This Is Not Fame

by Doug Stanhope

  How Joe Rogan could manage to drive us home is beyond me. These were before the days where KettleBells or Onnit were his sponsors or his addictions. I don’t even think he drank much back then. I’d drunk as much as I ever did and wasn’t even fit to ride much less drive. At some point on the drive home I had to piss. Rather than ask Rogan to pull over, I opened my passenger door, hung on to the overhead handle and swayed pissing down the freeway at sixty-five miles an hour.

  You’d think that even a monster like Rogan would take pause and call for restraint. But the country was at war and we all had to man up. Rogan did not take pause. He took video. Somehow, under the intrusive glare of hallucinogens and the overhead dome light, whilst careening down the highway, Rogan managed to drive and film me pissing out the door, all over the road and his brand new SUV without ever losing his smile.

  Rogan’s fame was never his strength. Rogan wrestled fame to the ground and fucked it into submission. Rogan took fame’s championship belt, held it over his head and then traded it in for something of value. Rogan is smart like that.

  He was doing Fear Factor for NBC at the time and the network comped him high-dollar seats for a Lakers game, probably hoping that the cameras would stop on him during a break for a free plug. He asked me if I wanted to go to the game. I didn’t really care for basketball. Rogan hated any sport where people don’t get hurt or die. But we both liked getting shit for free and we hated to waste the seats.

  As the game was about to begin, we grabbed some burritos from the VIP buffet and took our seats. We were hunched over our laps eating burritos when the national anthem started. There was no need to tell people to rise for the song. We were at war! People shot up like they’d been tased in the colon. But Rogan and I were eating burritos. I turned to Rogan as food fell from his face.

  “Should we stand up for this?”

  The stares of the attendees surrounding us still seated and eating were murderous. You could physically feel the hatred.

  Rogan barely looked at me or found time to swallow.

  Like I was stupid for even asking.

  “Fuck these sheep.”

  And back to the burrito.

  We left before the end of the first quarter.

  There was no reason to watch the Lakers. We’d just watched a war on mushrooms, a war that somehow kicked off right on schedule, prime time, just as Joe and Mary Lunchbucket were sitting down to their Hungry-Man TV dinners.

  We’d just witnessed reality television at it’s most pure, from behind the curtain of Oz.

  Ever since my experience with Jerry Springer, my obsession with the fraudulence of reality television has too often kept me glued to a couch if for no other reason than to cry “Bullshit!” And it’s all bullshit, usually on a much deeper level than saying that wrestling is fake.

  Early on in my career I did a pilot for a hidden camera show called Hotel Hell. The participants thought they were on their way to be on a Survivor-type show in the middle of the California nowhere. They were led to believe that their bus had broken down on the way to the set and they would have to spend two days at this hotel. The hotel out in the middle of the desert was—as the title states—“Hell.” Meaning, we’d fuck with them on hidden camera. The show could have been funny on premise alone but like too many shows I’ve been part of, the people in charge take precedence over the ones who they’ve hired to make it funny. They under- or overthink it and overwrite it and fuck it all up. When you have a dead mountain lion in a Jacuzzi and a kid who can vomit on command, why overthink the plot?

  The pilot obviously sucked and didn’t get picked up but the producers pressed on. They flew me out months later to film more gags we’d never even done to recut into the pilot. I’d be wheeled into a room underneath a room service cart and then roll out, doing something inappropriate and undoubtedly hilarious. To nobody. They could just cut in random reaction shots that we’d already filmed months before. You might know that wrestling is fake but what if you found out that those two guys weren’t ever actually in the same ring together? The show was still never picked up but knowing that they had no problem selling that deep of outright lies made me not only doubt all reality television, it makes me doubt even the nightly news. Maybe Rogan and I weren’t even watching a real war that night.

  I still watch these stupid fucking shows, trying to find the deception like an unrequested expert witness without a jury that gives a fuck.

