’s grandma. She was tiny, her white bushy hair slightly unkempt, her too-large purse balanced precariously in the crook of her arm as she fled from the madman who had just screamed “cunt” in her perfect little grandma face.
She hurried past me and sat down in the far corner of the car. The homeless guy continued.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I am here today to ask for donations,” he said, “so I can pursue my dream . . . of being a professional wrestler.”
At that point my internal monologue went into overdrive.
You don’t get to call a woman a cunt, I thought to myself, when you have the same fucking dream I had when I was nine years old.
“I have wrestled in the independent leagues,” he shouted as he headed in my direction, “but I need money to take more classes. Because there are still so many people I want to beat!”
I would sooner give you money if you were up there saying “Please give me money to support my heroin addiction,” I thought. It seems like a more direct route to exactly the same result.
“With your help, I know I can be a world champion!” he bellowed.
Even in the world of professional wrestling, it’s not okay to speak that way to women, I fumed to myself. Even the scummiest wrestler on earth (we can all agree that’s Jake “The Snake” Roberts, right?) would be like “Yo dude, cool out with the cunt shit.”
The man made his way past me. I didn’t say anything. Despite all the indignation screaming to be let out from the depths of my psyche, I just kept playing poker on my smartphone.
I didn’t feel that guilty. Other people actually gave him money.
But the thing is, a few years back I would absolutely have engaged this man in a dialogue. I can say with certainty that I would have confronted him about calling the old woman a cunt, and if that didn’t lead to my being beaten on an underground train, I would then have eagerly asked him where he trained in the art of professional wrestling. And if this was actually something he did, I would have asked him to take me to his school. Because I desperately would have wanted to see a homeless wrestling school.
I know I would have done all of these things, because those are precisely my instincts even today. If there is a school out there where dozens of homeless people are jumping off ropes and landing on each other, it is something I absolutely need to experience firsthand. I can’t tell you how hard it was for me not to confront that man on the train, but also not to ask him for every detail regarding his unlikely or, at best, confusing pursuit of fake fighting.
Instead, I bit my lip and lost a few more hands of mobile-phone poker. It’s taken me thirty years of life, but I’ve finally discovered that normal people don’t embrace craziness; they resist it. I didn’t say a thing to the homeless wrestler. A few minutes later, I got off the train.
That’s improvement, right?
In a sense, the stories you are about to read are about instances in my life when, rather than get off the train, I stayed on well past my stop. It’s not that I’m anything special. I’m just your average geek trying to get by.
The only thing close to a remarkable quality I might claim to possess is that when most people would say no, I too often say yes. (I refer to this as a remarkable quality. Most people just call it stupidity.) It’s an impulse that has certainly made life more interesting for me, but it’s also been very detrimental at times.
Either way you view it, I hope the daring or idiocy described in these pages provides some cathartic relief for those of you who can think back to a situation where you may actually regret not taking a chance on what at the time seemed like a very bad idea. After all, my experiences confirm that, in most cases, people don’t go out on a limb for a reason—straying outside of one’s comfort zone is often dumb and causes trouble. By the end of the majority of these stories you’ll likely feel good about not taking the road less socially advisable. Then again, sticking to the normal road can also be what leads us to the times we’ve all had when we wish we’d spoken up, but didn’t; situations we look back on where we felt pushed around, forgotten, or inconsequential and wish we’d done something about it. So maybe these stories will also inspire you to take a chance in that regard. In any case, I hope that when you read these stories you can find something to relate to, take some kind of comfort in the fact that we’ve all been in strange situations—or, at the very least, realize that you could have made things so much worse.
It would make me feel a lot better if you did.
My Father Is Not the Kindly Mustachioed Man He Seems
I’m obsessed with basketball. I’ll drop anything to watch an NBA game. I’ll watch summer league games. I’ll watch old games on ESPN Classic. I’ll even watch the Wizards play the Timberwolves.
I also love playing basketball, even though I’m not very good at it. Luckily, I’ve joined a team of comedians who are just as enthusiastic and equally bad. We’re called The Del Harris Marathon, and what we lack in skill we make up
for in dirty play and hilarious taunts. We’re not the best, but we’re gritty. We’re part of a league that donates the dues teams pay to charity. My team plays for the March of Dimes, a noble organization if ever there was one.
The kind-hearted nature of this endeavor only makes my behavior during games that much less excusable.
Case in point: the third week of the season we played our rivals, The 4Skins. They’re a bunch of Jewish guys who run set plays and are known for smothering defense. They’re antisocial and cocky. We consider them our archenemies.
When we’re playing The 4Skins, the chatter never stops.
“Nice cut, Ari!”
“Good hands, Harry!”
“He can’t stop you, Goldie!”
One of them even plays in a protective facemask. They’re just the worst. They get my anger up. And that’s a problem.
I’m unable to tell you what it feels like to be “a little” mad. My emotions work as if controlled by a light switch. I’m either fine or I’m out of control. I once spilled a container of thumbtacks and got as angry at myself as I did when I screwed up my relationship with my high school sweetheart. If I’m under the impression that there are Golden Grahams in my cupboard, then realize that there in fact are none, there’s a high probability I’ll be as sad as I was at my grandfather’s funeral.
In other words, my reactions aren’t in proportion to the things I’m reacting to. It’s something I’ve been working on with a very lovely shrink for the past few years.
But against The 4Skins one day, all that hard work went out the window.
Even in a charity basketball league, there are rules and those rules should be enforced. So I’m sorry, but if there is supposed to be a thirty-second shot clock and the ref doesn’t seem to care, I’m going to enlighten him.
I was riding the bench with my friend Gavin, perhaps the nicest person I know.
“This is fucking bullshit,” I seethed to him. “I’ve gotta say something.”
A Bad Idea I'm About to Do Page 1