Captive Audience

by Dave Reidy

  Without wanting to, I eventually connected one open-mike voice with a name. Tony Cascarino took the Basement Laughs stage every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to tell unrelated jokes in a clipped yuppie patter. At first I thought he might have been trying to lampoon the character-less, story-less, soulless comics of stand-up’s Dark Age. But after a couple of weeks, it became clear to me that Tony was emulating them in earnest. He was doing what he thought a comedian was supposed to do.

  And he was doing it badly.

  When Tony got nervous, the yuppie patter fell apart and his Italian city-kid accent took its place. One night he did a bit—it could’ve been a story, but it wasn’t—about working at a dot-com. “The touchy-feeliest place I ever worked,” Tony said. “First day on the job, they showed me to my desk, pulled out an ergonomic desk chair and said, ‘Make yourself dot-comfortable.’” That line got one chuckle, probably from some guy who couldn’t stand the silence after a dud. It was the only laugh Tony got that night. And by the time he delivered a joke about being fired via mix tape, Tony’s yuppie sounded like a goombah caricature.

  After Tony had been doing open mikes for about a month, some of the Basement Laughs regulars started cheering raucously each time he was introduced. They’d quiet down to let him begin, but then, as Tony tried desperately to set up his first punch line, one of them would shout his name, and the others would join in, whooping and clapping. When they had gotten to him, the cheering section would clam up and let Tony bake under the lights in silence. In the absence of any humor on stage, the Basement Laughs regulars were supplying their own—making Tony the joke.

  Yet, in the face of certain harassment, Tony Cascarino still went on every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday night. He had no local following to build on, no headlining gig or tour or TV deal on the horizon. But he kept coming back.

  Any comedian will tell you that you’ve got to want it bad to get good. Tony wanted it bad.

  If I had been able to see his expression and his body language, I would have known for certain. Upstairs in my apartment, all I could do was guess. Maybe he was heading his hecklers off at the pass. Maybe his confidence was shot before he took the stage. Whatever the reason, Tony Cascarino didn’t draw from his dot-com and cubicle material that Tuesday night. And from the moment he took the mike, he spoke like the Italian city kid I assumed he really was.

  “All right everybody, how we doin’?”

  Tony’s heckler friends screamed his name, but he spoke right over them.

  “That’s great. Excellent. So I was driving down the Interstate the other day on the way to my ma’s house and I saw this billboard for Tuggzie’s. You guys know Tuggzie’s? Home of the Tallburger and whatnot?”

  Over the murmurs and claps that indicated most of the audience had indeed heard of the hamburger chain, two people shouted Tony’s name. He paid them no mind.

  “So I see this billboard for Tuggzie’s and it says, ‘Sooner or later you know you want it.’”

  Tony paused. I imagined him shrugging in confusion.

  “‘Sooner or later you know you want it,’” he repeated. “What the hell is ‘it?’ There’s no photo of the Tallburger or a Tuggzie’s shake. It looked to me like the ad guys had cribbed the line from Date Rape for Dummies. If that line gets people to buy burgers, maybe GM should use ‘But I bought you dinner!’ to sell cars!”

  For the rest of the set, Tony told broad, bad jokes like that one. But, for the first time, he didn’t tell them the way he thought they were supposed to be told. He told them in a voice he was able to pull off—his own. With the city-kid accent and the driving-to-ma’s-house setup, Tony had managed to inhabit, well, a stereotype. While I knew that the odds were stacked against Tony ever getting from stereotype to character, he had already come further than I had ever thought possible.

  I found myself rooting for Tony, mostly for selfish reasons—I was a captive audience and I wanted a good show. It didn’t have to be perfect, and it didn’t have to be Tony, but I wanted ten minutes—just ten minutes—of character and story from a comic with even a journeyman’s sense of timing. The night I got that, I would be able to listen to Newhart when the jam stopped pumping at four a.m. But tonight—this morning—I could only shuffle my slippered feet over the hardwood floor, crawl into bed, and wait for sleep.

