I realized that I bombed at clubs because I disrupted the standard listening rhythm of setup/punchline, setup/punchline, and the crowd just couldn’t or wouldn’t switch gears. What was great about Un-Cab and Hot Cup O’ Talk was the audience walked in with the understanding that they didn’t know what to expect. They might get seven minutes that slay, then eight minutes that ramble. At the clubs, there’s a feeling of “We’ve paid this much, we’re forced to buy two drinks, they’re crappy drinks, the comedians don’t know each other, it’s not a community, and you’d better fucking deliver those laughs per minute.” I remember once I was talking to a comic I met at an open mike night—okay, okay, I banged him, too—and he told me, “I have to get a laugh every twenty seconds, and when I’m doing my act, I count the seconds in my head.” He said when he got to twenty, if he hadn’t gotten a laugh, he knew by twenty-one or twenty-two he had to start a whole new topic.
Holy fuck, who has the time or concentration for that bullshit? I could never count while I was telling a story. That doesn’t mean I didn’t sweat if I wasn’t getting a laugh. But to be so precise seemed robotic. I mean, I know there are technically proficient comedians who are great. But we were the anti-technicians. Janeane’s big line to me was, “Kathleen, you can’t possibly care what the audience thinks.” It’s so liberating to think that. It doesn’t mean you don’t want the audience to laugh. It means you’re driven by what you think is funny.
Besides, when you see a regular stand-up, they probably aren’t as revealing as we were being. I was going up onstage and innocently talking about how I’d taken seven laxatives because I felt bloated and thought it’d be great to just go to the bathroom for an entire day. Or my fear of camping: I’m convinced bugs will crawl up my vagina and lay eggs. Isn’t everyone? We all had audition horror stories, although mine were mostly about auditioning and not getting jobs.
The reason my stories about auditioning were, if I might say, hilarious, is because I suck at auditioning. And I don’t mean I blow the casting director. I wish it were that easy. I mean I am a terrible auditioner. What I’m good at is the kibitzing, so when I go into an audition, I’m so concerned with making the room laugh—which I invariably do—that I forget the pesky details, like preparing for the role, or memorizing the lines. Every so often, I would even have an audition for a real live movie that would come out. Once, years later, I auditioned for a big-budget movie called The Whole Nine Yards, starring Matthew Perry and Bruce Willis. I guess I should have prepared for my audition like a normal actress, but all I could think was, What if Bruce Willis is in the room and makes one of his dumb jokes that leading men always make when they think they’re funny? What will I do? Will I have to pretend to laugh? Yes, Kathy. Was I serious about my craft? No. But, get this! Guess who was sitting next to me on the folding chair at that audition? Soon-to-be Oscar nominee Laura Linney! I was so excited to talk to her that I just folded my script and put it in my purse. I tried to act very casual, not starstruck in any way, as if I auditioned for several major feature films a week. But really I just wanted to tell my mom and dad that I met her. She was so nice, too, I couldn’t get over it. And the best part is … right before it was my turn to audition, she said, “I just have to tell you, I think you are so funny.” The rest was a blur. I think some really fat, unattractive girl named Amanda Peet got the role. I don’t think she ever worked after that. It’s really kind of sad when you think about it. Have I mentioned that I totally know Laura Linney?
Anyway, audition stories were a big part of those stand-up nights. As for the others, if Janeane had had a tough day on the set of Reality Bites with Winona Ryder and Ben Stiller, it would come out onstage that night. Then you had Andy Dick talking about bingeing on drugs, or getting into a fistfight with Wesley Snipes because he used the “n” word, Wesley overheard it, and punched Andy in the face outside the bathroom of a nightclub. How does “I got a fake fucking ticket on the way over here” top that shit?
