The night I bailed in Reno, I was only five years in and had been doing small rooms, open mics, and bringer shows. I’d never seen a large, hostile crowd like this before. Now I have twenty years of experience under my belt and I can deal with any tense situation. About one in twenty shows, I have to come back at someone. You can’t plan what you’re going to say beforehand. Every time is different and you have to react in the moment. But here’s how I handled certain types of incidents:
Drunk idiots: Recently, a wasted guy was getting heated with someone he thought was in his seat. I looked down at him and said, “Aren’t you embarrassed?” The crowd laughed, and the guy sat down and shut up.
Screaming jerkoffs: Nowadays with social media, people feel like they have to participate in everything, and you get someone shouting out random shit. I go, “I’m doing a show up here. You mind?”
Insecure assholes: A certain type of macho guy feels threatened if his date laughs at my jokes, so he tries to say something funny to impress her. I can spot the Neanderthal type easily, and I know how to massage his ego. I say, “Look at this guy. I’m not even gonna bother with this guy. He looks like he could kill me with his right hand.” It’s a compliment, not that he deserves it, but he’ll instantly settle down if you acknowledge his guns.
Opening for Dice exposed me to every conceivable type of rough audience—as individuals and as a seething mass—in large venues. In that way, touring with him was like a two-year boot camp. I needed the training to learn how to handle adversity, how to deal with different groups of people. I developed the skills on stage, but what I learned applied to all aspects of life, off stage as well. Stay calm. Keep doing your best stuff. Meet your commitments, no matter what.
Back then, the growing pains of standup were tough to get through, but worth it. I must have thanked Dice a hundred times for the opportunities and advice. Along with sharing his wisdom, Dice and I became friends during this period. He invited me to his son’s bar mitzvah and I went to parties at his house in Vegas. Our friendship was a bit one-sided. I don’t know if I gave anything to him, or if I was much more than part of his entourage. He seemed to like the loose connection, and, as I’ve said, I was just happy to be there.
The end was like a slow fade-out. I wouldn’t get a call for three weeks. Then six weeks. Then Dice decided to take a long break, and I never got asked to open for him again. When he picked up comedy touring some time later, he used other acts. I didn’t take it personally. I reminded myself of something Dice had told me, about not comparing myself to others or wishing I had what they had. Just focus on the comedy and what happened on stage. Stay hungry and be patient. Good things were on the way, I just didn’t know what or when.
IT’S BEEN FIFTEEN years since my time with Dice, and now I’m in the position to tap up-and-coming comedians to be my opening acts. Sometimes the venue makes that decision, but usually I get to choose. For a while, I requested tapes from four local comedians, and I would pick one. But for the last few years, I’ve toured with one main guy: Pat McGann.
In 2010, I had a gig headlining at Zanies Comedy Club on Wells Street in downtown Chicago. The venue set up the feature act and the MC. Pat was the featured act. He likes to tell the story of the day of the show, how he saw me walking down the street, came up to me, and said, “Hey, I’m opening up for you tonight.” I was in my own head and apparently looked at him like he was crazy before my brain caught up and I realized who he was. Later, he said, “I didn’t want to interrupt you,” which reminded me of when I met Dice and didn’t want to go up to him or talk at all.
Pat and I got along well at Zanies, and when I returned to Chicago to tape my comedy special Aren’t You Embarrassed? at the Harris Theater, the venue recommended an opener for me. Pat McGann, again. Clearly the universe was trying to put us together. I liked the way he acted backstage, friendly but giving me a lot of space, which I need to clear my head (like I said, I have my pre-show rituals, and they don’t include chatting with people). He mostly stays in his dressing room, doing his own thing. His attitude is like mine. We were there to work.
