That’s not a bad show. That’s fucking funny. That guy made it funny. Without him, that show was just a plain baked potato. Unmemorable.
There was a comic who started his open-mic shows by doing hokey impressions from a wireless microphone in the men’s room. I’m sure he believed the audience was confounded as to why nobody was onstage, yet bad comedy still lived in their ears. He’d make his “Ta-da!” moment, revealing himself coming out of the shitter, take the stage and continue to suck. What he didn’t know or couldn’t see from the toilet was that nobody gave a shit. The only time it was funny was when the other comics got the entire bar to get up and leave the bar as he did his Donald Duck or whoever from the toilet. He went into the bathroom with twenty to twenty-five people in the room and came out to only the bartender silently wiping a glass. Ta-da! I don’t think he ever came back to open-mic night.
I remember doing a show for nobody. There was a flash-in-the-pan wanna-be booker we called “Jack the Wig” due to his ridiculous toupee. He’d started a show in North Las Vegas at the Silver Nugget Casino, a casino whose major draw was people coming in to not get murdered in the surrounding ghetto. The show was being held in the “bingo access room,” a room beside the bingo hall that could be used to hold more patrons should bingo draw above the capacity in their main room.
The loudspeakers in the casino were announcing “free comedy at eight p.m.” every five minutes or so in the hour leading up to showtime. Still, as the hour wore near, there was not a soul in the house. The Wig, in a panic, demanded that the show go on as planned, so on the off chance someone walked past and saw a show in progress, they might venture in. One after another of the local comics went up on the semblance of a stage under a darkened bingo board and delivered their acts to nobody at all. I can’t tell you about the tree falling alone in the forest but I can tell you that your jokes still suck if there’s nobody there to hear them. We all wished bingo had been more popular and there had been an overflow forcing our cancellation. We weren’t getting paid anyway. It would have been better to not play at all for nothing than to play to nobody for nothing. But the story was invaluable. I might not be famous but I could one-up or match any comedian’s story of the smallest crowd they’ve ever played. Nobody for nothing.
People who ask me now for advice about doing stand-up comedy as a profession without having ever stepped on a stage baffle me. Why would you want to skip those ridiculous early days of fucking up and fucking off and skip straight to having to do it for money? I did it as a dare to myself and it took me weeks just to drum up the courage. Asking how to do it for a living is like asking how to be in the X Games before you learned how to ride a bike. Learn to ride the bike first to see if you like it. And be prepared to fall down quite a bit and hurt a lot, knowing that the odds are you will never be X Games good at it.
I got good enough that I found my way out onto the road, playing to a few people more than nobody and for a little bit of money. Off and running.
A SUNDAY THAT SUCKED
April 18, 1993
Cheyenne, Wyoming, was big city for me and Wiley Roberts on that closing Saturday night on a tour of obscure western towns. It’s certainly the only town on that tour that you would have ever heard of, anyway. Lord only knows what horrible gags I thought were funny back then, much less what the people in Cheyenne thought was funny in comparison. Some places, you can be a celebrity just for being willing to actually go there.
I don’t recall the show at all but I know that the next day my car wouldn’t start and we couldn’t find a shop open on a Sunday to fix it. Not only was I stuck but I was also Wiley’s ride, so he was stuck as well. Serves him right for making the opener drive on this boondocks tour. The car—actually an old Chevy LUV pickup truck—was so badly rusted that you could watch the pavement go by through the gaping holes in the passenger-side floorboards. Enjoy the view, Wiley.
The car shitting out meant that little or nothing of the week’s money that I’d mined out of those Rocky Mountain Podunk towns would probably be left after they gouged me to repair it. Not wanting—or being able to—pay for a hotel, I went back to the bar we’d played and fortunately found the same bartender who’d worked our show. I spun my tale of being shipwrecked and stranded over free beers until she eventually offered up her couch to stay at her place. And with Wiley being included and being the headliner, I deduced that her couch would be Wiley’s and I’d be on the floor. Nothing new and not a problem. Beats a cold, broken-down car.