Hot Cup O’ Talk and the Un-Cab started to attract people who were into doing things differently. Word got out that there was a place to go in LA if you were a comic but you didn’t tell standard jokes, or kept bombing at the Improv. In fact, it was kind of a migration. Comedians were arriving from clubs and improv theaters around the country to be in on the ground floor of this alternative comedy scene. Janeane was starting to hit big because of The Ben Stiller Show and Reality Bites, so everybody came to see her, which was great and made Hot Cup O’ Talk an instant hit. But she also brought into the fold a lot of people who weren’t really comedians—Chicago Second City guys like Bob Odenkirk and Andy Dick. David Cross was from an improv group in Boston, Tom Kenny—now the voice of SpongeBob—came down from the San Francisco club scene. They loved the free-form nature of what we were doing. It’s not like I auditioned comics for Hot Cup O’ Talk. The pool of alternative comics was small enough that pretty much the same folks who did Un-Cabaret and any other alternative venues at that time—the Borders bookstore on La Cienega, a coffeehouse in Santa Monica, etc.—would rotate in and out of Hot Cup. And what I kept hearing over and over from people who came to see the show was, “Ugh, I normally hate going to see stand-up comedy, but this doesn’t feel like stand-up. It feels like somebody just talking to me, like I was with friends and they were making me laugh.”
Two not-at-all-bitter female comics.
Was it a coincidence that I gravitated toward the girl comics more than the boys? Or was it deliberate? A little bit of both. The girls were ten times more supportive—of me and each other—than the boys, for whatever reason. Obviously I could relate to the girls more, and one of the topics that came up—and still does to this day—is the raging, out-of-control, 1950s-style, backward, Mad-Men-like-you-can’t-believe-it level of sexism in stand-up comedy. It always pisses me off when I’m calling in to some Morning Zoo radio show to promote God-only-knows what—probably this book, so get ready, I’m comin’—when the DJ actually tries to convince me that there are as many female comics as male ones. Cue hypermasculine Morning Zoo Hacky McGee voice: “So Kath, I don’t know what you chicks are always complaining about.” To which I respond: “Really? Why don’t you call your local comedy club and ask for the Saturday night lineup? I guarantee you the male to female ratio is going to be about nine to one. You dick-wad.”
It was organic, then, that I developed a camaraderie with my posse of female comics. We hung out together so much that we ended up on the same fucking menstrual cycle. I was starting to feel like part of a group, and even though some of them were my contemporaries, I was personally very starstruck by their talent.
Janeane and I spent many, many hours together talking and eating, and eating and talking, at a dining establishment called The Soup Plantation. (It’s a plantation with soup.) The talk was gossip and boys and the history of comedy and who we liked and didn’t like. Laura Kightlinger was this tall, beautiful model-looking girl who was really too hot to be a stand-up comedian. She rescued me after one of my worst breakups ever by forcing me to go to a screening of Waiting to Exhale. It was all I could do not to start a small car fire somewhere in Manhattan that night, à la Ms. Angela Bassett. Were I to then be asked by the hot, white fireman, “Did you know you’re only supposed to set trash on fire, ma’am?” I would respond, “It is trasssshhhhhh.” That movie did make me feel better. Margaret Cho, not one to be afraid of a torn pair of neon pink tights, saw me do stand-up the third time I ever tried it. She was instantly sweet, and took me under her wing. She gave me great advice that mirrored what Janeane, Laura, and Judy said: Don’t change what you’re doing. Just get better at it. It wasn’t till later that I found out this sweet, semi-shy and, believe it or not, when offstage quite soft-spoken woman had a day job where she worked at a sex toy shop, so she could reference this unique employment in her act, and not have to make anything up.
Also, these comedians all kept me on my toes. When comedians socialize, chances are we’re not just talking to each other. We’re talkin
g, listening, and let’s face it, always trying out new material. This is when my friends started interrupting a conversation with me if they laughed, and saying, “Are you just trying out your act now?” I’ll be honest. Yes, I am.