  For a while I had a segment on the brilliant Charlie Brooker shows Newswipe and Weekly Wipe on the BBC in the UK. I was the “Voice of America” without the consent of the BBC or America. One of the segments had me shitting on reality TV. Trout meet barrel. In it, I closed the bit ripping the then upstart show Bar Rescue. It was another rip-off of the originator Kitchen Nightmares with the formulaic and ego-bound Gordon Ramsay who would somehow be shocked every week that he’d never before borne witness to the conditions of the restaurant he was there to save.

  “This is the worst I have ever seen” or “I have never met someone so awful” or “Never before on this show have I…”

  Bar Rescue had the same formula with some bloat-headed blowhard named Jon Taffer saving bars instead of restaurants.

  In my BBC piece, I closed by calling Taffer the worst fraud on reality television in America in that he was a pretend-douche. He was merely a mimic of his predecessors. You could tell that Gordon Ramsay was a serious shit-bucket. Jon Taffer was merely a cheap impressionist of fake outrage.

  Bar Rescue went on to be a success and I watched it out of spite and because of the fact that it was set in bars. If you’re gonna get drunk and watch worthless TV, you might as well watch a TV show that is set in a bar. I’d get drunk and yell at Bingo, pointing out how they were cheating camera angles, and putting in voice-overs to create scenes of conflict that never happened.

  Then one day an email came in or a phone rang. It was the Bar Rescue people wanting me to be on the show. Jon Taffer was so honored that he’d heard me call him the biggest douchebag on reality TV that he wanted me to be on an episode. If I’d called him the second biggest, I wouldn’t have gotten the call.

  I’d just returned from a tour in Australia but still caught the first flight to LA to be there. I sat for hours filming in the Chevy Suburban while we watched live feed of his “recon” team inside the bar. I had to duck out to piss several times where I’d refill my travel mug of vodka and soda, trying to think of something to say. All of my commentary was wasted. I like the kind of bars he ruins. Who would complain about their drink being overpoured or the barely dressed barmaid being drunk and dancing on a pool table? The Bar Rescue formula is to turn every bar that I love into some variation of a TGI Fridays.

  Eventually there was a point where the recon duo were unable to get a reaction from the bar owner to make for some conflict. I was very drunk now and told Taffer that I would go in there and rile some shit up myself. He let me go in. I was immediately pegged as an interloper by one of the bar regulars on what I found to be an otherwise closed set. He noticed that I didn’t have a wristband on, meaning I must be on the crew. I threw a fake fit while I got free drinks and ate uncooked chicken, which I complained about even more loudly. Then I went to play pool with some waitresses, forgetting I was doing a TV show.

  In the end, the episode aired. At the beginning, I was in the Suburban and edited down to an occasional nod or “yessir.” But the editing was so bad that they would cut from Taffer and me in the SUV watching the bar in action into shots of the bar where I was at the same time sitting. I spotted myself immediately because of the undeniable bald spot that I never see in a mirror.

  I’d like to do a show called Reality Show Rescue where I teach people to make reality shows that can trick people like me who are just watching and waiting for them to fuck up. But people like me aren’t their target audience. Or maybe we are, so long as we’re watching.

  Before Bar Rescue, my all-time favorite show to hate was Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. When I
hate a television show, I can taste the contempt in my mouth. Yet it makes me crave it more. If you love to hate, you understand. If you don’t, you are probably a better person. This long-term fixation with Celebrity Rehab culminated in a nearly fourteen-minute routine trashing both Drew himself and the cult of Alcoholics Anonymous on my stand-up comedy special Before Turning the Gun on Himself. After going back to listen to it again, it may be the most brutal personal excoriation of any individual, living or dead, that I’ve ever recorded. Like any ambitious yet lazy takedown, it had to invoke the Nazis—calling Dr. Drew the “Joseph Goebbels propaganda minister in the war on drugs”—and imagining his tortuous death in a prolonged, inventive, if not meandering fashion.

  Half measures avail us nothing.

  I treat any performance, recorded or otherwise, with a blind trust that the content will remain within the confines of the room. Kind of like an AA meeting, ironically. Part of that mentality lies in the omnipresent self-deprecation of thinking that what you said will never travel far and that if it does, the person in question won’t ever hear it anyway. In short, I know Dr. Drew ain’t in the room. So fuck him.

