You won’t find anything in this book about me being in Grand Theft Auto. That’s because I’m not. I never spent any time at all sweating my balls off in a CGI suit for the purposes of being a character performing at the comedy club in this game. For endless hours, only to never be used in the game. And if I did, I would have had to sign a nondisclosure agreement saying I couldn’t talk about it anyway. So stop asking. Because that never happened.
Yes, I did mention in my first book that my brother and I missed our chance to snort my father’s ashes mixed with cocaine. We’d had the idea but never got around to it before Keith Richards made news for doing that very same thing. If Bingo, Chaille and I later decided to do the same thing with my mother’s ashes, I don’t remember. If I don’t remember that it’s because we were supposed to be snorting those ashes mixed with the ashes of a famous person’s mother’s ashes, all mixed in the same amphetamine soup, well I can’t really recall. Perhaps it turned out that a bevy of that famous guy’s henchmen, stooges and apple polishers couldn’t find an Allen wrench small enough to loosen his mother’s ashes from the amulet he kept them in around his neck. Eventually, I don’t remember us just bogarting my own mother and blow up into our sinuses.
I do, however, remember later that night being jacked up at the Comedy Store watching Marc Maron in the Original Room. I saw him in the hallway after his set and I was obviously gakked when I told him that I enjoyed his show. My face was contorting through a million emotions. He asked if I was okay. I considered trying to explain what had just happened but settled on just shaking my head and telling him that it had just been a weird night.
He stared at me more confounded than my own spinning head looked.
“Really? What’s a weird night to you??”
I didn’t try to explain. Because none of that happened.
THE INTERNET IS FOREVER
I mentioned earlier that you can find bad “doug stanhope tattoos” in a Google search. I see them and I hope that one day the poor bastard will get it removed or covered up. And then I realize that he really can’t. Because he put it on the Internet. No laser or portrait of a screaming eagle will ever take it away.
Too often I have first-time comedians email me, asking me to look at their first open-mic set that they have put on YouTube. I cannot imagine the horror of any comedian from my pre-Internet era finding their open-mic days now available for anyone to see. Or perhaps I can, as someone posted gut-churning awful VHS-era video they’d found of me only six months into comedy. Don’t post anything publicly without knowing that it’s more permanent than a tattoo. You may have done well onstage in relation to your lack of experience, and your peers might recognize that, but the general Internet public will not.
Your gamble at fame may come back to ruin the day job that you never had the chance to quit. That old YouTube clip of you onstage, saying that women are nothing more than cum caskets isn’t on your resume but it’s on your permanent Internet record. The crowd might have laughed but not hard enough to keep you in comedy. The human resources department at Procter & Gamble didn’t laugh at all and fired you for it. Only wager what you can afford to lose. Michael Richards had already cashed all of the checks before his incredibly flawed choice to repeatedly scream “nigger” at a heckler. He weighed his options. The Internet may be ever lasting but not as powerful as reruns of Seinfeld.
I had no choice in the matter. I started comedy before there was an Internet and I recorded material that I could not have known would be heard outside of where I thought it should be heard. Sometimes it worked in my favor, sometimes not.
Nobody will tell you that you have enough fame. If you actually found your fifteen minutes, you’ll have a bank of people telling you that they can get you twenty more for a small percentage and that eventually they will get you a full hour of fame, so long as you put your trust in them. You can never be famous enough for people.
Your fans themselves will demand that they need you to be more famous and fuck you if you don’t want it yourself. They want it for them. You are their vicarious dream of what they could have done had they only taken more chances. You are famous because they want to be you and they want to be more of it.
Never trust the fans.
Ricky Williams got famous because he ran around with a football and he did it pretty well. It made the fatheads in the stands very happy. He also liked to smoke pot and hated attention. That doesn’t jibe well in the NFL. Or with the fans. After too many failed piss tests, subjugating to too many suspensions and having to answer too many questions, Ricky decided to just quit. The ire of the fans was that he’d quit right at the beginning of training camp for the Miami Dolphins.
He’d let down the team.
Dave Chappelle walked out on a multimillion-dollar contract because he felt that his personal mental stability and moral compass were more important than the money and empty accolades the rest of us are trained to strive for. Ricky walked out as well and became my hero. He wanted to enjoy his life more than he needed money and fame, a concept too inconceivable for people to fathom. He didn’t need the posse, the Cristal in the overhyped strip club and the fleet of Escalades that you wanted him to need. He didn’t like the overbearing scrutiny from the press and the fans. He liked playing football but he also liked being at peace with himself in life—part of which was getting high—so he chose that over the grand expectations of a stadium full of drunken mastodons, each one using sport as a diversion from their own desolate existence and each one a coach and a critic.
What a dick Ricky Williams was.
He quit and then he disappeared. Several months later, a writer for Esquire tracked him down living in a tent in an Australian campground for seven dollars a night. He studied holistic medicine and found some peace. Whatever could be tested in his piss was his own business. The fans who barked for his hide for walking away from the game would be the same people who’d tell you that they’d quit their own jobs in a second if they ever hit the lottery. Ricky had won the equivalent of several. Like most lottery winners, he found that it made his life more problematic.