What sealed it for me was that he sent a thank-you note. I didn’t even hire him for the gig, and he thanked me anyway. It reminded me of all the handwritten thank-you notes I had sent coming up—to every person I’d auditioned for or interviewed with for comedy gigs, acting jobs, waiter jobs. My personalized notes didn’t seem to get me far, but receiving one from Pat convinced me we were on the same page. He was always appreciative of the work. With me, a little gratitude goes a long way. After another show we did, he gave me two bookends, the lion statues from the Art Institute of Chicago. The thought was nice, but I would have had to ship all seventy-five pounds of them back to L.A. They probably needed a crate. So, in all reality, thanks from my father, Pat, because they are at his house with books on Sicily sandwiched between them.
FYI: All up-and-coming comedians, shelve the arrogance for five minutes and write thank-you notes or send small gifts to the headliners who hire you. It won’t work on everyone, but it could turn the tide.
I know what I’m getting with Pat. I know his act. I know he’s going to make my audiences laugh. He’s not going to swear or tell rough jokes. He doesn’t do crowd work, like asking someone in the audience, “Where you from?” As a headliner, you don’t want an opener who gives the crowd permission to talk to the comedian. When I come out, if I decide I’m going to interact with them, fine. The opener’s job is to go out there, get the crowd warm, and then get off the stage. Pat does exactly what he’s supposed to do. He’s also intuitive and a good reader of social cues. If someone comes onto the bus or into my dressing room to talk about personal or business matters, Pat knows to politely excuse himself. You don’t have to explain things to him. For instance, while on tour, I’m not a guy who likes to hang out after the show. Pat can read when I want to grab a dinner and a glass of wine with him, or when to say “good night” and let us go our separate ways.
Plus, he’s a great guy, a family guy with a wife and three kids, with huge potential. I want to help him in any way I can, by producing a special for him and introducing him to club owners and bookers. It goes back to what Dice did for me, exposing me to a different audience, taking me around. He lifted me out of my day job and gave me a little scratch for two years. So now I can pay it forward and give Pat a hand up.
IN 2015, DICE and I reconnected, thanks in part to my wife, Lana. She and I didn’t know each other when I was in Dice’s world, obviously, but she found him fascinating and she remembered her father loving him growing up. I showed her videos of him and told her some stories. She said, “He sounds awesome. Call him up!”
“It’s been years.”
“So what?”
Through a mutual friend, I reached out to Dice to congratulate him on his resurgence. Just like he’d talked about in a hotel room in Vegas years ago, he’d made his way back to TV and the movies. He appeared in Entourage (which made total sense to me, since he’d always had his own); Blue Jasmine, an Oscar-winning movie by Woody Allen; and Martin Scorsese’s Vinyl series on HBO.
He invited me to go see his sons’ band at a bar in L.A. When I was opening for him, his sons were ten and thirteen. Now, they’re grown men in their twenties. I went down to see them play and hung out with Dice for a while. We didn’t reminisce about the old times or update each other on what we were doing lately in our careers. We just talked about this and that—people we knew, movies, music, comedy. Dice is still a talker, but he’s mellowed somewhat.
The vibe was relaxed, chill. It would have been inappropriate to tell him what I’d been thinking: “You were right! I was patient and did what you said. And now I’m doing arenas, too.” Instead, I kept quiet, like the first time we met. I enjoyed being back in his orbit for a couple of hours, just two old friends, sitting together, listening to music as if no time had passed at all.
5
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HOT DISH
After touring with
Dice, I thought everything would open up for me. I did notice a brief uptick in gigs, but nothing that propelled me to the top. In fact, after the blip of attention, I was right back where I was before the Stardust. For another two or three years, my comedy career was stalled. I kept punching in at the Four Seasons, doing spots at the clubs, stagnating. To move up, I needed to impress the right audience. I knew where to find it, but as to how to get there, I was at a loss.
In the early days, Dublin’s Irish Pub on Sunset Boulevard was the hottest room in comedy. On any given night, Justin Timberlake, Vince Vaughn, and all of young Hollywood would hang out. Dane Cook was the biggest comedian going and Dublin’s was like his comedy home. MySpace was very popular, and he was the first comedian to use social media to promote his act. He became a MySpace sensation (him and Tila Tequila; whatever happened to her?).
