They invited me to go drinking with them a few times to a place called Teabags on Tenth Avenue. One night when I was there, one of the guys said to me, “Whatever you do, Darrell, don’t hit on a girl here.”
I wasn’t in the habit of doing that anyway, but out of curiosity I asked, “Why?”
“Every person here has a gun,” he said.
Where I’m from in the South, everyone had a gun. What’s the big deal? I didn’t think any more about it. It would be fifteen years before I learned the truth.
When I wasn’t slinging burgers and gin, I got cast in a few plays. And these weren’t just any plays. I was going up against New York competition, which is a pretty good indication that you’re a decent actor. I did a few off-Broadway productions, which were great. But more often, I landed out-of-town summer stock plays upstate or in Rhode Island. Those were great, too, but each time I got one, I’d have to give up my apartment and my job, which was a huge pain in the ass when I came back to town in the fall and had to start all over again.
Also, I was drinking. A lot.
Sometimes the craving was worse than any desire for food or water or sex. When it hit, all of a sudden—bang—any plans for the next few days were off the rails. That super interesting woman who agreed to have dinner with me tonight? Not gonna happen. I remember walking up First Avenue one morning with a quart bottle of Tanqueray gin in my hand, and I saw Jackie Onassis walking toward me, and all I was thinking was that I’d have to cancel my date for that night because I had the craving.
Finally, about five years into my attempt at making it in the big city, I realized I was sick of myself and my life. I said, Fuck it. I was done with New York and acting.
At twenty-seven years old, with no money and no prospects, I moved back in with my parents in Melbourne. They must have been so proud.
Back in Florida, I found a job at an automated radio station in Vero Beach pushing buttons three times an hour. That gave me access to their production studios, which I used six nights a week for well over a year to practice voices of cartoon characters, sitcom stars, celebrities of every stripe. Given how much people seemed to like them, I thought I would see if I could expand my library.
I didn’t think I had as much talent as other people, so I figured I would have to work harder than everyone else. I’d be sitting there in the middle of the night working on my Porky Pig and saying to myself, “My competition cannot be doing this. They cannot be working this hard.”
There was one other perk to working there: one of the producers told me that pitcher Bob Feller, the first American Legion alum elected to the Hall of Fame with the most wins in Cleveland Indians history, would pitch to members of the media. Even though I was a button-pusher, I qualified, so I made a beeline for Holman Stadium. When it was my turn at bat, I one-hopped one off the wall in left field.
Feller said, “You got a nice swing, son.”
I didn’t want to fuck things up, and I was afraid my drinking would do just that, so I went to my first rehab. A doctor at Heritage Health Clinic in Sebastian, Florida, decided I was manic-depressive and schizophrenic, which seemed to make my parents rather happy. It reassured them that my drinking was no fault of theirs. (Other doctors would later tell me I was bipolar or had borderline personality disorder, and even multiple personality disorder. It would be nearly twenty years before an ER doctor in New York would finally make the right diagnosis. But I’ll get to that.)
When I got out of the Heritage Health Clinic, I made a decision that I was either going to starve to death, or I was going to do voices for a living.
I heard that a radio station in Orlando, BJ105—Howard’s Meats to BJ105, my life was turning into one long dick joke—was looking for a guy who could do voices. This was the advent of the “morning zoo” concept in radio, which Scott Shannon started in Tampa. They always had guys who could do voices on those programs, so I sent them a tape. By then, I was sharp. It was the most I’d ever improved in anything in my life, and I got the gig. Then I started doing voices for radio stations in Phoenix and Detroit. I had a nice apartment in Winter Park. I had a nice car. I was going to AA meetings and keeping clean. I even sponsored someone in AA, a young lawyer named Dean, and we became friends. Life was pretty good.
I did my first stand-up at a club called Bonkerz, owned by Joe and John Sanfelippo, who later became my managers for a brief period. It was an open mike night, and I had three minutes. I did impressions of Pee-wee Herman, Eddie Murphy, Porky Pig, Popeye, Elmer Fudd, Donald Duck. The sound of strangers laughing triggered something in my already addiction-prone psyche. I was hooked.