  The next night, a Wednesday, Tony took two steps back. He performed the same jokes with tweaks (“maybe GM should use ‘Look at the way you’re dressed!’ to sell cars!”) that failed to improve them. His only new joke had something having to do with an HIV-positive Muppet and Kermit the Frog giving warts to a character named Elmo. I gave Tony the benefit of the doubt and assumed I hadn’t watched enough Sesame Street to get the joke. Judging from the groans, the audience got the joke and hated it.

  The following Monday, I waited patiently for the emcee to introduce Tony. By ten-thirty, he had not been announced. I hadn’t gotten the ten solid minutes I needed from the prop comic who had headlined the previous weekend, and none of tonight’s open mikers had come close. I would have taken the ten minutes from anyone capable of giving them, but as the emcee took the mike at ten to eleven to introduce the final open miker of the night, I realized that I wanted those ten minutes from Tony, as much for him as for myself.

  “How about another round of applause for Jeremy Folsom,” the emcee said.

  The audience obliged the request mechanically.

  “All right,” he continued. “Thanks from all of us here at Basement Laughs for coming out tonight. In just a few minutes, local sensation Nick Jovanovich will be out here for you.”

  More polite applause, plus some whooping from those I assumed to be Nick Jovanovich’s friends and family.

  “So stick around for that. We’ll have open mikes tomorrow and Wednesday night, followed by more from Nick Jovanovich. And on Thursday night, we’ll welcome Jake Teelander back to the Basement Laughs stage.”

  One man whooped.

  “Then on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Basement Laughs will have two shows, at eight-thirty and eleven, with Brian Posehn.”

  The audience seemed to recognize the name and cheered approvingly.

  “He’ll be fresh off an appearance on the Late Late Show, so get your tickets as you leave tonight,” he continued. “It’s going to be a great show. Doors open at seven-thirty.

  “OK! Once again, thank you for coming out to Basement Laughs. We’ll hope to see you this weekend. And now, without further ado, our final open-mike performer of the evening. Ladies and gentleman, let’s have a big hand for Mr. Tony Cascarino.”

  As Tony took the stage to the faux excitement of the heckling regulars, I scooted up to the edge of my recliner. I had no real notion of the club’s layout, but I imagined Tony was standing almost directly below me. I stared at the floor and listened.

  “All right, everybody, how we doin’ tonight?” Tony began. Even as the applause died, one guy was still shouting his name. “That’s terrific. All right. So I go over to my ma’s house for lunch on Saturday like I usually do, and when I get there, there’s this woman at the table. A woman besides my mom, all right, smart ass?”

  Tony had put a little menace in his voice for this last line and had gotten a small laugh. I hadn’t heard any smart-ass comments from the audience. Had Tony invented a heckler?

  “So my ma introduces this woman to me, says her name is Rita and that she’ll be joining us for lunch. Now Rita’s nice, a few years younger than me, maybe, and attractive. And, given who I am and who my ma is, I’m smelling setup, right?”

  The audience murmured its agreement.

  “Right. So we make small talk for a while, and then ma says she has to go upstairs for a minute, which she never does with food on the stove. So she leaves Rita and me alone.” Tony paused for a beat. “And Rita goes to guns. I mean, she starts grilling me, asking me about my job, what school I went to, what kind of car I drive. Can you believe that? What kind of car I drive? I’m like, ‘What is this, L.A.? I drive a Cro
wn Vic and it gets me to my ma’s place and Soldier Field and back. What else do you need in Chicago?’”

  I rolled my eyes and sat back in my chair, but the audience cheered. With the dig at L.A. and the reference to the home of the Chicago Bears, Tony had gone for easy affirmation and gotten it. I was disappointed, but, given the kind of sets Tony had been having, I could hardly blame him for pandering.

  Then it occurred to me that the rah-rah Chicago stuff might have a more legitimate purpose: what if Tony was trying to put some flesh on the bones of his Italian city-kid stereotype? Though that reasoning had been (quite literally) imposed on his act from above, it seemed possible—for the first time—that Tony might actually know what the hell he was doing.

