From the laughs I heard while I was out back smoking, I’m pretty sure Dara had a pretty decent show.
To say I was booed off stage sounds exciting but it was the guy who paid me that got me off stage. I was merely booed onstage. As my comedian friend Basil White used to tell audiences when a joke invoked their wrath—“I bathe in your hate!” I’d created a Jacuzzi of hate and could have exfoliated all night. So long as they kept bringing the beer it would have seemed like fun to me. The only person that can boo me off stage is the paymaster and he has to use a murder hand signal to inform me that I’ve fulfilled my contractual obligation.
History is written by the winners or just as easily by the alcohol.
The press started calling only because Hennigan started calling the press. “Unknown Comedian Has Shitty Show That Nobody Knew Was Happening” would not make the headlines without PR people making it happen. One journalist called my hotel and asked if it was true that I’d said that Irishwomen are too ugly to rape. I laughed and replied, “Yes, I guess I did say that… in a way… but what I really said was…” and then explained the entire bit. In her article she only quoted the part where I said, “Yes, I guess I did say that.”
I was pulled from the two remaining showcase shows—shows featuring multiple comics—yet had an extra solo show added. Those shows sold out quickly due to all the hubbub and went fantastically.
I kept with the bit, ironed it out and it eventually, down the road, it became one of my most viewed bits ever on the Internet. I’d long since ditched the part about the Irish as by then nobody anywhere else knew about that news story or cared about Irish people. But at the time, as I left Ireland, the tabloid headline at the airport read: “Irish Women Are Too Ugly to Rape: Fury at Comic’s Outburst!”
No press is bad press—unless you’re the pedophile with the sport coat over your head being lead from the courthouse.
Sucking overseas is different in that you don’t always know why they hate you or even if they really hate you at all. Sometimes they are simply being polite. Sometimes they are screaming words of approval that you don’t understand and assume are an assault. Sometimes you just stop caring when you realize that you’ll never understand. Serenity prayer. Accept the things you cannot change.
I was never a good comedy host. I think that is what got me bumped up to a middle act early on in my career. The host is supposed to make people feel at home, welcome. Just like at a dinner party. My act was the guy who got drunk too early and jumped into the pool naked. But I learned how to fake it long enough to be pushed up from host to weird naked guy. I learned a few tricks to get me through but forgot them as soon as they were no longer necessary. I still suck at hosting.
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland is a month-long cluster-fucked jubilee of a million acts that you don’t want to see and a million people who come to get drunk and not want to see them. But they come to the shows anyway. Comedians will do shows literally anywhere. I was there once when a comedian did shows on a cab ride to the three people in the back. And I’m sure that even he had shows that weren’t sold out.
I was asked to host a late-night show in a small bar called the Tron, the same bar that I’d done on my first Fringe fest. Late-night shows usually have the “dirty” or “X-rated” theme so I’m your guy. But I’m a shitty host. By this point I treated all crowds like they were my own audience and these were not. Opening the show by telling everyone that they’re “an assembly of idiots” who should “just shut the fuck up and drink” would work at my own show. Here it only made folks a bit tense and agitated.
There is no way to know how long I’d been awake at that point or how many shows I’d done. The truth is that most likely I’d been shut in my apartment all day, done my own show and was reasonably drunk enough to host this late show. In hindsight it feels like every Edinburgh show was one wobbling binge meeting another. Regardless, I was in no mood to be dealing with after-hours drunks as is the job description at this gig.
In between acts, I did a bit about Ecstasy when some girl started screaming, “That’s not funny! My sister died from Ecstasy!” I was out of time and patience and began railing on her, saying, “Nobody dies from doing Ecstasy! You die from garbage that was sold to you as Ecstasy that was shit that some dude made in his toilet. And your sister should have known to drink more water if she’s going to dance all night like an asshole.” As I went on and ranted about how her story was the reason drugs should be legalized and regulated, she ran out of the room crying in a fit of histrionics. Well, there’s a good break to bring up the next comedian! And now that I had ’em all fired up…
“Ladies and gentlemen, your next act coming to the stage, all the way from America… Scott Capurro!”
