The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz

by Ron Jeremy

  “So, what are your New Year’s resolutions, Ron?” he asked.

  “Oh, I guess I want to be like you,” I said. “I just want to be a part of family entertainment.”

  It was a funny little skit, and though I had only a few minutes of screen time, I knew it would be worth it. But as we performed several takes for the camera, I began to suspect that something wasn’t right. Crew members were already starting to wrap for the day. I could hear loud crashes behind me as set pieces were dismantled and carted away. The director wasn’t even paying attention to us, noisily conversing with his PAs and gaffers. It wasn’t the hushed atmosphere that one usually finds on a professional shoot. And that’s when I figured it out.

  “There isn’t any film in the camera, is there?” I asked.

  Sam shrieked with laughter. “Of course there is. What are you talking about?”

  I peered at the camera’s blinking red light. It appeared to be rolling, but I couldn’t be sure. I had used the same trick once on John Holmes.

  “You’re a fucking liar,” I accused him. “That camera is empty!”

  Sam dropped to the floor and clutched at his sides. “You are such a paranoid freak.” He laughed. “Do you really think I’d do that to you?”

  We continued with the skit, but I knew in my heart that none of it was being shot on film. And sure enough, when the New Year’s Eve special premiered, our scene was nowhere to be found.

  I was upset, but it didn’t stop me from finding work for Sam. It wasn’t always easy. I got him a speaking part in the film Lords of Magick, but he lost it when he blew off his first meeting with the director.* Fred Asparagus got the part instead. Sometimes, though, it actually worked. I recommended him for a role in Savage Dawn, and he was perfectly cast as a born-again Christian barber who gets his throat slit after singing “Amazing Grace” to a rogue biker (played by Bill Forsythe).

  By the late 1980s, Sam’s comedy career was bigger than ever. United Artists offered him a starring role in a movie called Atuk, about an Eskimo who travels to New York City. Sam promised roles to several of his comedy friends. He was going to try to find me something as well. But just weeks before the shoot was to begin, the project crumbled.

  Sam didn’t care for the Atuk script and decided to rewrite it. I visited him at the Mayflower Hotel in L.A., where he and his writing partner pulled all-nighters to finish a new draft. When he submitted their revisions to United Artists, they balked and told him that they would be using the original script.

  “I told them if they didn’t give me a little more creative control, I’d just walk through it,” he explained to me later. “I’d give a lousy performance on purpose.”

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “They pulled the plug.”*

  I told him that it might be a bad idea to clash with a major Hollywood studio and a man like Michael Ovitz. And sure enough, United Artists filed a lawsuit against Sam, and he and his manager, Elliot Abbot, parted ways. But he didn’t care.

  “I’m not going to give my fans a crappy movie,” he said. “If it means I go back to sleeping on floors, that’s fine. You can just buy me dinners like you used to.”

  Even if I didn’t always agree with his career decisions, I still joined him occasionally during his Leader of the Banned concert tour. I even introduced him to my former porn cohort, Seka. They dated for a while, and when he hosted Saturday Night Live, Sam gave her a nice bit in a skit with Dana Carvey (the Church Lady).** His eventual fallout with Seka was particularly brutal. (Supposedly, it had to do with Billy Idol.) Sam told me that during their breakup, he said to her, “If I ever want to see your face again, I’ll rent a tape.”

  On April 10, 1992, I was at the Comedy Store hanging out with Jim Carrey and some of the other comics when we heard the horrifying news of Sam’s death. Earlier that day, Sam had been on his way to a stand-up gig in Laughlin when he was hit by a drunk driver in the Nevada desert. Sam had often predicted that he would die young. He told me that he just wanted to see the new millennium, and make it past January 1, 2000. I had always suspected that if Sam did meet with an early demise, it would involve a car crash.*

  How did I know? Because I was involved in one of those crashes.**

  Six years or so before the accident that would take his life, I was driving with Sam through New Jersey, on our way to Manhattan. Sam was planning to perform at Catch a Rising Star with Robin Williams. It was a rainy night, and Sam was driving erratically and far too fast for my comfort, but it was nothing I hadn’t experienced before.

