The primary way the audience can do this is by purchasing OBM-branded merchandise at the Orange Baby Man®’s Bassinet & Blanket Shoppe in the lobby of the theater. According to our best projections, merchandise plus intermission alcohol sales will comprise 50% to 70% of the average franchise’s net profit, so you are advised to direct the audience toward the bar and merch kiosk early and often.
The Mallet
The only prop that remains with Orange Baby Man® throughout the entire show, and is used in more than one (but not necessarily all) of the sketches, is his oversized mallet. The mallet can be used as many things—cane or crutch, air guitar or assault rifle—but in the logic of the mythology of OBM’s world, we understand that the mallet is the one toy from his oversized crib Orange Baby Man® took with him on his journey toward the Radical Yes. For OBM the mallet is his best friend, security blanket, and conscience all wrapped into one—indeed, sometimes he interacts with it as one normally would with another person.
But, of course, the mallet’s most important purpose is to smash fruit and water balloons at critical junctures of the show. Ticket holders in the first five rows of any OBM theater are in the Splash Zone™ and have paid a 150%-above-average ticket price to be splattered with something.
And satisfying our audience isn’t just our duty—it’s our pleasure!
(IMPORTANT NOTE: AT NO POINT ARE ANY OBM EMPLOYEES OR SUBCONTRACTORS ALLOWED TO REFER TO THE OBM MALLET AS A “SLEDGEHAMMER.” DUE TO THE SETTLEMENT OF RECENT LITIGATION, ANY ACCIDENTAL OR INTENTIONAL REFERENCE TO THE OBM MALLET AS A SLEDGEHAMMER WILL RESULT IN THE OFFENDER’S IMMEDIATE TERMINATION.)
The Diaper
It is highly recommended that regional and local OBMs not attempt to carry objects such as wallet, keys, cell phone, inhaler, pocketknife, or small props inside their diapers while performing, as the risk of injury is prohibitively high.
The Bib
The bib is an essential visual element of Orange Baby Man®’s unique trademark as registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office and for that reason must never be removed and must remain at least partially visible during all OBM performances.
Orange Baby Women
Due to the embrace of OBM by people of all genders, we have understandably had many requests for female performers to take over the role of Orange Baby Man®. Unfortunately, the minimalist nature of the costume (diaper + bib) precludes its deployment by members of that biological sex so as to comply with local decency and obscenity laws.
A packet on how to evade equal opportunity hiring laws in your locality is available from the home office on request.
—Orange Baby Man Theatre Regional Franchise Manager’s Handbook (excerpt)
I
After carefully unpacking his carry-on and hanging his shirts, William Griffith reached into a side pocket and removed a small rectangular cloth cooler containing smoke-aged gouda, red wine salami, and octagonal rosemary-infused crackers in a Ziploc baggie semi-refrigerated by a cold pack. He hadn’t eaten anything since the Delta Club in the Miami airport and he was absolutely famished.
Heading downstairs to find a knife to slice his cheese and sausage, he tried the first door he came to and found himself in the floor-to-ceiling library. William glanced at the titles on the spines and read words like BOOK, TOME, and VOLUME. When he tipped the books toward him, he found nothing but Styrofoam blocks inside the covers.
He tried a door and nearly bumped his nose stepping through it, meeting a brick wall with a cartoonlike black outline of a running figure cut out of it.
Hilarious, he thought.
He remembered Meredith Ladipo’s incredibly anal printout (a lovely young woman after his own heart) and fished it out of his blazer pocket. He found the other set of real doors in the room and stepped into what was marked on the map as a lounge.
It was a large room with low divans and a wave-curved wet bar decorated in velour candy-stripe wallpaper and clown paintings. There were hobo clowns, sombrero-wearing clowns, clowns in chef hats, cello-playing clowns, lady clowns, clowns in bathtubs, clowns in glasses, clowns with balloons, clowns in balloons of the hot air variety. One portrait showed the artist, comedian Red Skelton, sitting in front of a mirror, Norman Rockwell–style, carefully painting on the canvas his own mundane reflection as that of a scarf-wearing clown.