Scott Capurro, a flamingly gay American comic, is very funny. But he isn’t better than cigarettes so I went to my usual spot out on the back stairwell to smoke. Evidently the crying girl had gone upstairs to her two thug friends or brothers or husbands and told them that the American comic downstairs was making fun of her dead sister! So these two fucking knot-headed hooligans came down and walked onto the stage on either side of Scott, thinking that this must be the American comedian who’d talked shit about the sister. And they were going to kick the eyeballs out of him.
Scott, having no idea why he was being flanked onstage, got even more gay and asked, “Whoooo are you???” I wasn’t in the room but I imagine him twirling his hand and snapping his fingers. Regardless, by all accounts he was not intimidated in the least. There were no bouncers and the ladies who were running the door somehow calmed and eventually removed the savage beasts from the stage. I was out back oblivious to the whole event until someone ran out and said, “You’ve got to get out of here NOW! We’ve got to get you to another bar!” We ran for our lives before they could even explain to me why we had to run.
I used to defend my usage of the word “faggot” in that I only used it as a word meaning weakness, without stapling it to any type of sexuality. If I were in Scott Capurro’s shoes that night, I would have been the bottom with no place to run. Scott was a queer who saved my ass and stared adversity in its ugliest ranks while I ran like a faggot.
I’d feel like I owe him a blow job but I’m not that attractive and my giant teeth don’t suit the experience. And I’m not that good of a host.
JUST FOR SPITE: A FESTIVAL
This reminds me of the reason I went into rehab.”
Those were the last words Greg Giraldo said to me.
It was July of 2008 after I’d been removed from the greenroom at the Dirty Show at Montreal’s Just for Laughs comedy festival. I’d had an argument with the nerd who ran the event or, rather, he had an argument with me. He’d taken exception to a scathing update on my website about the fest and I calmly—if drunkenly—stood my ground that essentially he treated comics like migrant lettuce pickers. Imagine him as Bill Gates if Bill Gates didn’t know shit about computers but stumbled blindly into a place where he was in charge of it all and then got all swelled up in the front of his baby pants because of it.
Just for Laughs held a lot of sway in the eighties and nineties when comedians were landing huge deals for sitcoms and networks were throwing panic money like confetti at everybody. Those deals started to drop off by the late nineties but the festival still ran strong and the best of the best comedians still attended. I’d performed there in 1997 and 1998 when I was living in LA, when there was still some vague hope of scoring free network scratch. By the time I performed there again in 2005, I’d already given LA the finger and moved to Bisbee. The lure of a big deal was of no consequence. I was just there for the paycheck and the party.
In 2008, the head weasel contacted my manager about me coming back. At this point, I no longer did mixed-bill shows. Like the Kilkenny festival, they didn’t usually work out well for me. People who want to see Judy Tenuta or Jim Gaffigan don’t necessarily want to see me on the same show. I’d also been booking my own shows on the road in rock-a
nd-roll clubs so I could figure out the basic percentages of the ticket price versus the cut, usually now with me getting between 80–100 percent of the door.
Just for Laughs offered a ten-night run doing my own show for the amazingly insulting fee of eleven hundred dollars. A hundred and ten dollars a show. When I was brand new, doing hotel lounges and random dance clubs in the far reaches of Montana and Wyoming, I’d make a hundred twenty-five dollars as an opening act. Now that I was known enough to do ten nights at the biggest festival in North America, a hundred and ten seemed reasonable to them.
I don’t remember what the ticket prices were supposed to be but it put my percentage down to single digits. They take a big chunk for themselves for the “prestige” factor.
This wasn’t just a “no.” It was a loud “Fuck No.” I could book one Montreal show on my own on short notice with no advertising other than on my website and mailing list and make more in one night than they were offering for a full run. You can wipe your prestige on your sheets. The more the insult of their offer burned into my psyche, the more I knew I would have to do exactly that.