The other thing I did when I got out of detox was go to a party with some of my old friends and drink. I told everyone that I’d been in the hospital for stomach problems, gastroenteritis or some shit.
Frank Facciobene said, “You didn’t have stomach pains, did you?”
“No.”
“Let me have that,” he said, and took my cup.
The second he walked away, I headed straight back to the bar.
After a year of doing open mike nights at Bonkerz, I started driving to clubs all around the state. Every big city had a comedy club with an open mike night, and if you got there early enough, you could get three minutes onstage. I managed to get four or five sets a week by doing Orlando, Cocoa Beach, Tampa, Miami, and Las Palmas. It was a lot of driving, a lot of time alone in the car, but I made the most of those hours in the car, listening to tapes of people whose voices I was doing.
While I was still at the radio station in Vero Beach, I got this idea from AA that if I made small, easily attainable improvements in the impressions I was learning, over time they would add up to major improvements. I thought of distinctions in the things that I learned, a tweak of how a vowel was pronounced, adding a nasal twang, moving a sound from the back of my throat to the front. I might make a single improvement a week, but that’s fifty-two improvements at the end of a year. I never stopped thinking about it, and I never stopped trying. Tony Robbins talked about it as well. I never stopped listening to tapes. Between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-nine, until the day I walked into my audition at 30 Rock, I drove all over the country, playing tapes, experimenting with my voice, with my tongue, with my teeth, with my diaphragm, with my breathing.
I also worked hard at writing decent jokes, but a lot of my stuff was cheap. Gay jokes. Fucking jokes. Time-of-the-month jokes. Dick jokes. Audiences would howl with laughter when I did the underhanded salesman Mr. Haney from Green Acres, a 1960s sitcom starring Eddie Albert as a New York attorney who abandons city life to become a farmer and moves to the country with his glamorous wife, Lisa, played by Eva Gabor. Pat Buttram, who played Mr. Haney on the show, had a very distinctive, high-pitched nasal way of speaking, so he was instantly recognizable when I had him saying the phrase “Hershey Highway,” which, in case you’re not up on your Urban Dictionary definitions, is slang for the, um, back passage. I was ashamed that I was putting that stuff out there, but it’s all I had. Later I considered that kind of shit blackmail material. I would be walking down the hall at SNL, and I’d be afraid someone would come up and say, “I saw you one time in Daleville, Alabama, do a joke about Pat Buttram on Green Acres saying, ‘Mr. Douglas, if I may introduce you to the Hershey Highway.’ Was that you?”
I imagined responding in a haughty British accent, “I beg your pardon! You are mistaken, desperately mistaken. Good day, sir!”
I started getting booked in clubs around the Southeast. Sometimes the clubs were really sports bars where the game was on the giant TV, the bar was serving gigantic Long Island Iced Teas for 75 cents, and people were fucked up out of their minds, making out, screaming, and I’d be up on the tiny stage going, “So, any birthdays?”
People weren’t even looking at me, but I’d have to stand there and pretend that they were. You have to finish your routine. When I needed to, I resorted to horrible shit just to make it through the night. I would do the filthiest, most vile mat
erial just to see if I could get a response from the audience. On one occasion, the NBA playoffs were on, and I remember thinking, There’s a reason they don’t have the playoffs on during The Phantom of the Opera. That’s why waitresses don’t come around for last call and give patrons their checks during the big eleven o’clock number.
So I’d do this joke: “How many people here read Penthouse magazine?”
No response.
“How about those letters to Forum? They’re unbelievable, right?”
I’d start out using a cross between Bugs Bunny and a Joe Pesce kind of voice:
Dear Penthouse,
I never thought it would happen to me, but I was skydiving the other day from 1,500 feet when lo and behold I noticed that my skydiving partner was not a man but a woman. Imagine my surprise when she sidled over to me in midair, unzipped my fly, and engulfed my rock-hard cock. Although small for an adult male, a mere nine inches in length, she nevertheless hungrily lapped up my hot gurgling seed.
