The next morning I woke to the sound of shit spraying through the fan. It was the Springer people on the phone.
“What the fuck is going on, Doug?” I was caught completely off guard.
“What’dya talking about?”
“Why did you tell 20/20 that your story wasn’t true?” they asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I can’t lie for shit straight outta bed.
“So you’re saying 20/20 is full of shit?”
I paused for a second, then said, “I can neither confirm nor deny and have no further comment” and hung up the phone.
The next call was from Penelope at 20/20 wanting to know the names of the people in the limo pictures and how to get in touch with them. She needed someone to corroborate my story. I gave her the little information I had. Meanwhile Springer people were busy calling everybody from the show, reminding them of the consequences and threatening lawsuits should they talk. I was unconcerned. Those were risks you could take when you didn’t have any money. Suzanne retained an attorney and stopped answering her phone. 20/20 went so far as to send someone to her house. She wouldn’t say a word. The Springer people got a sworn affidavit from Danielle saying that our story was completely accurate, that I’d never known Suzanne until she came out on the stage. I faxed phone bills to 20/20 showing calls to Suzanne from a month before to prove otherwise, but it wasn’t enough.
20/20 couldn’t air my interview without someone else coming forward. It was scheduled to run on a Monday, which was then three days away. Without corroboration, they would have to run with their original piece on Springer that they’d been working on, about him degrading unsuspecting people on his show. Either way, they were going to cash in on his popularity.
Over the next three days, right up until hours before the 20/20 show aired, we tried to get another source. I went down to a theater where one of the girls from the plane performed in an improv group. She said she couldn’t talk to me because the Springer people might be watching. Like it was the CIA. And she was serious. Finally, 20/20 went with their original story.
About a week later we caught a break when the show Extra came up with a group of people who said their Springer shows were all rigged. The story made it to every local news channel that day and I made sure to call every one of them, scratching for my fifteen minutes of the pie. I got on a few local news channels, including the NBC affiliate, which passed me on to Dateline NBC. 20/20 got the people from Extra and ran a drastically different story than the one a week previously.
In the first exposé, Jerry Springer was spotlighted as being bad for exploiting his guests. Now, Jerry Springer was bad for not really exploiting his guests. Poor prick couldn’t win either way. Dateline sent a crew to my apartment. The producer told me to pause before I answered the questions so they could cut Maria Shriver in later, pretending to be in my apartment asking the questions. I said, “So you want me to pretend that you are Maria Shriver and tell you how Jerry Springer is all bullshit?” They said, “Heh-heh.”
In the end, 20/20 and Dateline cut my interviews down to a few benign words, focusing mostly on the people whose episodes had already aired. I got a few sound bites and, what I was looking for initially, a great story to tell my friends. A story I got sick of telling almost immediately.
Sometime a while later, when I was on the road in Texas, I saw the Springer episode I’d been on. They had cut my segment out due to the publicity but they couldn’t cut me out of the last segment where everyone takes questions from the audience. There I was, for seemingly no particular reason, sitting Gump-like, looking stupid.
I’d get calls from friends with every repeat of the show. “Hey, man. I think I just saw you on Springer. I musta been in the kitchen during your part but I swear I saw you right at the end.”
Famous.
PRANKING THE MEDIA
Excuse me while I go all over the map for a decade or so while I tell you about some other fuck-withs I am proud of. I’ll get back to the nineties eventually. I assume. But now we’re somewhere around 2005.
Joe Rogan and I happened to be playing San Francisco the same weekend and just down the street from each other. He was at Cobb’s playing four shows to a six hundred seater while I was just up the block at the Purple Onion playing two shows to sixty. I was excited that we were both sold out.
After my Friday show, Bingo and I hoofed it down to catch Joe’s late show. We spent most of the show outside smoking and passing around a bottle in a paper sack that our old friend Hags had shown up with. We could still hear Joe through the door, along with the monstrous waves of laughter shaking the place. It was nearly last call by the time the show ended. We waited for Joe to get done with the pictures and pressing hams before hitting the bar like people clean grocery store shelves before a hurricane.