Skelton had been a huge radio and vaudeville comic who hosted a variety show bearing his name that ran on CBS throughout the 1950s and ’60s. When he went off the air, he retired his act to concentrate on painting, mostly clowns, presumably inspired by his most famous character, Freddie the Freeloader, a tramp with a five o’clock greasepaint shadow. Griffith could sort of appreciate the pieces, intellectually, as outsider art, even if the imagery made his eyes bleed. He didn’t doubt the paintings were worth more than a million dollars and that Walker must own the biggest collection of Skeltons in the world. Maybe it wasn’t something to boast about, but he couldn’t completely dismiss the accomplishment just the same.
Following the map, he at last discovered the kitchen, well-appointed with a refrigerator the size of a small room and a marble countertop brimming with smaller appliances like mixers and such. He located a wood knife block beside a pasta press, but it was empty. So was the chrome dishwasher.
He pulled open every drawer and found nothing with which he could cut red-wine salami or smoke-aged gouda, only aluminum sporks.
Every single blade had been removed from the kitchen.
William sighed loudly:
“Do they expect us to starve?”
II
“There’s no Wi-Fi,” William said to Meredith when she walked into the writers’ room. He was the first one there, seated at the conference table.
“What?” she said, distracted. The room was basically a solarium, with floor-to-ceiling windows commanding wide views of the robin’s-egg blue Caribbean. The French doors at the far end of the table listed open against the sea wind, which had blown seven or eight stray palm fronds and brown balls of dead Spanish moss into the far corners of the room. The breeze had scattered pens and yellow legal pads across the long table.
“There’s no Wi-Fi. Or, at the very least, the password you gave us isn’t working. There are no knives in this entire house, either, though I have to presume that fact is unrelated.”
“Chizzum,” Meredith said under her breath. “Was this room in this gammy state when you came in here?”
William looked around a bit. “Yes, but then I assumed we were supposed to be”—he made finger quotes—“roughing it.”
“No, we are most certainly not supposed to be roughing it,” Meredith said as she used her feet to push as much of the detritus as possible onto the balcony beyond the French doors. “Dustin despises roughing it, and Dave knows it. How could he let this place go so utterly butters?”
“And who is this Dave?”
“The caretaker of the estate. He’s the only person who lives here year-round.”
“And would he know the Wi-Fi password?”
“The what?”
“Wi-Fi doesn’t work,” Ruby said as she walked into the room. Meredith finished getting most of the debris off the floor and closed the French doors.
“Use the password I gave you,” she said.
“I stand corrected,” Ruby said, taking a seat and putting up her feet on the long table. “The Wi-Fi seems to be working fine; it’s your password that doesn’t work.”
“No, this is the one,” Meredith said, and from memory she scrawled fifteen characters’ worth of nonsense onto the nearest legal pad.
“That the Wi-Fi password?” Zoe snatched the pad from Meredith as she walked into the room and sat down, pulling out an Android phone bigger than her head.
“It does not work,” William said, slowly and distinctly.
“You’re sure?” Meredith said. “I mean, you tried it more than once?”
“I—”
Ollie walked into the room with a bright-orange binder in the
crook of his arm and pulled her aside. “Miss…”
“Ladipo. But you can call me—”
“I was wondering if you could help me out with something?”
“Of course, Mr. Rees, how can I be of assistance?”
“I was wondering if you could get me access to the Wi-Fi network. I need to check my emails as I had a number of in-process business dealings involving the world-famous Sandals resort company right before I left the U.S. that I need to check the status of—”
“Of course, Mr. Rees. If you would please just use the password I gave you.”
“You gave us a password?”
“Damn password doesn’t work!” Zoe cried, throwing up her hands.
“I know, I tried that shit like seven times already,” Dante said as he entered the room and dropped into a chair.
“Tried what?” Janet asked as she followed him in.
“Wi-Fi password,” Ruby said. “We’re living like animals here.”