“I hope you don’t mind animals!” she said and I didn’t flinch when I should have. We drank the day away waiting for her shift to end and then she drove us to her place—which, naturally, was in a trailer park. If I could describe it in detail, which I cannot, it would be no funnier or entertaining than what you would picture when I say “Wyoming trailer park.” Yep. It was just like that. Along with a lot of people. Some of them children. And then there were the animals. Six dogs, eight cats and a pig. I’m lowballing the guesstimate on the cats and dogs. I’m deadly accurate on the number of pigs that lived in the trailer.
You mean the animals all lived inside the trailer?
Oh, yes. Lived, slept, ate and shit in the trailer. Shit everywhere like they’d thrown it as confetti for New Year’s and there it still lay in mid-April, cold and hard to greet the coming spring.
The animals all rushed out to greet their master for dinnertime and the trailer seemed like an ark. I don’t know my pigs but had to assume that this was one of those Vietnamese potbellied pigs that were all the rage as pets at the time. But I’d also pictured potbellied pigs to be small, pink and cute like a Disney cartoon. This one just seemed like an ugly, hairy, grunting, stupid pig-sized pig. I’ve heard that pigs are extremely intelligent compared to other animals and I have no reason to doubt that. I’m simply saying that this particular pig seemed stupid. Not everybody’s baby is a prize.
All of the beady animal eyes were now on the mom as she retrieved their food—which all came from one impossibly large thousand-pound sack and was spilled directly onto the linoleum kitchen floor where the stable circled around and gorged. If Wiley and I had been polite at all when we first walked into the place, we had drifted into spewing laughter by now. Every walk to the beer cooler was a dance around the minefield of animal shit and the degree of difficulty grew with every drink, as did the hilarity. Stranger still was that our hosts thought our laughter itself was the amusing part. They saw nothing out of the ordinary in the way they lived. They looked at us like we were some kinda high-falutin’ city folk who were witnessing real America for the first time.
Fortunately for me that night, Wiley was a drinker too. Sober people have a harder time finding the amusement in these types of situations. I was also fortunate that Wiley was a better drinker. Meaning he could drink more and longer. It’s the only way I can imagine I pulled off stealing the couch. I must have passed out first.
Wiley found himself a spot on the floor just in front of the couch where people’s feet usually go, hence a small swath of feces-free acreage. As I was waking up in the morning, I opened an eye to Wiley just as the pig was trying to maneuver his way over Wiley’s sleeping head. Wiley woke up in a fit with the pig high-centered and stuck on the side of Wiley’s face, his stubby back hoofs unable to vault him the rest of the way towards the remaining pile of animal food in the kitchen.
The next day we sat back at the bar waiting for the car to get fixed, rehashing the details of the night before. And that is the only reason I can tell you the exact date that this happened because, on the news behind the bar, David Koresh and his followers in Waco, Texas, were all being burned to the ground.
That story was towards the beginning of three years of living on the road, aimless and without any expectations. There were other stories but if I had to sum them all up into one, it would be being famous enough to sleep with a pig for free.
I wanted to call Wiley to see if he had any other detail to add to this story but Wiley is one
of those old friends who you really only have that one good story you share. Every time you cross paths over the years, you hug it out and eventually you say, “Remember the pig???” and then you exhaust your laughter with a moment-closing phrase like “Oh, man. Those were the days.”
The silence kicks in as you both scrape for something more to say. You have nothing. You fake that you’re late for an appointment.
New comedians email me quite often for advice. I don’t have any. Early in my career I was giving advice to an even younger comedian after an open mic. Joey Scazzola, a comedian just a little bit more experienced than me, pulled me aside and said, “Hey, don’t ever tell these kids what to do because all you’re doing is telling them how to be more like you.”
That was the best advice I ever got. If a young Russell Brand had asked me for advice I would have told him to quit and buy an ice cream truck. Everybody has a different sense of humor, both audience and comedian. It makes me crazy when I hear someone say, “He’s not funny” without acknowledging personal preference. Even comedians do this. Even I do this. I’ll catch myself saying something isn’t funny even when I’m giving advice to some comedian that I know is only telling them how to be like me.