  I hope Dr. Drew still hasn’t heard the bit. But like my trashing of Jon Taffer, shortly after the special with the Celebrity Rehab bit aired on Netflix, I was asked by his producer to come on Dr. Drew’s podcast. Like Jon Gnarr, I also believe in coincidence. But not this time. I could only assume that it was a well-deserved ambush but there was no way I could refuse.

  I sat outside Dr. Drew’s studio that morning, smoking cigarettes and drinking from my travel mug, conceptualizing the trap I was about to walk into. I went through my head, working on defending my salient points like a politician going into a debate. A politician who’d forgotten the part where he’d wished loudly and publicly for the opponent to be dragged through the streets, tied shirtless to a light pole and… well it goes on from there. Once I got on the air, we exchanged some tentative pleasantries before I cut through the tension and to the quick.

  “All right, you didn’t invite me here for no reason.”

  I said it amicably, like archrivals from professional sports teams would long after retirement. Sitting in a studio, face to face and mic to mic, all of the hours I’d spent loathing Celebrity Rehab became as ridiculous as a Yankees–Red Sox quibble from the days of yore. Drew admitted that he had heard I had some beef with him but said he was not the type of person to look up negative things about himself on the Internet. We immediately found common ground on having egos too fragile for that nonsense. Fuck that Google ego-surfing yourself. Once you’ve gained a solid audience, there’s no longer any reason to seek out detractors online. On that level, Drew was as frail as I was and it sucked me in. Turns out that even famous people can occasionally have feelings just like regular folk and are not impervious to having those feelings hurt. A common enemy brings people together and we found that enemy in everybody else. And then I hated him for making me realize that, and I hated the fact that I really liked him as a person.

  I still defended my original stance on why his rehab show was a lot of exploiting people at their weakest. You don’t take someone in the throes of the DTs and send them boating with Gary Busey for conflict. That isn’t medicine. He agreed with me and blamed the producers, saying he was also aghast at the idea. I told him that was like Nazis—again, always fall back on the Third Reich—saying they were only following orders. But in this case he was Hitler saying it. It was his show. Then I had to remember that The Man Show would have been seen as my show when it was awful. Having my name on it didn’t make me the person in control. I got it but didn’t want to concede ground.

  I asked Drew what advice he would give if he were hosting a Celebrity Rehab with a cast of Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, William Burroughs, Keith Richards and Dean Martin, all legendary fuckups who thrived on booze. He stuttered and finally responded that he’d heard Dean Martin wasn’t really as drunk as he pretended to be. I felt like I won that round solidly. But more so, I still liked Dr. Drew.

  For the rest of the podcast, not only did he begin to agree with me, he seemed to be arguing against himself better than I was. I went in prepared for combat and somehow he made me feel like I’d lost using the same arguments, like he was beating me at my own game. I left feeling like I’d made a friend who’d just drugged and raped me—in a beautiful, selfless way that made me the prettiest princess in all of the land. More Bill Clinton than Bill Cosby.

  At first I felt tricked but not long after, he asked me to be on an episode of his HLN show to do a point-counterpoint with another guest on the topic of legalized marijuana. I don’t smoke weed but you can guess what side I was on. And I was probably a dick about it where he probably played the straight man. You fall into a groove.

  Dr. Drew has evidently admitted to being a narcissist. He likes being a famous doctor. I’m a narcissist in that I sometimes like to believe I’m some sort of doctor suffering from fame. Whatever bullshit keeps you on point but I think that we understand each other. And oddly we have become friendly, a point that I undersell on purpose so I don’t have to ever issue an apology for my personal attacks.

  Drew has not only been a friend since but an ally in other personal shit that I wouldn’t have known how to deal with otherwise. And I still give him shit about boating with Gary Busey. He takes it well. When I had the drunken moxie to ask him to write a foreword for this book, he asked me if he was being punked. I told him I was sincere and that I would let him read it first. If he has in fact read the book—or what I would do and just read the parts about me—I will guarantee that his foreword will be completely unedited and give him free range on returning the ball-busting I gave him on that special. I’ll bet money that he’s too much of a gentleman. Almost a dare.