Thus was born my “Just for Spite” festival, booked at a tiny, rat-box punk venue. Every decent venue gets swallowed up by Just for Laughs during the two weeks it runs. My people wouldn’t complain. It only held fifty people so I had to do two nights to prove my point and make more money than their ten-show run.
Also, I’d get to enjoy the JFL after-parties, the main reason comedians still go there. There is nothing more fun in the world than hanging out and getting blasted with fifty of your favorite comedians all in one place. One of the comedians in my show had some cocaine, which would help carry me through the night. He was only eighteen, the legal age to drink in Montreal, and looked far less. We were doing key bumps without discretion in the back stairwell of the club when a bouncer stumbled upon us. I hadn’t considered that this might be an inappropriate location for doing drugs. It was Canada. I figured that it’s all cool.
The bouncer just rolled his eyes and gave us some kind of “Ah, c’mon, man!” and we apologized and went elsewhere. So I was right. It’s Canada. It’s all cool. The kid was staying in a youth hostel across the street so we decided to move the party there, now with two more barely adolescent friends of his in tow. More pigs for the teat. One had never done cocaine.
“But fuck yeah, I’ll try it! I just want to be able to say that I did blow with Doug fucking Stanhope!”
That’s not really a story I wanted on his resume. One, because he looked thirteen and two, because I wanted that cocaine. For him it’s a good story but for me it is medicine that will get me through a bunch of JFL parties without falling down. But it wasn’t my cocaine to make that decision. As the key passed in a circle, my phone rang and I saw that it was Bingo. I answered in a theatrical cheer.
“I can’t talk to you right now, honey! I’m in Canada doing Cocaine with Children!!!”
“Uuuh… okay,” a voice said. “This is Evelyn your neighbor. I’m on Bingo’s cell phone. She isn’t doing very well.”
Bingo was off her meds or on mushrooms or both and was having a very bad trip, the severity of which got me out of any questions regarding my “doing Cocaine with Children” declaration. Being a comedian, people often think you just say ridiculous stuff like that for no reason.
Now I was trying to calmly explain to my kindly sixty-year-old neighbor lady how to talk someone down from a bad trip, all the while watching the bindle dwindle as the key went around like a carousel without me. I got off the phone before the supply was spent and cleaned up the leftovers. The kid got his story and I got a cab to Club Soda.
That’s where I was when I got ejected from the greenroom. Ron White, Nick Di Paolo, Brendon Walsh and a shitload more comedians were all at Club Soda in the greenroom between shows. Ron even gave me his laminate so I wouldn’t have a problem getting into Henry Phillips and Mike O’Connell’s show later that night.
A good time was being had by all.
Until the pus-wart that runs the festival showed up.
It was obvious from his face that he’d read my website post that shit on his offer and where I’d announced my Just for Spite fest, and he wasn’t happy about it. I smiled and tried to avoid the topic. I knew it’s always a bad idea to get into that kind of shit when I’m drinking but he didn’t know that and he pressed the issue.
He questioned my basic arguments that (a) he paid shit to comedians when the festival was making a killing and (b) that he was outright insulting to comedians by telling them what material to do and how to do it. He’d done this to me after nearly every show I’d ever performed at the festival. I would just nod, smile and ignore his unsolicited and unqualified suggestions.
I told him that his offer to me was less than I made for my first-ever paid gigs in 1991. He responded by telling me how much money he was losing on some other comedian there that year, a point he repeated several times as though it had any bearing whatsoever.
“So you offered me basic cab-fare money to cover the costs of other poor decisions you make as a shit booker?”
As to him coming into the greenroom between shows and telling comics which bits to keep or drop—in the infuriating tones of a pandering camp counselor—he told me that it was necessary because I had not been doing well.
“What about Jim Jefferies?”—who I’d performed with at my previous JFL in 2005.
“Jim Jefferies did great,” he said.