  We were talking about religion and death, with Sam arguing the pro-God agenda. He had been a Pentecostal evangelist long before getting into comedy, and he still held firmly to his beliefs.

  “I think I believe in Him,” I said. “I think I speak to Him. I just wish I had more proof.”

  “What does proof have to do with anything?” he said. “It’s not about needing proof, it’s about having a gut feeling that the universe isn’t random, that there’s some spiritual architect responsible for it.”

  The rain was starting to come down in sheets, but Sam refused to slow down. He continued speaking to me, but I was too terrified to talk back. The road was just a blur, and I was convinced that he would lose control of the car before long.

  And sure enough, as Sam tried to negotiate a corner, he skidded off the highway and down into an embankment. We flipped over and came crashing into a tree, shattering the windows and demolishing the car. We sat there for a moment, upside down, too dazed to do anything else, and I wondered if we might be dead.

  “Are you okay?” Sam finally asked me.

  “I think so,” I said. “How about you?”

  We crawled out of the windows and staggered to our feet. Sam laughed as I gathered the pages of my phone book off the car’s ceiling. We picked glass out of our clothes and hair, and checked our bodies for broken bones or blood, but there was nothing. The car was totaled, but somehow we had survived without so much as a scratch.

  We walked toward the highway in the rain, neither of us saying a word. If I was thinking clearly, I might have yelled at Sam, chastising him for nearly killing us. It was a miracle that we both weren’t mangled corpses. But I didn’t have the energy to get into a screaming fit. I was just thankful to be alive and walking upright.

  “So Ronnie,” he said, “do you believe in God now?”

  His face was drenched with rainwater, and he was laughing like some mad prophet who had just shared a life lesson.

  “You really go out of your way to prove a point,” I said.*

  A few days later, upon hearing this story, Bill (Sam’s brother) and Carl LaBove sat me down, looked me in the eye and said, “It wasn’t Sam proving the point.”

  Comedians always seem to use me as a punch line for some of their jokes. Eddie Murphy did a great routine about me on HBO, as I mentioned earlier, which came very close to being included in his 1987 concert movie Raw. “It’s okay if Ron Jeremy sucks his own dick,” Eddie observed. “As long as he doesn’t cum in his own face or fuck himself in the ass with his own dick. ’Cause that would definitely be gay.”

  Sarah Silverman had a hilarious bit that she’s used in her stand-up and on talk shows like Late Night with Conan O’Brien and It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. She noticed that whenever she saw me masturbating in a porno, I would always be lifting a pinky in the air. “I realized why that is,” she said. “It’s because he’s a classy guy.”

  Dave Chappelle brought me on his Comedy Central show to do a skit about the Internet. He’s having a fantasy where he imagines that the Web is an actual place, a physical location that anybody can visit. He’s walking through cyberspace, and he bumps into me.

  “Are you sure you don’t wanna see me have sex?” I ask him. “I do a great doggy-style.”

  “Yeah, I know, Ron,” he says. “I got my stroke from you. Thank you, Obi-Wan!”

  Drew Carey once referenced me in a routine about Brad Pitt. He’d heard rumors
that Pitt has a large penis, which struck him as very unfair. God, he said, shouldn’t just pass out the large cocks to anybody. “If you’re attractive, you shouldn’t have a big penis, too,” he reasoned. “It should be one or the other. Look at Ron Jeremy. Now that’s fair.”

  Yeah, it was kinda mean, but I don’t mind being insulted as long as it’s funny. And insulting or not, it brings a performer like me closer into the world of pop-culture status.

  I’d run into Pauly Shore occasionally at the Comedy Store (his mother, Mitzi Shore, was the owner), and sometimes I would introduce him to porn starlets. If we both had free time, we’d take them back to his place, where we might get lucky (or not). He called it “pizza delivery.” When Pauly would hear that I might be stopping by the club, he’d say, “Ron’s bringing pizza!”*

  Some comics, like Jim Norton, were bold enough to join me for sexual escapades and then tell the world about it. Jim was at a hotel in Vegas for a stand-up performance, and, after his set, he walked into a room and stumbled upon me having sex with one of the girls. He watched me fuck her for a while, and the girl and I eventually coaxed him into joining us for a threeway.*

  He bragged about it later on Colin Quinn’s Tough Crowd. “I was cock-struck,” he told Colin. “Ron says to me, ‘I think she needs something in her mouth.’ And I’m like, ‘I have to do this.’ It’s almost like the Pope saying, ‘Look, I’m doing Mass, could you help?’”