I remember when Ricky Williams walked away. I did a bit about it at the time—one of those painful pieces of material that you are so passionate about but that you know has a hospice shelf life—where I spelled all of this out. There is nothing more pleasing in comedy than going against the heavy stream of public opinion and winning them over. Not only did I take the side of Ricky Williams, I suggested that Ricky Williams should have waited until the regular season to retire. That he should have waited and then quit right there on the field in the middle of a play, if only to drive his point home even harder. He should have waited until the middle of a clutch fourth-and-one possession while the quarterback was milking his barked calls, trying to pull the defense off-side.
Hut one.
Hut two.
“I quit. I think I’d rather get high.”
Then the announcers, astounded as Williams removed his helmet and his gentle stroll to the exit, would be confused and shouting, anticipating the penalty flag that would inevitably be thrown. Ricky would remain nonplussed.
“Nope. That’s your flag now. I quit. I’m out of the penalty flag business. You’ll have to mark off that loss of yardage at my house.”
I suggested that Ricky should have kept his uniform and purchased season tickets, front row just behind the Dolphins bench and sit there every game, suited up and high as fuck. Every goal-line stand his team would look up at him, groveling for him to enter the game.
“Oh, shit. I can’t, man. I am waaaay too high!”
At the same time I was doing this bit, I was juggling the same issues in my own head. I didn’t know if what I was doing was based on what my handlers were telling me to do, what my few fans expected or what I really wanted. At that point in my life I really just wanted to walk off the field in the middle of the game. I’d felt like that before and I’ve felt like that since. I just never had the balls.
R
ecently the long-since-retired Ricky Williams found an old bootleg from a Sirius XM recording of that bit on the Internet. He thanked me that at least one person knew what he was going through at the time and had his back, even if he only found it twelve years later. It was one of the most career-confirming moments I’ve had. I felt validated.
When it was recorded, I couldn’t imagine that it would ever be heard beyond the audience of eighty or so people that were in the room. At that point I didn’t even believe anyone really listened to satellite radio, much less that it would one day be heard by Ricky Williams himself. All I remember from that night was that I drank ninety-seven dollars’ worth of booze. I remember that because it was unheard of for a club to charge you for the booze that you, the comedian, were there to sell. It was like a football player getting charged for the Gatorade he dumped over the coach’s head.
But Ricky Williams eventually heard that recording and that made my day. It still makes my day.
The flip side to that coin was when I was recording my second CD, Something to Take the Edge Off, in 1999, in front of sixty-some people in Houston. At the time there was a spate of premiere NFL quarterbacks who had children with disorders or diseases of varying degrees of gravity or neglect in funding. Boomer Esiason, Dan Marino, Jim Kelly. Mark Rypien. Football Sundays were chock-full of these athletes doing public awareness commercials for their respective causes. I was doing a bit about being terrified at the thought of what type of child I would produce given the amount of abuse and toxins I’d exposed my body to, given that these NFL guys were in prime physical condition and even they couldn’t avoid kids with disabilities.
Writing it now in that way sounds so much less distasteful than the recorded version, where I’d list all of the players’ names and mimic any given commercial with “Hi, My name is Doug Flutie and this is my boy Wacky! He was born without bones!”
The bit went on to address that I could never be the giving, dedicated parent these athletes were, and that I’d drop that baby at the closest church doorstep with a note in his little flipper hand.
“I couldn’t be a responsible enough parent if my kid were born with a new suit and a full-time job, much less fish gills or an ingrown head.”
There was no way of me knowing that one day this new Internet thing would take off and the audience of sixty people in Houston would one day become an audience of anyone with Google. YouTube didn’t exist back then and I couldn’t imagine elite NFL players stealing shit on Napster.
The Doug Flutie commercial at the time was raising awareness about the autism that afflicted his child. His boy did, in fact, have bones and did not have flipper hands or an ingrown head, not that there’s anything wrong with either. Yet I wouldn’t want him to come across that bit now on the Internet. Unlike Ricky Williams, I would definitely hide from Doug Flutie if I saw him in a bar. Just in case, I’ll mention here that his www.flutiefoundation.org helps children with autism. I’ve found no charity for ingrown heads, but perhaps I’ll start one when I’m famous and have to apologize for a lot.
RETARDED
re·tard·ed
/rә’tärdәd/
adjective
adjective: retarded
dated offensive
less advanced in mental, physical, or social development than is usual for one’s age.
Informal offensive
very foolish or stupid.
“in retrospect, it was a totally retarded idea”
—Google search
Here, both descriptions apply. The first definition will be apparent in the story. The second applies to me posting it in the first place. I was searching my archives looking for a related story. I found this update that I put on my website in 2002. If a vague through line of this book is why I’m not famous, there couldn’t be a better example than this. If I were to post this on my website today, I’d be assassinated, castigated or more likely, still be unnoticed.