Meredith emitted a despairing little sigh. “The password really doesn’t work? Maybe Dave changed it…though I don’t know he would have access.”
“Dave Letterman?” Ollie cried out, rapidly clapping his hands. “He’s going to be here?”
“No, different Dave.”
“He is the caretaker,” William said.
“Yes,” Meredith said.
“Well, where is he?” Janet said.
“I’m not sure,” Meredith said. “I can’t find him anywhere.”
“Dusty! What up, my brother! How’s it hang—” TJ walked into the room with his arms spread wide.
But looking around and not seeing his friend anywhere, he turned to walk back out. “Screw this, I thought I was late. I’m always the last one to the writers’ meeting.”
“No, no, no, please, Mr. Martinez, we really should get started.” Meredith Ladipo managed to steer a grumbling TJ around the table and toward a chair. Instinctively he took the one at the head of the table on the far end, beneath a large wall-mounted plasma screen.
“Sorry I’m late, everybody,” Steve said when he walked into the room and took the last seat on the other end, beneath a gold-framed mirror as big as the TV on the opposite wall.
“Hey, can I ask a question?” Steve said. “Does anyone have the Wi-Fi password?”
“No,” came the in-unison reply.
Steve blinked.
“Well, all righty then,” he said.
III
Meredith Ladipo took a remote in hand and walked to the head of the room, on one side of the plasma screen.
“I’m not sure what’s delaying Mr. Walker, but I have no doubt he will be joining us shortly. He left instructions that I was supposed to play this video regardless. It should give you all the background you require on this particular project.”
She pointed the remote at the screen and pressed a button, and soon they were looking at an empty chair and a table.
After a second or two Dustin Walker walked into the frame and sat down. He wore a red track suit with luminescent white piping, the same outfit worn by his inflatable doppelgänger over the bouncy house outside. His hair remained in its iconic widow’s peak, though it was thinning and grayer than they had last seen it on television. His eyes were still wide, the lenses of his glasses still Coke-bottle thick, his demeanor still the nervous slouch of a middle-class accountant lost in the bad part of town.
“What the hell is that on his head?” Janet said.
Strapped to Walker’s forehead was a small square camera, its unblinking eye pointing directly at them.
“It’s a GoPro,” Ruby said.
“Ssh!” Ollie put a finger to his lips.
“Eat me, Props Boy,” she said.
On the screen, Walker gazed around the room, eliciting chuckles simply for his wide-eyed expression. Walker was one of those rare lucky people who just looked funny; that was part of his brilliance. The anticipation of the joke was as funny as, if not funnier than, the joke itself, once it arrived. Everyone felt the corners of their mouths turning upward through no conscious effort of their own. The quiet moment, that was what Dustin Walker excelled at: he was wiping the chalkboard clean before scrawling whatever he wanted across its virgin surface. An impression, maybe? His impressions were the best. As a mimic, at not breaking character, at never breaking character, he was legendary, like an anti–Carol Burnett Show. What made it all the more astounding was that he was able to convincingly impersonate Cher, Nelson Mandela, or Darth Vader without ever removing his trademark magnifying-glass spectacles. The performance just made you forget the glasses were there—or, more accurately, he made you think the people he mimicked wore those glasses all the time.
“He really is the best,” Zoe said.
“Ssssshhh!” Ollie put a finger to his lips.
“I swear to God, you shush anybody one more time and I will come over there and beat you red-assed with your own sledgehammer.”
“It’s a mallet!” Ollie said, jutting his nose into the air.
“If we could, um, just sit and…listen to this prerecorded message, I am sure it would be, uh, important and useful to our work,” Meredith murmured from her post by the door.
Suddenly Walker started slightly in his chair, a wide grin spread across his face as he appeared to notice the camera for the first time.
“Why, hello there,” Walker said.
He waited.
“I said, hello there,” he repeated, leaning forward.
“Hello there,” the live audience said in unison, chuckling.