  While we were doing it, I tried to mess around with Jim and make him laugh. He was getting a blow job while I fucked her from behind, and I could tell that it wasn’t entirely comfortable for him. He wasn’t accustomed to having sex while another guy was in the room, much less a guy who was joining in. So every once in a while, I would give the girl an extra deep stroke, really pounding my cock into her, causing her entire body to lurch forward. The propulsion was enough to make her deep-throat him.

  After we finished, Jim took me aside and said, “That was so weird. I never thought that another man could have so much control over my sex life.”

  I also became friends with a brilliant comic named Rodney Dangerfield. Rodney reminded me of the best comedians from the Catskills, delivering one-liners that were so corny and goofy you just had to laugh. Whenever he walked onstage, you knew that you were in the presence of a true master.

  Though I met Rodney several times during the 1980s, we were little more than passing acquaintances. But then he asked me to make a guest appearance in his 1989 HBO special, Opening Night at Rodney’s Place. I was featured in the show’s opening skit, where Rodney auditions for a role in a porno movie. The director is less than impressed by Rodney’s physical endowment, and I’m called into the room to show him what a “real” porn star should have in his pants. Rodney takes one look at my penis and says, “All men are created equal? What bullshit!”

  During a visit to Las Vegas, I took him to the Adult Awards, which he enjoyed; but the after parties were not nearly as exciting as he’d hoped. I still remember walking into an Adult Video News (AVN) after party with Rodney. There were at least a hundred guys in the place and not a single female porn star in sight. He took one look at the crowd, turned to me, and said, “Hey, I love your party, Ron. There are ten guys for every guy.”

  He also asked to sit in on some of my porn sets. Now hold on, I know what you’re thinking. He wasn’t there to gawk at all the naked women and watch strangers having sex. He was doing research for a new comedy script he was writing, loosely based on the adult film industry. It was a soft-core movie, but there were a few explicit scenes that required actresses who weren’t averse to nudity. He never actually made the film, but he was serious enough about it to meet with Jim South at World Modeling, the top porn agency in L.A. They arranged for a casting call, and Jim asked me just how much skin Rodney was expecting to see.

  We decided to pull a practical joke on him. When he walked into the office, there was a roomful of naked girls waiting to meet him. Rodney loved that. He had a great sense of humor.

  Rodney was not what you’d call a bashful man. He loved naked women, and he had an affinity for loose-fitting outfits that left very little to the imagination.

  During one summer, I visited Rodney in Las Vegas to catch his act at the MGM Grand. I brought along Mark Carriere, president of Leisure Time Entertainment, who was a big fan of Rodney’s and wanted to meet him. So I took Mark and his girlfriend to Rodney’s hotel room to say hello. Rodney greeted us at the door wearing nothing but a bathrobe. Normally, this wouldn’t have been cause for alarm, but the bathrobe was tied loosely around his waist. You could barely notice, but his balls were hanging out.

  Rodney posed for photographs with Mark and his girlfriend, and I feel a little guilty about admitting this, but I lowered the camera on purpose to get Rodney’s balls into the frame. If he saw me doing it, he either didn’t know what was happening or didn’t care. Two weeks later, I went to Mark’s house in Brentwood to show him the Vegas photos. And sure enough, in one photo, we had a clear shot of Rodney’s balls.

  “Those can’t be his balls,” Mark insisted. He took a magnifying glass to the photos and examined them more closely. But there was no denying it. Those hairy satchels barely drooping from Rodney’s robe were exactly what they appeared to be.

  “Jesus Christ,” Mark muttered. “I thought we were exhibitionists.”

  Rodney was a good guy, right until the end. He used me in two of his movies, Meet Wally Sparks and Back by Midnight, and always treated me like a professional and not just a porn star oddity. In his autobiography, he said very kind things about me, complimenting my sense of humor (as well as a few other things).