There is no good advice.
Nothing that ever happened in my career was by design. Every credit on my resume is like every stain on my reputation was something that happened randomly, like stepping in a pile of dog shit. All by accident. Run on instinct and take it as it comes. There was no long-term plan. It has always been living in the moment and Whac-A-Mole. That isn’t to say I haven’t worked my ass off but I never knew why or to what ends.
There has never been any kind of system that worked consistently. Maybe you try to write about your life. Maybe try to write about current events. Out of the creek in between, you might find something unimaginable that you couldn’t have ever “tried” to write. But you wouldn’t have ever found it without the trying.
Sometimes you’d have a certain number of drinks before the show and kill only to repeat the same recipe a night later and find yourself slurring. Sometimes bits that consistently destroy inexplicably lie down and die on the night that counts. And later you realize that that night didn’t really count at all.
There might be a day where you work out your material so succinctly, adding all sorts of new tags and dead-on segues that you can feel it killing while you write it. But that night the show goes in a different direction. There are hecklers and spilled drink trays and some guy has a seizure during the middle of your act. You prepared but you are so completely in lockstep with what you’ve memorized and imagined that you can’t adapt. And you suck. You should have written seizure jokes.
You learn a little bit more every time but there are no set rules for you as an individual, much less across the board as a comedian. And the more you learn, the more it tears your ass out when you still aren’t perfect.
Eat before you drink and make the stage as much fun for yourself as possible. Those are rules you can live by. If you aren’t enjoying yourself, what the fuck does it matter. Generally, if you are genuinely having fun, the audience will climb on board. Fuck the ones who don’t. If you try to pander with garbage that you yourself don’t find funny and you still fall on your ass, you can’t even fall back on self-respect. So fuck ’em. There are plenty of other jobs out there for you if you think that the customer is always right.
Giving people advice on how to do comedy is like telling them how to get laid. You try to get laid and when it works, know that you have no guarantee that the same approach will work again. Eventually you might realize that not trying at all works even better or that getting laid isn’t worth all the time you put into it.
Here’s a piece of advice I hear every comedian dole out right off the top and why I don’t necessarily subscribe…
GET ALL THE STAGE TIME YOU CAN
Bill Hicks—who I’ll get to later—had a line where after any particularly caustic bit, he’d finish by saying, “Yes, and I’m also available for children’s parties.”
Just after I moved to LA, Becker and I played a children’s party. Or didn’t. But we unwittingly booked it.
We’d run into some tail-wagging new comic who’d been hanging around the local scene. He breathlessly asked us if we could possibly do a private afternoon show in the Hollywood Hills the next day. We knew better. Most comedy veterans will tell you that as a new comic you should get any and all stage time you can when you’re starting out. Not necessarily a bad recommendation. But too much stage time in places that will repeatedly suck can demoralize you on the whole.
Matt and I learned early on that you should never try to open for nor do breaks during a live band. And we would still often ignore what we learned. An audience who are there to hear live music don’t want to hear you talk, no matter how much your drummer friend tries to convince you that they’ll love you. I’ve been booed off stage by many a comedy audience, but it’s nowhere near as defeating as the feeling of playing to a packed bar talking loudly and not even acknowledging that you are onstage. It’s worse than playing a show for nobody.
I’ve done a few private parties for the money or just for the fuck of it even when I knew they would go poorly. One house party for the well-to-do had no mic and no proper room to fit all the guests. I made the call to do it outside at the pool, mostly because it allowed me to smoke. I used the diving board as the stage and the pool as an ashtray and yelled my way through the silence. No refunds.