The place was still lousy with comics after the regular folks were shown the exit, so the bar stayed open late for us. Somebody offered up cocaine. I was trying to be fairly responsible because I had agreed to get up at some ghastly early hour to do a spot on local TV news to promote my show. Worse, it wasn’t even gonna be in studio. I had to go to some fairgrounds or convention center for a live feed from a car show.
Now, maybe you’re not a comedian but put yourself in my shoes and go down the reasons you don’t need to show up for this interview. First, as I said not humbly, my shows were already sold out. Second, it’s already 2:30 a.m. and I’m drunk and doing coke. Third, it’s going to air early on a Saturday morning. Nobody is going to be watching, at least nobody who would like me. Fourth, the station has no idea who I am. They only agreed to have me because they were sold on the fact that I was the host of the new version of The Man Show, which everybody hated. Lastly, I should blow it off because it would stink. There’s nothing I could do that would represent my act that wouldn’t have me quickly cut off the air. The alternative was me just plugging the club so they get free advertisement and I look like a dullard.
These reasons went through my head in the amount of time it took to douche my nostrils with Miller Lite. I went back and focused a bit more on number four. They have no idea who I am. I turned to a local comic, Jason Downs, who was hanging out.
“What are you doing tomorrow morning?”
I bet he was expecting me to invite him to brunch.
“I dunno, why?”
“Do you wanna be me on TV?”
I explained my thinking and then continued into overthinking in the way an amphetamine tends to make you do. I’d give him my trench coat and knit winter hat that I was fond of wearing back then. No, wait! I’d need that to get back to the hotel. Otherwise I’d be cold. Wait, I got it. He’d come all the way to my hotel in the morning and get my coat and hat. Then he’d drive all the way to the civic center or the horse track or wherever the fuck.
I don’t know if it was my enthusiasm for the gag or the gag itself that sold him on the idea but he was in. He was Downs!
When the morning came too quickly, it was him knocking at my hotel room door. I probably just shoved my coat and hat at him through the door and mumbled a good luck. It still hadn’t dawned on me that if they don’t know who I am anyway, wearing my trench coat and longshoreman’s knit hat is a completely unnecessary step that he drove across the city to fulfill. But some great plans have a lot of fat that could have been trimmed.
The irony—as the British don’t understand—is that instead of sleeping in, I had actually set a wake-up call for when I/he was going to be on live television. I even videotaped it from bed with my feet sticking out from under the covers framing his face. The graphic under his face on the television feed read: “Doug Stanhope: Host of The Man Show.” He played it straight and dull like I would have had to if I didn’t want to get the hook. My attire did not hide the fact that he was about eight inches taller and twelve years younger than me. The anchor didn’t have any idea that he was being duped but during the break someone caught wise. I/he was supposed to do a second break bu
t during the commercial, Jason Downs saw a producer rushing the furlong from the control booth towards him talking hurriedly into a headset. Jason knew the jig was up and pounded turf to get the fuck out.
He could still get away with it today, twelve years later. Only he’d be wearing a different unnecessary outfit. They still wouldn’t know who either of us are.
Jason Downs does a far better impression of me than I do of Johnny Rotten. Let me start by saying how much I loathe doing radio interviews, especially by phone. There are always too many people talking and a delay that makes everyone talk over each other. There is no face to read that tells you when you’re going too far or when they’re trying to wrap up. I’d rather play the sixty seater by word of mouth than have to promote a bigger show. But sometimes you are contractually obligated to promote.
This time I was obligated to promote something that included a telephone radio interview, pre-taped for a later air date. It would also be transcribed as a print interview for Huffington Post.
My phone was ringing at six-thirty in the morning. I ignored it. It rang again and by the time I picked it up and screamed, “WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT???” I realized I’d missed the call and was yelling into a dead line. Then I got angry when I heard the beep that there was a voice message. I wanted blood.