We all hung out together almost every night, mostly at a house in Laurel Canyon shared by a talent manager named Dave Rath and a couple of comedians. It was the party house. Jay Mohr lived next door, and he was doing so well with movie parts and being a cast member on Saturday Night Live that we pretty much considered him a celebrity. I met Ben Stiller there. He was already well known because of his MTV show and Emmy-winning Fox sketch series The Ben Stiller Show that featured Janeane, Andy Dick, and Bob Odenkirk. Hanging out at that house was also how I met people like Judd Apatow (writer/director of The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up), Dave Attell (host of Comedy Central’s Insomniac), Patton Oswalt (The King of Queens and the lead voice in Ratatouille), Mary Lynn Rajskub (24) and future late-night host Conan O’Brien. Seemingly every writer on network or cable television was there as well. This was also when Janeane introduced me to Sarah Silverman, whom I’ve known since the day she moved to LA. Sarah was—hell, is—gorgeous in her cut-off shorts and tank top, and she knew all the boy comics. I was so envious of that because I could never really get in with them. Janeane had the cool factor with the guys. Sarah was the one they all wanted to marry. And I was the pesky flea.
Then again, I was the one going up and talking about these guys in my act, commenting on them maybe a little too much. When you hang out with Andy Dick six nights a week, eventually one of those nights your set is going to be about the time you were making out with some guy in the bathroom and Andy bursts in and yells, “I want to fuck your boyfriend!”
Yeah, that’s right, I school-of-rocked Jack Black’s world.
Another example of getting flack from the boys is what happened when Jack Black dumped me. That’s right. I fucked Jack Black. Okay, we went out only two or three times, but that’s a relationship in my book. And by the way, this is my book.
I met Jack through this same crowd, too. Of course, I thought he was a weirdo, and was therefore instantly attracted to him. When we started dating, I took him home to meet the parents, and Mom said to me later, “OH! he’s got those SERIAL KILLER eyes! I don’t trust him. Did you see him in that Bob Roberts movie? He looked like a SERIAL KILLER!”
First Rod Serling, now this. “Well, yeah, Jack plays a stalker in it, Mom,” I said.
She replied, “He plays that part so good, I think he’s like that!”
Well, Jack and I pretty much were complete opposites. I was always kind of a neatnik, a stickler for rules, and Jack would smoke pot and play video games all day. But don’t get me wrong, Jack is actually very hardworking, and knows his shit. He’s very sweet and fun, and very driven. He only kind of acts like a rocker pothead dude. Compared to him, I was stuffy. I had a car that ran. He didn’t. I had a clean apartment, and he lived in this filthy place, littered with video games and bongs. When Judy met him, she said to me, “Kitten, I can’t believe you’re dating Pig Pen from Peanuts. Every time he walks I see a cloud of dirt above his head.”
One time, I spent the night at Jack’s place. I got up the next morning to take a shower so I could leave. He stayed in bed. When I stepped out of the shower onto the towel on the floor, I couldn’t find anything to dry myself with. “Jack, where are the towels?” I yelled out, dripping.
He said, “Um, I just have one that I use for a bathmat and a towel.”
“What?” I said. “That thing on the floor? I’m supposed to pick it up and dry my body with it?”
“What’s the problem?”
Oh, Pig Pen.
Even though the general population didn’t know who Jack Black was at the time—this was when he and Kyle Gass’s folk/metal parody act Tenacious D was just starting out, when Bob Roberts was his biggest role—he did get mad at me because I talked about him onstage. When our brief fling ended, I got up at Un-Cabaret and did a bit about how Jack dumped me for Andy Dick, because they had started hanging out and became their own mutual admiration society about each other’s comedy. Well, even though there probably wasn’t a single guy I knew who I hadn’t gone up onstage and talked about, Jack and Andy were staring daggers at me after that set. I remember thinking, I don’t care. You broke up with me, Jack. And Andy, you’re probably high.