“Then why did you keep telling him what material he should use?”
“Well, obviously what I told him worked.”
Why didn’t he just do the comedy himself if he were this good? You could see where this was gonna go nowhere and the fewer points he could make, the more irritated he became. He then unwittingly painted himself into a corner by going on and on about how poorly I did the last time, that maybe I was drunk or maybe I just didn’t care anymore but that I wasn’t funny and how I sucked “nine out of sixteen shows,” like he kept statistics, which I wouldn’t doubt.
“If I was that bad, why did you make an offer to get me back this year?”
Pause.
Cartoon steam leaked from his ears.
As I dropped an imaginary mic, he grabbed my arm and almost cried: “It’s time for you to leave.” He pushed me as though I was resisting to make some show in front of the other comedians. He stopped momentarily. “And I’m taking this laminate because I know it’s not yours!” pulling Ron White’s pass off my neck. He said this exactly the way you’d say, “And it’s my ball and I’m going home if you’re not gonna play my way!” only he wasn’t joking.
I said nothing more—mostly because the huge security guy showed up and I was undoubtedly hammered. You will never appear correct in an argument if you are the drunk one, no matter how factual you may actually be. Two plus two equals nothing if you’re saying “four” with a tilt and a slur. Why bother. The bonehead who runs the Just for Laughs Festival is a condescending shit-baby who bought the nicest swimming pool so that every summer he can live in the illusion that people actually like him. I was stupid to even waste a minute talking to him at all with this many old friends around.
So I shut up and left with a lot of his free greenroom beer in my bloodstream and paid to see Henry Phillips and Mike O’Connell out of my pocket. Money works just like a laminate and the show was worth every penny. I just wish the performers would see nickels on the dollar for it.
By the time I ran into Giraldo and a couple other comics on the street, I was a stumbling wreck. The coke had worn off long before and now the drinks hit all too quickly. The kind of drunk that affects all of your motor skills while leaving your brain intact, a cerebral palsy–type of hammered, or the “Muhammad Ali” if you will.
My story about being ejected from the venue came out of the corner of my mouth with a stammering drool and that’s when Giraldo made his rehab remark. I was a bit insulted as drunks tend to be when their point is overlooked because of their sta
ggering.
I was quite relieved when someone emailed not long afterwards that they’d seen Greg perform so shitfaced that he barely made sentences. It’s nice to know that you aren’t the only comedian left with a cocktail in your hand. It was not satisfying at all when he died of a prescription drug overdose two years later. Cheers to you, you funny motherfucker.
Prescription drugs are also a constant for me—downers and only enough to sleep—and it’s bothersome when people die from them because you are never given the specific dosages or combinations involved in the death. That is information that can really be useful to other users. A heroin overdose tells you nothing since the potency or purity of the heroin can vary wildly. Prescription drugs aren’t cut with baby laxative. You know exactly what strength you are taking so you can regulate with far more accuracy.
I first took Xanax at an Ecstasy party in Alaska somewhere in the late 1990s. We were all coming down and someone gave me a blue (1 mg) and told me it would help me sleep. Shortly afterwards, somebody else gave me another blue making it a full bar of Xanax where a peach (.5 mg) would have been plenty.
Long story short, I pissed the couch I was sleeping on and woke up convinced in the moment that someone had pissed on me in my sleep. Those were the kind of friends I did drugs with and that’d be the kind of thing they might do. I scurried for any piece of mail that had the address on it and got a taxi as quickly as possible before anyone else woke up.
I can’t count the number of times Chaille or Bingo has woken up in the middle of the night on the road to stop me from pissing in a hotel closet or on an air-conditioning unit. Maybe that’s where the bathroom had been located in the hotel the night before and my reflex memory just guided me to that spot. What I do know is that for every time they woke up and caught me just in time, there had to be many nights they didn’t wake up at all. I’ll never know how many times I’ve sleep-pissed all over a hotel or even on my own stuff.
This Is Not Fame Page 17