“Hey, John… This is [name not remembered] and we have a phoner scheduled. It’ll all be pretty simple stuff, just a few questions about PiL and your upcoming tour. Gimme a call back…” etc.
I knew that I had a phoner scheduled for 11:30 a.m. and even in my delirium I was sure that it was not 11:30. I’m no fan of music but somehow I put “John” and “PiL” together and realized it was the same radio guy I was supposed to talk to at 11:30 a.m. fucking up his contact info and calling to interview Johnny Rotten.
My contact lenses were still blurry as I pulled up Johnny Rotten on Wikipedia and returned the call. For the record, I’ve worn contact lenses since my twenties and sometimes go a year without ever changing them out or even taking them out. They will tell you two weeks or a month at maximum. I think they are full of shit and so far, so good. Sometimes the only downside is when you are trying to read the Internet at an inhuman hour of the morning, trying to read some facts about a person you are pretending to be. I faked a British accent as well as I could (and can’t at all) and started the interview.
It stinks when you have a golden comedy opportunity like this but you don’t have the faculties. I had that one strand of sense memory that connected PiL to Johnny Rotten. That was the extent of my knowledge. I’m squeezing my eyes to fight the gunk on my contacts trying to read the computer but it didn’t matter.
The questions were all softballs and I answered with bunts. I apologized for being extremely hung over—neither of us knowing that Johnny Rotten had long been sober—and when I got stuck on a question, I’d fill my mouth with water and spew it into the toilet to create the sound of violent blood-vomits. I kept making references to my wife divorcing me, neither of us knowing that his wife had, in fact, died. All in all, it was a good interview.
Eleven-thirty a.m. came around and I was wondering if the phone would ever ring for my actual interview. When it did, I was wondering if the HuffPo guy was gonna be unloading a truckload of shit on me for pretending to be Johnny Rotten. It was the same guy but he went straight into interview mode, asking a lot of the same questions he’d asked me earlier when he thought I was Johnny Rotten.
I played that interview straight as well, knowing eventually he’d figure it out and neither interview would ever air. But I was wrong.
Several days after, the fake Johnny Rotten interview aired. They edited out all of my fake vomiting and any vulgar language, killing all the funny I might have added. The interview went out and it eventually came to light that it was bogus—only when we posted it on my website with the full story behind it. The Rotten camp wanted it taken down. The interviewer begged us to take it down. He was afraid of being fired. He wasn’t aware that nobody gave a fuck about me OR Johnny Rotten, much less him for that matter. And besides, he’d cut all the funny out of it. At six-thirty in the morning, I could only focus on believable and I failed miserably even at that, so maybe he should have been fired.
I’d done the same thing in Tampa, Florida, only live, in-studio. Thanks to social media I rarely have to do terrestrial radio anymore and I no longer work full weeks at comedy clubs that require it. It used to be that clubs would have you go out and do any radio station they could get you on, regardless of the audience. Of course, on regular radio you have to keep it clean so I’d have to show up at whatever zombie hour of the morning when assholes sit in traffic to not do my act. On rock-and-roll stations you could dance around language and still stay within the parameters of “decency” that are legally required. But then I’d get stuck doing country-western or sports talk a.m. radio where I have no business being nor would their listeners have any interest in seeing the show I was promoting if they knew what it consisted of.
Here’s where I’d have a decision to make. I can play it straight, have a few timid yucks at the expense of the town or the news of the day, keep it light, get your plugs in and get the fuck out. The problem with this is the deception of it. Here I’d be selling a product that doesn’t exist. Your listeners would all think I’m some family-friendly cruise ship act and then they show up to a litany of fist-fuck jokes, blasphemy and abortion stories. I’m basically inviting complaints and walkouts. This makes me the asshole.