Here it is unedited.
Here’s a comedy rule that shouldn’t have to be spelled out but evidently does. If you don’t have any limbs—don’t heckle. I’m with Andy Andrist, who is perhaps the funniest person on the top side of the earth, at the Acme Comedy club in Minneapolis last week. Andy tells me he’s worried about his extensive “fat people getting handicapped parking/people in wheelchairs shouldn’t get special privileges because a lot of them are in chairs because they are fuckups” bit due to a couple of patrons who are wheelchair bound in the crowd, one being little more than a torso.
The bit is absolutely ripping funny and can be worked so as not to offend, but it’s still tricky to pull off. Andy is going to do it anyway because Andy doesn’t give a fuck but before he can even venture into it, the torso starts blurting shit out and throwing the room into funeral-parlor silence. That’s what happens when freaks heckle. If you—the regular drunk-off-the-street guy—starts bellowing out shit, trying to be the life of the party, then you know what to expect and will be verbally pummeled. But when a mop-top inebriate with ten-inch stubs for limbs decides to be the asshole for the evening it turns into a black hole of comedy because the comic can’t say shit back without the crowd looking at him like he’s gut punting a crack baby.
This has happened to me on many occasions. There was the time where the midget couple brought their retarded son to the front row of a show at Jokers in Dayton. The more I tried to fight out of the hole, the worse I made it. The worst was when I used to work at the other club in Minneapolis years back. There was a regular group of rubberheads who would be brought in now and then under what I assumed to be some kind of “laughter is the best medicine” program. I assume this because these people weren’t just a little bit touched. They were full-blown butternoggins who hadn’t a clue where they were or why they were there. So you’d walk onto the stage, oblivious to their presence and right in the middle of a setup you hear a terrifying “DAAAAAAAAAARFPH!” from the back of the room. You don’t know if you’re being heckled or if you have one ball hanging out of your pants.
If you’re lucky, you spot the problem, give a shrug and a wink to the audience and try to plow through. But good luck if they happen to be behind the lights somewhere and you go into knee-jerk heckler mode and spew out your best “Hey, Chico, why don’t you go eat a bag of dicks, you fucking retard!” Now you wonder why the audience hasn’t started yelping approval as they usually would, so you cup your hand over your eyes and see that you’ve just publicly berated a low-watt gurgler in a high-back chair who begins to break the icy silence with guttural sobs.
Try pulling out of that hole. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were really a retard” won’t get the audience back on your side. Skip your closer and head for the farthest barroom.
Am I saying retards shouldn’t be allowed in comedy clubs?
Yes. Yes I am.
I’m not saying it should be a law nor would I post a sign, but use some common sense for fuck sake. The caretakers/handlers who brought them would say that it was good therapy for them to be around laughter and smiling people. Well, good for them. Put ’em in a circle and throw a burning raccoon in the middle. They’ll all laugh and smile for hours. Instead you put them here where they’ve turned laughter and smiling people into awkward silence and people who wish they were at the movies instead.
I applaud the people who work with people afflicted with these disabilities and can think of no job that is more selfless or requires more patience and understanding. That’s why I didn’t take that job and why I don’t want you to put me in that position against my will.
The case with Andy is different. This person had all of his mental faculties (save for what he drank away that night); he just didn’t have arms or legs. And he was a belligerent asshole.
Andy played it perfectly and just gave benign jabs in return until he could feel that the audience had spent its full supply of empathy. Then, among other things, he challenged him to a race up stairs and closed by saying he now understood why God punishes some people.
&
nbsp; I could still make the same argument using less derogatory language. But if I had been famous when I posted this, I would have lost my Disney contract, my Burger King commercials and all hopes of ever being president. Or at least the first two.
There is no logical argument against how Andy dealt with the Torso. Even the Torso loved it as all hecklers do, thinking their assholery made the show so much better. Torsos are no worse than the average legged person.
As for my argument that “retards” shouldn’t be allowed at comedy shows, well, I guess I can see where that could come across as somewhat caustic. If I were stating that case in a court of law, I would have taken a less vitriolic and more eloquent approach. I would have simply stated that perhaps there were venues and activities that might be better suited and more enjoyable for these fine folks.
I searched my archives for that old post to tell a different story of a girl who had been a caretaker for a “low-watt gurgler in a high-back chair” and brought him to a show in Portland. He did the same discordant hollering out that I described in that original web posting. By this time, I was better equipped for dealing with the unforeseen at shows. I saw the girl at the bar later and we talked. She said that her charge—the guy in the chair—was unable to speak or hear. She explained that she brought him to the comedy club because he indeed liked to be around laughing people. When other people were laughing, he would laugh. I had no problem with that as, unlike those old Knuckleheads days, I’d now developed enough chops to deal with dicey situations like that. I understood and I felt some compassion. She and I spent the weekend together.
Back then her name was Amy Bingaman. Now we call her “Bingo.” And she’s a fucking retard.
You don’t even know what love is!
This Is Not Fame Page 27