If comedy in L.A. was like high school, Dublin’s was the popular kid party, and I was the geek who snuck in and stood alone in the corner. I’d heard about it, but I wouldn’t have gone by myself to check it out. I was never the popular guy in school or in comedy. In both settings, I always felt like an outsider.
In high school, I didn’t play football. I played soccer. The football guys were popular. The soccer team was made up of the kids who weren’t big enough for the gridiron or came from immigrant parents who hoped their son would be the next Diego Maradona. When popular kids’ houses were TPed on Halloween, my house didn’t even get a square. If I was lucky, they would throw the empty cardboard roll on my father’s lawn.
In the comedy world, the popular kids were touring the country as headliners while I delivered chicken satay to table 142, my left pec adorned with a plastic nametag.
Bret Ernst brought me with him to Dublin’s one night, and I met the guys who ran the room, Ahmed Ahmed and Jay Davis. Nice guys, but they didn’t fall all over themselves to give me spots. They had their stable of regulars, and only occasionally gave an opportunity to a newcomer. For a long time, when I hung out there, I was in the room, but I wasn’t part of it. I wasn’t doing spots or mingling or scoping out the VIPs. Most of the Dublin’s regulars were invited to Montreal’s Just for Laughs Comedy Festival to do a showcase for up-and-comers called New Faces. A lot of them got network development deals and roles on TV. It was a common path for a lot of now famous comedians to take.
Not me. I was on an island, it seemed, and I was never a New Face. I was a No Face.
Even other guys who weren’t popular were doing more than I was to get up on that stage. They would approach the plugged-in guys to ask, “Can I get a spot?” Very often, they could schmooze their way onto the stage, but what did they do when they got there? That was the question. Being an excellent networker didn’t necessarily mean you were a great comedian. And vice versa.
My style was to let my act speak for itself. If the guys who ran hot rooms liked what they saw of my act at the Comedy Store, then they’d invite me to perform at their space. Even if I saw room runners at the Store, it was like pulling teeth to go over to them and say, “I want to do your show, man.” I would wait to be asked while stewing in frustration.
But Dublin’s in 2004 wasn’t just any room. If there was ever a moment for me to overcome my discomfort about going up to people and asking for favors, it was then and there. If I couldn’t get something going, and soon, I would have to ask myself the tough questions like, Am I really good enough? Am I wasting my time? Will I ever get away from the Windows Lounge with its nut-munching and bad tippers? As uncomfortable as I felt about pushing myself on others, I had to start doing it or the invitations I was waiting for might never come.
One night I approached Ahmed and said, “Hey, I would love to do your show.” Done. I did it. Ahmed was dealing with two hundred comedians who would “love to do” his show, but he didn’t shut me down. I took that as a good sign. He and I started talking, and I became a more visible presence at Dublin’s. The next week, he gave me a spot, which was a very nice surprise. When I got up there, my set was funny enough to be asked back. It was like a combo of letting my act speak for itself and putting myself on the line.
Even after I got piped in at Dublin’s, though, I didn’t overstep. Some guys would basically walk off the stage after a set and go right up to Ahmed and ask for another. I would give it a little time, maybe three or four weeks, then I would ask to do it again rather than be one more pest buzzing around his face.
I didn’t grow up hearing, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” I grew up being told, “Grease your own wheel!” For that matter, make your own wheel and grease from scratch. Don’t rely on other people to do you any favors. Don’t ask for things. Don’t be a nuisance. In my mind, working the room and networking would take time and energy away from the comedy, and that would not serve me in the long run. I saved up my courage for when I was on stage.
If I’d had the gift of gab, it’s possible I would have gotten a break earlier. But looking back, I think I needed those seven years of warming up before I was ready to get hotter than I was. It was a process, a long one.
So one night, I was at Dublin’s, heading for the stairwell where you waited before you went on stage. The space was small, cramped. Maybe three people could fit back there at once. That night, when I walked up the stairs, I saw two other guys were already there. One of them was Vince Vaughn.