A woman with blond hair teased within an inch of its life caromed off the tables in back on her way to the bathroom.
I’d switch to a southern drawl:
Dear Penthouse,
I never thought it would happen to me, but I’m a schoolteacher at a local elementary school here. And the other day a student came up and asked if she could use my #2 lead pencil. I said yes. Imagine my surprise when she dropped to her knees, unzipped my fly, and engulfed my rock-hard cock. Although small for an adult male at a mere seventeen inches in length, she nevertheless hungrily lapped up my hot gurgling seed.
A table full of frat boys stood up and howled at the television when their team’s star forward sank a three-pointer from half-court.
I brought it home with my best evangelical voice:
Dear Penthouse,
I’m a preacher in the Baptist Church here in Melbourne, Florida. I never thought it would happen to me, but the other day I was giving a sermon, and a parishioner came up to me behind the lectern, unzipped my fly, and engulfed my rock-hard cock. Although small for an adult male, a mere twenty-four inches in length, she nevertheless lapped up my hot gurgling seed.
Someone put a John Cougar Mellencamp song on the jukebox. And then I’d say to the crowd, “I’m sorry, that was over the line. I didn’t mean to offend any churchgoers out there.”
Let us pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we are gathered here at Giggles Sports Bar along Route 70 in Daleville, Alabama. It’s been quite an evening so far. A lot of drink specials going on. I was onstage a little while ago, and lo and behold I noticed that one of the audience members was staring at my crotch. Imagine my surprise when she walked up to me onstage, unzipped my fly, and engulfed my rock-hard cock. Although small for an adult male at a mere fifty-seven inches in length, she nevertheless hungrily lapped up my hot gurgling seed.
The couple in back were still sucking face, a waitress was cleaning up a spill at table seven, and the blond weaved her way back from the bathroom, not one of them so much as registering my existence.
I sometimes hit the road with a kid named Billy Gardell, who now stars in the sitcom Mike & Molly. Sometimes the clubs didn’t want to pay us our measly $20, so Billy, who was a formidably sized young man, would confront the managers to make sure we didn’t get stiffed. He was only eighteen then, but he already wrote brilliant stuff. One time I gave him a joke I’d written about Beaver Cleaver, and in return he gave me a far better joke. This was back when the Ayatollah Khomeini had died: “I hope he’s reincarnated as a tree, cut down, turned into paper, and on him is printed a copy of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.”
People would go crazy. They didn’t notice the hot gurgling seed joke, but they went for the patriotic thing.
Bill and Pat Mullaly and I used to study the big names doing their stand-up routines to see how many laughs they got. With a stopwatch in hand, we watched Jerry Seinfeld’s routine at the University of Florida and counted ten laughs a minute, and he’d end with an applause break. Jay Leno and Bill Cosby got that many too. It was incredible.
I won a stand-up contest for Funniest Comic in Orlando. My prize was being sent to the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles, where I would do a spot on Comic Strip Live, a popular stand-up showcase that aired weekly on Fox starting in 1990. The producer came to see me do my set. In the middle of it, I saw the silhouette of him throwing his arms up in disgust as he rose and left the room. He called my manager, who told me later he’d said, “How dare you send me this fucking amateur?”
One night at a club in Orlando where I’d done a whole bunch of impressions, an attractive young woman comic got onstage after me. She pulled out the largest carrot I’ve ever seen and said, “I’d like to see Darrell Hammond imitate this.” The place went crazy. I had to agree, it was pretty fucking funny.
So I married her. A couple of times.
And then life dropped another bomb in my lap. One day in 1991, Dean, my sponsee, came to talk to me. He was in a bad way after having just been fired from his job. Apparently he’d been caught kissing another man, although why that was a firing offense, I have no idea. I guess it was that this wasn’t the West Village, this was uptight Orlando, and Dean was a married guy with two kids. That night, he told me he was in love with me. I was shocked. When I told him I wasn’t gay, that seemed to be the last straw. Dean used to joke that if he ever wanted to kill himself, he’d use a .357 Magnum. I never found that very funny, and less so when he finally did it. His wife was too distraught to give me the news. I can still hear his seven-year-old daughter’s voice on my answering machine, telling me her daddy had killed himself.