Walker cocked his head and in a soothingly paternal PBS-kids-show-host lilt said, “It’s so special that many mostly rich and mostly famous people came all the way out here just on my say-so. You are such good neighbors. And the fact that, as many of you have said to me personally and in public, I was such a huge influence on you is very flattering. Also, completely horrifying.”
Slight, nervous laughter, except from TJ, who just sat frowning in puzzled silence.
“I bet all of you funny people started out in this business just like me—in school, right? Making a class full of kids laugh with a fake fart in the armpit or a funny drawing of the teacher or mimicking the principal’s voice—remember the classic fart in the armpit? Adorable. Look, I modified it just a bit.”
Walker lifted his left arm, revealing a hole cut in the armpit of his red track suit that exposed his hairy underarm. He stuck his right hand into the crook of his arm and rapidly pumped his bicep, roiling out juicy fart noises that made the entire room, including TJ, explode with laughter.
Next, Walker used only his voice and his arms to transform into a Southern tent-revival preacher, throwing out his hands and calling to heaven:
“Yes! Yes, Lord! That’s when you felt it! The laughter! Do you remember the first time you heard that and knew it came from you? It was in the second grade for me, Lord, long before I knew the demon temptations of women, booze, and money. This was the rush! The most powerful thing in the world! I held the attention of an audience. I felt for the first time the power and the glory of the Church of Comedy! The spirit moved me, Jesus, and I was reborn in the gospel of the Chasing of the Holy Laugh. No other worldly pleasures mattered to me.”
Then he became a taciturn Midwestern farmer, clutching imaginary overalls straps:
“Yessir, I chased that laugh, and I did pretty well for myself. Yessir, yes I did. Cut a few albums. People bought ’em. Did a TV show. Did a few movies, and some of ’em I was actually proud of. I made a lot of money for a lot of folks and made a lot of folks happy.” He turned and spit invisibly at the earth.
“Does anyone know when dinner will be?” William Griffith said, and now everyone else sssshed him.
Out of Walker’s mouth came the Teutonic monotone of Werner Herzog:
“But somewhere along the way, I became lost. As a child I had childish fantasies of being Lenny Bruce, or Richard Pryor, or George Carlin, telling truth to power. But the dreary cowardice of show b
usiness ground out the daring parts of my soul. Telling people what they don’t want to hear and making them laugh while doing it did not perpetuate the lavish lifestyle to which my early successes had made me accustomed. So I stuck with safe, banal subjects. Driving. Airplane food. Relationships. Then, in cinema, I stuck with the dick jokes and the jokes about farts. It’s just so much easier to get the quick laugh, the easy insult, the obvious comparison. Give them what they want instead of what they need. Before you know it, you’re back in that childhood classroom. But the wonder at inspiring laughter is gone. Instead, you fear the void opening before you. You fear that today will be the day the laughter stops, and you’ll have no memory of how to get it back.”
“No, really, Ms. Ladipo, when is dinner?” William looked to Meredith but she was staring transfixed by the Jack Nicholson twinkle on the screen:
“This comedy thing we’ve got—it’s a beautiful, delicate canvas. And we just keep dropping trou and squeezing out a Cleveland Steamer right on its chest, you know what I’m saying?
“Yeah, I said ‘we.’
“Those of you gathered here—you’re as bad as me. Those of you that aren’t worse.”
No one made a sound. Walker rose out of his chair, and the camera tracked him. He pointed a finger at each of them from behind the screen, speaking in the stentorian tones of a syndicated daytime TV judge:
“I accuse each and every one of you of crimes against comedy. I am qualified to pass this judgment because I inspired, by your own admission, and in my own way, each one of you. I consider you all to be my children. Except you, Janet.”
“Thanks, darling,” Janet said, and blew a kiss at the screen.
“Is this a bit?” Zoe asked no one in particular. “This whole thing, it’s got to be a bit, right?”
Walker picked up something off the table in front of him and began widening it with both hands.
Dante Dupree squinted at the room on the screen, then turned and looked at the mirror on the opposite wall.
“He shot it in here,” he said. “He shot this in this room.”
Ten Dead Comedians Page 5