Back in 1996 when I was a senior in college, my dad had clipped an article in the Chicago Sun-Times about two guys going on a rogue mission to make a movie. My father said, “Look at these guys. They have hardly any money and no permits, and they’re shooting on the side of this highway. They went to Las Vegas and almost got arrested. But look at what they did.” The two guys were Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau. The movie was Swingers, which was so funny, ballsy, and fresh. Ever since then, I was a huge fan. Flash forward to 2004, in the stairwell at Dublin’s, I’m crammed into a tiny crawl space with all six feet, five inches of Vince.
He said, “You’re from Chicago, right? I’m from Chicago.”
It started to feel like being from Chicago was the key that unlocked nearly every huge opportunity I ever had.
Vince and I started talking about where we grew up (he was from Lake Forest, a well-to-do neighborhood), sports, the Bears, the Bulls, and just bullshitting about Chicago and our teams.
He was at Dublin’s often, because he and Ahmed were good friends going way back. In 1990, they were in The Fourth Man, a CBS Schoolbreak Special about teen steroid use (also starring Peter Billingsley from A Christmas Story). Vince was a big supporter of Ahmed’s standup and hung out at Dublin’s when he was in town. I could see how they’d be such close friends. Like Vince, Ahmed made things happen. He was very entrepreneurial, starting comedy rooms and later organizing group tours. I’d heard some whispers that Vince wanted to bring a comedy show to places in the United States that wouldn’t ordinarily be exposed to this type of entertainment. The concept was “thirty cities, thirty shows, thirty nights on a bus.” Some sketch, some celebrity guests, but the anchor of the show would be four standups.
Imagine my shock when, soon after my encounter with Vince in the stairwell, Ahmed told me, “Vince wants you to do the Wild West Comedy Show.” Now I don’t believe that my five-minute conversation with Vince got me on the tour. I think Ahmed had a lot to do with it, for which I’m eternally grateful. Vince probably asked him to recommend some people, and I wouldn’t have made the final cut if Vince didn’t think I was funny. Along with me and Ahmed, the other comedians were Bret Ernst, whom I knew well from the Hustler comedy room, and John Caparulo, a Comedy Store regular I’d seen around but never gone out with socially.
To put in context how monumental this was: The tour was in 2005. In the previous two years, Vince had starred in Old School, Dodgeball, Anchorman, and Wedding Crashers The Break-Up, his movie with then girlfriend Jennifer Aniston, was coming out. He was on top of the world, one of the hottest names in Hollywood. He had one month off between movie shoots, and during that time,
he wanted to do the Wild West tour.
The logistics of it boggled the mind. We were booked to perform a show every night for thirty nights in a row at a fifteen-hundred-plus-seat venue, in sixteen states, covering six thousand miles of the heartland. Vince didn’t pull it together himself. He had a team of four or five people handling all that, including his assistant, Sandra Smith, producer Peter Billing-sley and his sister Victoria, and publicist John Pisani. On top of all that, a camera crew would follow us around to make a documentary about the tour that would be released in theaters later on.
The whole thing came together really quickly. One month after I got the call from Ahmed, we hit the road.
Our first show was at the Fonda Theatre in L.A. Big Holly-wood types were in the audience, including director Taylor Hackford and Jon Favreau. Favreau, who’d become a major director himself, was opening the show by doing a Q&A on stage with Vince. I remember thinking, Man, if I do well here in front of these people and this crowd, hopefully, some doors will open for me.
I had a manager, and I invited him to come early to the show because the lobby would be prime hunting ground for him to talk me up and make some contacts. I had to go looking for him that night and found him outside the theater, in the alley. He was drinking a beer out of a brown paper bag like a homeless person with another guy from the management company.
I said, “What are you doing back here?”
He said, “The drinks out in the lobby are expensive so we went across the street to the liquor store.”
I wanted to say, “Get your ass back inside and mingle.” The whole point of them being there was to get me some buzz. Their job was to schmooze and wangle opportunities for their clients, and these clowns were in the alley knocking down forties.
Stay Hungry Page 8