They got over it very quickly, and that was about the biggest dustup I ever had in those days pertaining to anything I said onstage. That’s because the crowds were small, the same two hundred people usually who were fans of the scene, and this was in the pre-blogging days, when what you said in your act didn’t necessarily go anywhere, and someone like me could really get away with murder. What I said just died on the vine. I could go up and talk about what Winona Ryder ate when Janeane took me to her house to watch John Cassavetes movies—she was really more of a food picker, I never saw her have a whole meal, that’s how she stays waif-y—and you certainly weren’t going to read about it the next day on Perezhilton. But Jack and Andy’s mini-snit probably foreshadowed how this kind of material might upset a famous person not accustomed to having their bullshit exposed. Not that I’m complaining here, but there’s something about the safety of a theater. See me live these days, and you will get a much more eyebrow-raising act than anything you’d hear me say on a talk show or The D-List. In other words, if your name is Clay Aiken, you probably don’t want to come to one of my stand-up shows. It may not go your way.
Nowadays when I see Jack, it’s on the red carpet, and it’s like high school all over again: as in he won’t say hi to me. Maybe not out of any choice on his part. I don’t think he’s trying to be rude. I get it; the guy’s a little busy these days. Huge movie star, wife and kids, the whole thing. Let’s face it, he’s an A-lister. I remember being at the Grammys and looking at him up on the podium as he presented an award and thinking, That’s so great. He’s a giant movie star now. It’s the transient nature of show business friendships and relationships. It’s a bittersweet thing.
There was a period when we all saw each other all the time. None of us had money to travel, but we could all hang out at someone’s house. Inevitably, though, I started to lose friends to fame. I learned a lot about what happens when someone goes from not being famous to being famous very quickly. Janeane got so hot, she wasn’t just well known: Girls wanted to be her and duplicate that Doc Martens-and-black-tights look of hers. I remember visiting Garofalo at one of the Chateau Marmont bungalows, and there were flowers everywhere from studio and network people. I was so happy for her, but also a little jealous. I wasn’t getting flowers, not even from donut fryers. I mean donut chefs.
I went from seeing Molly Shannon all the time at Dave Rath’s house, doing shows with her, to not seeing her for years after she got Saturday Night Live. I ran into Molly after her first year on the show. I was so happy to hear that she was having a great time. I distinctly remember her saying, “A year ago I was a hostess at Hugo’s restaurant. I can’t believe I get to do this now!”
That drift occurred with Cho, too. She had been doing Un-Cabaret and Hot Cup O’ Talk constantly, and then all of the sudden she got her own ABC show, All American Girl, and none of us saw her anymore. I remember one of our mutual girlfriends saying, “Well, she’s caught up in the machine now.”
“What machine?” I said.
“You’re on a television show,” she said, “so you’ve got to lose the weight, get a trainer, take fen-phen, and you can’t stay up till four in the morning because you’ve got to be at work at eight a.m. the next day.”
It happened to Lisa Kudrow, as well. We were never best friends, but we spent a lot of time together because of the Groundlings and often auditioned for the same parts in sitcoms. My favorite story about Lisa is that when I was hanging with her, she had long black hair and real boobs. She got a few guest spot gigs, like on Cheers, but she felt like she wasn’t getting any traction. So one day she said, “I’m gonn
a dye my hair blond, I’m gonna get a nose job, and I’m gonna get fake boobs.” (I remember after she got the boob job, she was playfully knocking on them one day, and this girl walked by and said, “You might as well enjoy ’em, you bought ’em.”)
Well, it helped change her career overnight. She got Mad About You right after that, and then Friends. Then her career just took off into the sky. I remember in the week or so after Friends premiered, we ran into each other at a mall. At Cinnabon, to be exact, a place Lisa referred to as “life-changing.” During our chat she said to me, “You know, I think this show is gonna actually end up being pretty good.” Well, if it had been a month later—after Friends hit the stratosphere—I doubt she’d have been able to be at that mall without a bodyguard. I remember thinking, I’m not going to see Lisa for five years now.
But then I started to get my own foothold in TV shows, from an HBO special to a few choice guest spots in well-known sitcoms, and I was finally on my way. I was only a few years away from becoming an overnight success.
George Clooney clearly has his hand on my ass, and Quentin Tarantino told him to put it there.
So my luck with television shows started to improve after I became a stand-up, and it was about time. Obviously, my dazzling network debut four years earlier—on an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air during its first season—hadn’t turned into the avalanche of offers I thought it would.
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