Or I can just talk about the same kind of things I do talk about onstage and, even without the obscenities, I will be shuffled out of the studio and possibly burn the club’s bridge with the radio station. I’d ruin it for all the upcoming comedians whose personas are better suited for that market. This also makes me the asshole.
A lot of times the clubs and radio stations would try to alleviate the problem by calling me “X-rated.” This is also dishonest. This can lead people to think that what I do is just a lot of swear words and fuck jokes. In truth, my language and my fuck jokes were the last thing people would complain about. That was the soft stuff. The people who hated me were the ones who took exception to my opinions. Plenty of folks would have no problem seeing an X-rated show but then go apeshit when I start shitting on religion or yesterday’s plane crash. My apologies. I’m sorry you brought your wife out to an X-rated show and then I’m wrong for making fun of your Lord and Savior. My bad. But still, “X-rated” gives the illusion that there will be sexual penetration at some point in my show and maybe that’s why you’re scribbling angrily in a comment card. I guess I’d be really upset if I bought an X-rated movie and it was just some dude talking for an hour.
In Ohio one winter I did a station where I had a window view of the bleak, industrial landscape and its utter lack of prospects. As I implored the listeners to skip work and keep driving south to Florida and a better life, I made the mistake of describing their existence as “Dickensian.” The jocks were so panicked that this X-rated act was going to swear and get them fined by the FCC that they jumped to the five-second delay as soon as the “Dick” part came out. Censored for a literary reference and I’ve never even actually read Dickens.
Back to Tampa. This was probably late 2005 when my life was in full “who gives a fuck” mode. Brendon Walsh and I were doing two morning radio shows, both stations in the same building, Chaille and Bingo in tow. As you may know, we’re fond of thrift store shopping and back then would find the most ridiculous outfits we could pick out to wear to the shows. We’d found Muslim prayer robes on this trip and thought it would be funny to bring Bingo to the station like this, head shaved bald, bare footed and wearing a hijab. We told her to just look at her bare feet and mumble to herself and we’d act like there was nothing amiss. The banality of the hosts was offending. The female of the duo capped any and all stories with a drawn-out and unsultry “Aaah, good times,” like she hadn’t listened to a word. All the time Bingo was doing a short shuffle in a corner, eye
s crossing and chewing her thumbs. When Bingo and I stepped out during a break, the host asked Brendon gently what the story was with the bald gal.
Brendon put on a full-panic face and told her that he didn’t know. He told her that I’d picked Bingo up in a truck stop, that he thought she might only be sixteen years old and that he was so creeped out that he was thinking about quitting the whole tour. Then we walked back just in time to go back on the air. The tension was crawling but not a word about it was spoken. Bingo got more spastic, intermittently squeaking sounds and picking invisible bugs off of her scalp.
“Aaah, good times.”
We finished the first station and stepped out front to smoke, killing time until the second. A woman pulled up in her car and jumped out, obviously harried. When she saw us standing there disheveled and leaning against the wall you’d have assumed she was terrified of us. Instead she ran up and asked me: “Are you Steve???”
I told her that I was not Steve. And immediately Bingo corrected me.
“Yes, he is Steve.”
Evidently this complete turnaround didn’t raise any red flags. She apologized for being late. I forgave her as I, Steve, am a decent person. She guided us to the station where Steve was to do an interview. She filled me in on the basics, that we’ll be doing so many minutes and this and that. Chaille had been fond of filming everything—back then with an actual video camera before phones were all-capable—so he had pulled out his camera and started filming right away. When the nice PR lady asked why we were filming, we told her that we were doing a “little documentary.” Again, she asked no more questions.
We got to the station—fortunately not the one that I’d already done or the one I was scheduled to do next—and she introduced me to the jock. He told me what she’d already told me and that we’d be going on the air in about five minutes. He reassured me that he’d received my press release from my office. I asked to see it so I could make sure my secretary had sent the updated version. He gave it to me. Now I could read who I was and why I was there.
This Is Not Fame Page 6