I. Freaked. The. Fuck. Out.
In that moment, I thought I could hear flies buzzing in my ears. My senses seemed to cross boundaries with other senses, a smell I could feel, a fear I could hear. The whole room seemed to fill with the blare of a thousand strident trumpets.
I ran down to an AA meeting in Winter Park, but the meeting didn’t work. I ran into Dean’s sponsees, and I had to tell them what happened.
He had a closed-casket funeral.
I read a book called In Tune with the Infinite, which said that the first hour of the day, your mind is a clean sheet of paper, and you can write whatever you want on it. So I read positive-thinking literature like Emmet Fox’s Seven Day Mental Diet for an hour every morning as soon as I woke up. I wouldn’t allow my brain to think its own thoughts, or I thought I would lose my mind.
I did that for a year, but I no longer had faith in God or in the Program. I went to Overeaters Anonymous meetings too, because for a while after Dean’s suicide, I couldn’t eat, and then I couldn’t stop. Eventually I quit going to all meetings, and I started to drink again. Five years of really good, productive sobriety, gone. My life had been better than I ever could have believed: I was making good money doing voices, I had a beautiful wife, I had a gorgeous apartment where I lay out by the pool slathered in suntan lotion, an item you would not find in my medicine cabinet today. I felt Dean’s suicide was directed at me, and it worked. I had to leave Florida.
It seemed like a good time to give New York another try.
Seven years had passed since I’d flamed out of New York. I had a lot more going against me now, not least of all that I was in my mid-thirties, which is way too old to start a comedy career. And did I mention I was drinking again? It bears repeating.
My first gig in New York was at a short-lived club in Yonkers, a suburb of New York City.
The home of Mary J. Blige, Ella Fitzgerald, and DMX—and with W. C. Handy Place right off of Central Avenue—what were they thinking? Can you imagine poor DMX, a black Jehovah’s Witness, living in Yonkers? I can just see him knocking on the door of some Irish or Italian family on Tuckahoe Road, trying to spread the word of God. His only hope was if he picked Steven Tyler’s family home on Pembrook Drive. Like he was commenting on an American Idol contestant’s performance, Tyler would have loved that: “I thought your preachin’ was great, just great, DMX. You sang like
a duck and you quacked like a singer, fiddle-de-dee kiss my little finger.”
Anyway, the gig was at a place called Grandpa’s Shooting Stars. Owned by Al Lewis, the actor best known for playing Grandpa on the sitcom The Munsters, although he did a fine turn in Car 54, Where Are You? before that, it was a classy joint with fishbowls on the tables, and the drinks all had long, long straws. The audience sat there sucking on these giant straws, and after eighteen minutes of a forty-five-minute set, they started to boo. I heard someone in the audience say, “He’s wounded, finish him off.” I slunk off the stage. At least I got carfare to get home.
And it was still the best gig I got. I was turned down by every club in Manhattan because I did impressions, and they were prejudiced against that. It was seen as a novelty act, and serious comedy clubs don’t like novelty acts, guitar acts, prop acts. People looked down on it.
When I worked at the Skyline Motor Inn when I first lived in New York, I was living uptown in Washington Heights on 163rd Street. When I moved back to New York with my wife, we started out even farther uptown, at the very northern tip of Manhattan in Inwood. But eventually, after we realized living together wasn’t working out that well, I ended up on my own in an apartment at 688 Tenth Avenue between Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth streets in Hell’s Kitchen. Coincidentally, my building was across the street from the Skyline Motor Inn.
One afternoon when I didn’t have much else to do, I was browsing through a bookstore, looking for something to read. Like my father, I was always drawn to stories of law and order, anything from Wyatt Earp and the frontier justice of the Old West to the sordid true crime tales of modern organized crime. I was trolling this section of the store when I saw a paperback with a photograph of the street sign on my corner on the cover. What were the chances? I had to get it.
God, if You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked: Tales of Stand-Up, Saturday Night Live, and Other Mind-Altering Mayhem Page 6