  “Then Rita asks me what my type is,” Tony continued. “And I’m like, ‘O-positive.’”

  A few audience members snorted.

  “That’s about how funny she thought it was, too.”

  That got a laugh, but Tony spoke over it, maintaining his rhythm, showing a glimmer of the confidence the good ones had.

  “But she keeps after it and says, ‘Come on. What’s your type?’ So I try to be honest with her. I say, ‘Well, you know, I have a few things I like—dark brown hair, bright blue eyes, a woman with some heft to her—but I don’t really have a type.’ I try to leave it at that, but she tells me to go on, and I say, ‘I guess it’s like those Supreme Court judges said about pornography. I know it when I see it.’ And, frankly, she likes the line. And the porno reference doesn’t throw her, which is nice.”

  More laughter.

  “So she’s sending all the right signals—putting her hair behind her ears, smiling, all that good stuff. But my brain’s working overtime on my type, the Supreme Court, all kinds of things I don’t usually think about, and I say, out loud, but mostly to myself, ‘That’s not the only way my type is like pornography.”

  This busted them up. Legitimately. I felt the laughter rumble through my chair.

  “Anyway,” Tony said over an exhalation, “she left after that.”

  And the laughter swelled again.

  “So my ma comes down as I’m finishing my sausage and peppers and says, ‘Where’s Rita?’ And I say, ‘She left, Ma.’ Of course, she immediately assumes I said something to blow it, and she’s clickin’ her tongue at me and mumbling under her breath, either swearin’ at me or prayin’ for me, I can never tell.”

  The laughter for that line was knowing, as if the audience could see Tony’s mother behaving in just the way he’d described.

  “So I go over to the pot to get another sausage and she says to me, ‘How many of those have you had?’ And I say, ‘Just one, Ma.’ Then she looks at my glass and says, ‘How many glasses of wine?’ And this hurts me deeply.”

  The audience laughed at the disingenuousness of the remark. I pictured Tony putting his hand over his heart as he said it, and smiled.

  “So I say, ‘Ma! Come on! Just one! It’s like you say, all things in moderation, right?’ And she says, ‘That doesn’t mean you should be drunk half the time!’”

  It was a hackneyed line, but because he gave it to the mother—the mother character!—it got a laugh.

  Before the laugh had died, Tony said, “You guys have been great. G’night.”

  And with that, the set was over.

  I was too astonished to applaud. The material was C-level at best, but Tony had converted his Italian stereotype into a real character by telling a story. And he hadn’t sacrificed timing to anything, not even to the laughs he’d surely been desperate to hear in such quantity and quality.

  At three-thirty, when the last one out locked Basement Laughs up for the night, I kept my seat for a moment, relishing a silence I could finally fill. Then I pulled The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart from its sleeve, laid it gently on the turntable and set it spinning. I counted thirty-three revolutions, then put the needle in the groove at the record’s edge. Even before I heard Newhart introduced by the Tidelands emcee, I knew how I would play Lincoln that night. After all this time, Abe must have missed the sound of his press agent’s voice almost as badly as I did.

  The next night, Tony did the same lunch-at-ma’s routine and the hecklers let him have it. I listened with my head in my hands as he rushed the setup and laughed nervously at his own jokes. Before Tony could deliver the pornography punch line, a woman shouted it out. Then I heard the bassy thump of the mike hitting the floor, followed by the voice of the emcee announcing the next open miker. He had bombed before, but Tony had never walked out in the middle of a set.

  After Basement Laughs closed for the evening, I played two cuts from The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back. But I couldn’t listen to Newhart—I couldn’t even hear him because I was replaying Tony’s miserable set in my head over and over, continually reliving the moment he left the stage. That Tony had reached his breaking point was clear. But had he stalked off defiantly, with his chin set and his head held high, or had he shielded crying eyes from his tormentors?