  At Dangerfield’s funeral, I ran into Jim Carrey. I hadn’t seen him since he became superfamous, and the first thing he said was, “Hey, Ron, John Wayne wouldn’t say much of anything!”

  After Johnny Carson’s funeral at Dan Tana’s, I ran into Jerry Seinfeld. He still remembered me from my years on the open-mike circuit in New York. In fact, he made a mention of my old “My Moon Over the Keys” routine, playing the piano with my ass cheeks.

  I couldn’t believe he remembered that.*

  There are some critics who might question the logic of combining comedy and pornography. Is that really what porn consumers are looking for, anyway? Is it possible to laugh and jerk off at the same time? And even if it is, would you even want to?

  I may not be the best person to answer these questions. I haven’t watched a porno that I’m not in since I was a teenager, and even then I wasn’t jerking off to them. So I don’t know if there’s anything appealing about comedic porn. But I do know this: I’ve made over seventeen hundred adult films, and the majority of them were comedies. So somebody is buying these things and, one can only assume, watching them.

  So I guess that makes me something of an expert in the field of porn comedy. And because I’m such a generous guy, I’m going to share some of my secrets with you. So find a seat, put on your mortarboard, and get ready for an educational segment that I like to call…I’m a fatty funny fucker, and what’s your name?

  Lesson #1:

  THE ONE-LINER

  This is probably the most important element of any successful porn comedy. Let’s face it, most porn is not, by definition, very funny. Porn is about the sex, not the punch lines, so directors are more interested in shooting scenes that are more inherently sexy than hilarious.

  But just because you may not find yourself in a scenario rife with comedic possibilities doesn’t mean that you can’t show off your wit. You just need to know where to find your moment to shine. It could be where you least expect it, like in the middle of an otherwise scorching oral sex scene, or while probing the anal cavity of your female costar. These are prime opportunities to lighten the mood with a well-placed one-liner.

  Remember, you’re not trying to distract from the action. You’re just throwing out a small comedy nugget to keep the audience on its toes. For instance, say you’re giving a girl head. Take a moment to
gaze into your partner’s cooter and say something goofy and off-the-cuff, like, “Honey, I’m not saying you have a big vagina, but there’s a small man up in there, waving a lantern and saying, ‘Go back, go back! It’s not safe!’” It may not be funny, but it’ll catch your audience by surprise. And surprise, as any comedian will tell you, is the root of all comedy.

  Don’t be afraid to bring a little satire to your routine. Some of my best one-liners can be found in Hal Freeman’s still classic Caught from Behind series. I played Dr. Proctor, who ran the appropriately named Sphincter Clinic. In Caught from Behind 4, I was using a telescope to look at the stars just as Keli Richards stepped in front of it. With a clear view of her ass, I said, “You know, on a clear night, I can see Uranus.”

  Like any health-conscious proctologist, Dr. Proctor would wear a rubber glove during his examinations. But while diddling a girl, the gloves would often switch hands without warning, just to see if the audience is paying attention.

  In some films, I even wore jewelry over the gloves, like a watch or bracelet. I’d be fingering a girl and suddenly the watch would disappear. I’d just look at the camera and go, “Oh shit. That was a Rolex.” Or while eating out a girl, I might place a map of the Grand Canyon next to her, pausing every so often to check it for directions. It’s what we in the comedy trade call a “sight gag.” It doesn’t need to be explained. You either notice it or you don’t.*

  Another excellent opportunity for one-liners is during your pop shot. You could waste your orgasm with a lot of grimacing and shuddering, but any run-of-the-mill porn stud worth his salt could do that. Instead, delight the viewer with an improvised quip. In Carnal Possessions, a 1988 Beetlejuice parody, I delivered my funniest pop shot, announcing, “My little semen are about to proudly burst forth, proclaiming, ‘I am, I exist, I am here, I matter! I read Descartes!’” Lessons in existentialism or French philosophy might not be what your typical porn enthusiast wants to hear while watching a guy ejaculate, but it’s nothing if not unexpected. The element of surprise is one of the most effective tools of the would-be porn comedian. My favorite line, however, is “While diamonds are a girl’s best friend, here comes a pearl necklace you’re never going to forget. UGGH!”