Another private party was in the living room of a lawyer we’d recently met at a show a few months earlier. The house was filled with his cohorts—cops, attorneys, prosecutors—all easy marks for me at that later stage of my career. Instead of jokes they got a lot of angry opinions and a summary of why they were all the cause of the rot in the core of America. The problem with lawyers is that you can’t hurt their feelings. The easy joke is that lawyers do not have feelings but the truth is that they don’t need them. They have all the power. The same way you can’t shit on white people for being white to any effect. White people own everything and have all of the privilege. They have no reason to be offended.
The lawyer show turned into a drunken heckle-fest and eventually devolved into me leading the whole party through the neighborhood in their gated community, midsummer Christmas-caroling their sleeping neighbors. The lawyer who hired us, Jay Kirschner, remains a good friend and has gotten us out of more than a couple of bad jams in the years since. More of that later.
The next show doesn’t really count as a private party but still happened in their own house. Brandt Tobler was a young comedian in Vegas who got tired of the shitty or nonexistent stage time he was getting in town. He was renting a house in a gated community with a large backyard that he shared with a few other local newbie comics. They came up with the idea to just rent folding chairs and hold shows in the backyard. Bring your own alcohol and tell your friends. He’d done pretty well with it. I loved the idea and booked a night, selling tickets on the Internet through BrownPaperTickets.com. The only advertising was through social media, my mailing list and word of mouth. We sold every rented chair and the rest stood. This, I thought, should be the way of the future. Cut out the middleman. Bring the bar to you, book who you like, charge a reasonable cover charge and folks don’t have to get jacked up on liquor prices. Invite people you already know on (then) Myspace. Why wasn’t everyone doing this? It was the perfect DIY show, sold out and everyone was cool and happy.
Except the neighbors who evidently weren’t big fans of my material, the volume of which they could not ignore. I killed and made bank. Brandt was evicted shortly afterwards because of it.
These stories all happened years after Becker and I were asked to perform at that afternoon private party in the Hollywood Hills. We still knew the gig would probably be agony and there wasn’t even any money. Maybe we thought it might be good careerwise—what if it was Spielberg’s house and we turned it down unknowingly? There must have
been a reason we said yes, even if just for free beer.
But nobody had mentioned the children.
Just finding the place in the labyrinth of the Hills in a pre-GPS era was a workload. We found parking about fifty yards down from what seemed to be a 90 percent climb to the house at the top. We could hear the ruckus of the party with a comedian trying to talk over it as we passed the side of the house where ivy covered the chain link before we got to the front door. Allowing ourselves in—talent never knocks—we found our way to the backyard into a full-blown children’s party. Not just a children’s party but a Hollywood children’s party. It was set up to be some type of fundraiser for Arts for Kids. Every kid had a booth set up like a tiny farmers’ market. A face-painting or palm-reading booth, a lemonade stand and such. Cute. All the parents were chatting and drinking wine spritzers while the comic who’d invited us was on a stopgap stage, oblivious to the depths of shit he was eating while fighting for their attention. Wine-drunk mommies showed us to the undernourished beer cooler, while their kids manned glory-hole or origami booths for charity. Becker and I started drinking like we’d crossed a desert to get there, depleting their beer stores before settling for their wine.
Our comic friend finally gave up on his set and announced that there was going to be a small break before the comedy resumed. Nobody noticed, nobody cared. Becker and I were already living in the horror of what was to come like a lucid nightmare.
I am a polite person on most occasions, even when I don’t want to be. It’s a character thing and sometimes a flaw. That day I was polite. I’m also self-aware that I am a one-trick pony as a comedian. I have my material and that is all. I can’t act. I don’t do characters. I fail at crowd work. I can usually handle a heckler with a quick barb but I’m no improviser. Just me and my act, and my act back then was rife with bits like “Suck Your Own Dick Dreams” and “Bucket of Vaginas.” It wasn’t gonna play to six-year-olds hitting piñatas with their parents. On the hostess’s tour of the house to the bathroom, I stopped her in the kitchen and told her earnestly that we’d had no idea this was a children’s event and that Becker and I had no material that was appropriate for the function. We felt bad for drinking all of her beer before we bowed out of the gig but we knew it would be far more impolite to go through with it.
This Is Not Fame Page 2