  Both Jon Taffer and Dr. Drew appearances were the direct result of me publicly shitting all over them. Let’s see if the next story gets me booked as a late-night talk show guest.

  When Jimmy Fallon first showed up on the LA scene he was a humble, sweet-faced, friendly young kid with absolutely no discernable jokes. And he killed. It was bewildering. His entire act consisted of him going onstage with a guitar and a troll doll. He set up the premise in a disturbing British accent that he was holding auditions for the jingle for the new commercial for the troll doll. Then he would go through a series of impressions of the hit songs of the day and to his credit, they were spot on. They just had no jokes.

  “Okay, first up is U2!”

  He’d then play U2’s “Desire” and simply put “Troll Doll” in place of the chorus. “Desire” became “Troll Doll.”

  “Next up, the Counting Crows.”

  Their song “Mr. Jones (and Me)” was cleverly rephrased into “Troll Doll (and Me).”

  Spot on.

  People literally fell out of their chairs. It was like suburban comedy jam. Folks heaving in tears and burying their faces between their knees, unable to breathe. Becker and I would sit in the back of the room and stare blankly at each other wondering what the fuck we missed. I’d seen comedians do the gag where, after someone left the front row to use the bathroom, they would get the audience in on a prank.

  “When she gets back from the bathroom, I’m going to tell a joke that ends with ‘And that’s why my grandma doesn’t eat Laffy Taffy!’ It won’t make any sense but you guys will all fall apart laughing and she’ll wonder what the hell is wrong with her for not getting it!”

  That prank never failed to kill. That is what it felt like to watch Jimmy Fallon bring those rubes to their knees. Like we were being set up in an elaborate ruse where the joke was on us. Fallon didn’t have a single punch line. Not even the troll doll made any sense. He could have done the exact same act with a pumpkin or a hacky sack. It didn’t even have to follow any rhyming or syllabic structure. It was just bad and I’d never seen audiences laugh harder.

  There was no question the kid had some talents and nobody was more affable or polite, no big ego whatsoever. You�
�d think he was just as confounded by the crowd’s reaction to his lack of punch lines as every other comedian was.

  Becker and I were having this same conversation after one of those shows with an industry gal we knew from the Improv named Randi. It was at some Hollywood party full of Hollywood types at some Hollywood upscale bistro that I believe was in Hollywood. Jimmy was there and his arrival was the impetus to our motherfucking him behind his back. We were all in agreement that he had zero substance and nothing resembling a joke in his stupid act and we collectively scratched our heads at the phenomenon.

  We then split up to go see if there was anybody cooler to talk to as is the Hollywood party norm.

  Later, we ran back into Randi.

  “I just wanted to let you guys know that I told Jimmy what you guys said about him because I’ve been telling him the same thing, that he needs to really write more.”

  Noooooo! Why the fuck would she tell him that we said that? Especially knowing what a soft-hearted, meek little kid he is. Why would she be so cruel to us by ratting us out?

  “Oh. You did know that I’m Jimmy’s manager, didn’t you?”

  No, Randi. We did not know that. Now we’d have to avoid him not only at this party but in life in general. That lasted about ten minutes before Becker and I ran into him. I cleared it all up with a meandering, “Hey listen, man… sorry but… you know, I was just sayin’ is all.”

  To which he responded with a shuffle-footed: “Oh yeah… don’t worry… I get it I guess.” It was a good heart to heart.

  I still find Jimmy Fallon intolerably unfunny to the point where I have to fast-forward through even a short commercial for his show. I am still astonished as to why people laugh at him. I’m sure he is still a fantastic human being, which is far more important. I’ve heard gossip that he has substance abuse problems, some common ground that would make him more endearing to me. Personally, I have to drink in order to repeat material I’m too tired of saying. His material sucks the first time. I would understand if he had to abuse drugs or alcohol.