  I knew that the empathy I had developed for Tony was the stuff of the amateur aficionado, not the seasoned connoisseur, but that knowledge didn’t help me. I felt what I felt. And Tony’s disaster, so close on the heels of his triumphant metamorphosis, destroyed what little of my routine I had managed to salvage.

  Dear Tony,

  Congratulations on your set this past Monday evening. It was very well done. Your development of story and character has helped your act immensely, and the many laughs you received were well deserved.

  I understand that when you performed last night (Tuesday), things did not go as well. Though such an experience is certainly not any fun, I hope you can take some comfort in its universality. All standups—even the great ones—have had a set like that one. They never forget it, but they get past it.

  I am not a stand-up comedian. I cannot take the stage, as you do, so I offer the following advice in a spirit of humility. As you continue to develop story and character in your act, you are wise to use open-mike nights as a testing ground. However, when tweaking your material, you might consider working in front of audiences less familiar with it. If, in making the open-mike circuit, you decide that performing at Basement Laughs still has value for you, I would encourage you, by all means, to return. I would certainly be glad if you did. But I humbly suggest that, at this point in time, your act would be best served by your taking it elsewhere.

  Working Chicago clubs on weeknights, you are not likely to encounter many comics worth emulating. Please find the enclosed three albums, each one worthy of emulation from beginning to end. If you listen with an ear for character and story, I’m confident you’ll hear something worth applying to your own material.

  Congratulations again, and good luck.

  Sincerely,

  James Ryan

  I asked my father to set the package outside the Basement Laughs door at the end of his next Saturday visit. The moment after I handed him the large manila envelope, I grabbed it back and scratched out the return address I had written in the upper left corner. It seemed suddenly important that no one, least of all Tony, know where I lived. My proximity to Basement Laughs invited all sorts of unpleasant questions, none of which I felt much like answering.

  As I watched my father walk to his car without the envelope, I realized that I had sent the records around which I had built my life, in care of the club that had nearly ruined it, to a comedian I might never hear again.

  I quickly plotted to undo what I had done. No one would arrive to open the club for another half-hour. I could retrieve the records and the letter without seeing anyone, and without anyone seeing me. But at the thought of crossing my threshold and stepping down those stairs, I gagged. I burst through the door—the bathroom door—fell to my knees and clutched the rim of the toilet.

  The package might as well have been halfway around the world. It was outside my apartment.

  I spent the next several nights anxiously waiting for the performers to be announced—w
aiting for Tony. I would wonder if he were down there, trying to stay out of sight at the bar or a back table, listening, convincing himself that the material he had been working on was as good as—maybe even better than—anything he heard from the comics performing that night. Then, when the show was over and Tony hadn’t performed, I would wait out the music, trying to muster the will to get up from my chair and walk back to bed.

  When he delivered the groceries the following Saturday, my father got the sense that something was wrong—something more than the usual. As he left, he announced he would be stopping by each Tuesday and Friday evening, in addition to his regular Saturday visit. Even with nothing to do, I resented the intrusion, but I didn’t have the will to stop it.

  He would arrive around seven-thirty, dressed in the gray or dark blue suit he had worn to work that day. Once I had let him in, he would not allow me to reclaim my seat until I’d taken a shower. Meanwhile, he would set up a folding chair (the recliner was the only chair in my living room) and open the newspaper, which he would spend most of his visit reading. Though on occasion he would have to raise his voice over the music warming up the Basement Laughs crowd, my father never mentioned the club or the noise.

  Damp and exhausted, I would return to the recliner to face an oral account of the previous day’s events.

  “Alabama was hit by a hurricane,” my father said one Tuesday.

  “Huh.”

  “Hurricane Cameron.” He paused, reading. “You think that’s a good name for a fighter?”

  “Sure,” I said, rubbing my eyes.

  “Heavyweight or lightweight?”

  I leaned my head back and let it loll toward the wall.

  “Jim?”

  “Yeah,” I said, turning my head a few degrees in my father’s direction.