by Jeff Dunham
About ten minutes into my set the guy started up. I had done about ten minutes of my own stand-up and now I had Peanut out. The guy blurted out, and Peanut let him have it. Big laugh. Less than ten minutes later, the guy did it again. Another line from Peanut, another big laugh, and we went on. A few minutes later, another yell from the guy when the rest of the crowd was quiet and I ignored him this time.
The lights at a comedy club are just like most other stage settings: Dark in the audience and so bright onstage that the performer is virtually blinded from anything beyond the first row. A minute or so later, I felt this big empty hole form in the sea of laughter, from just about where the guy had been heckling. The quiet in only that area continued for a couple minutes, then it began to go back to normal. I finished the show and all was well.
When I walked backstage, there in the Green Room sat an ashen Hartmann and Brightwell, with an odd look on both their faces. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Oh, man,” was about all Gary could utter, then he began to slowly shake his head back and forth. Robert put his head in his hands, elbows on the table, and covered his eyes.
“WHAT?” I asked again.
“This was bad,” Robert finally replied.
“What the hell happened?” I asked again.
“That wasn’t a drunk,” Gary stated.
“It wasn’t?” I asked.
Almost simultaneously both said, “Nope.”
“Then WHAT?”
Now I was getting mad. Robert took a deep breath and explained: “It was an eighteen-year-old kid. Huge fan of yours. He has the dolls, the T-shirt; everything.”
“And… ?” I pushed.
“His parents brought him. He was loving the show. He has cerebral palsy and the timing of his laughs was just off from everyone else and the noises were just him having a good time.”
I was stunned. “Oh nooooo…”
“Oh, yes,” replied Gary.
Then Robert explained, “He was killing the show and pissing off everybody at the tables around him. I got into an argument with his mom, and to shut him up, she told me off and then spiked him in the neck with some sort of shot. Everyone around us was horrified when she spiked him and just went quiet.”
Robert had given the family passes for other shows, paid for their dinner and drinks, and apologized profusely and unendingly. He had asked them to stay after the show, so when most of the crowd had dispersed, I went out and made my own apologies. The family was seemingly fine and I took a couple of pictures with the young guy and signed some stuff. As they were leaving, Gary turned to me and with a big smile said, “Now you have your worst road story ever.” Yikes. No kidding.
Now let’s try a funny one: The Comedy Connection in Boston was one of my favorite clubs of all time, but unfortunately it’s no longer there. It was on the second floor of Faneuil Hall, a marketplace and meeting hall in Boston since 1742. It was a Sunday night and I had just finished the last of eight shows that week. The audience had gone, and I had rewarded myself by having a single beer and hanging out at the bar next door for twenty minutes. This was an unusual thing for me to do, quite honestly. I always preferred to go back to the hotel room and watch Star Trek (just kidding… maybe).
I headed back into the darkened showroom to pack up my trunk and all the little guys for our trip home the next morning. In the dark that night, I quickly threw the original Muppet-like Bubba J. in the trunk, along with Peanut, the stand, and so on. I slammed it shut, latched it, then stood it back on end to roll down the stairs and across the cobblestones to the Bostonian Hotel and my room for a quick night’s sleep and then an early flight back to LA the next morning.
When I got home the next afternoon I left the trunk in the garage, where it would now sit for five days until my next flight for some weekend shows in Tucson. It was August in the San Fernando Valley, so my closed garage easily reached temperatures of over 100°F.
On Friday morning, I opened the garage, got my trunk, and hefted it into the back of my truck. As I was driving to the airport, I thought, “Did I leave some food in here? What’s that smell? Whatever.” I got to LAX, unloaded the trunk, and checked it in curbside. I then parked my truck, went inside, checked in, got through security, and was just arriving at the gate when I heard myself being paged from the airport public address system.
I had to pick up a white security phone and dial a number. I did just that, and was then told to head to a certain door where I would be met by security. What the heck? I was then escorted out to the plane where I found two more security guys, a police officer with a gun, a baggage handler, and my trunk. “Sir, is this your trunk?” a big guy asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
“What do you have in that trunk, sir?” he queried.
“Dummies,” I stated.
“Dummies?” he asked.
“Yeah, you know. Puppets, ventriloquist dolls,” I replied.
“Could you open the trunk for us please?” he said.
“Sure, but what’s the problem?” Now I was really confused. I’d done hundreds of flights and millions of miles without a problem.
“It’s the smell,” the guy said. “Are you transporting any human remains in that trunk?”
“Good lord, no!” My mind was whirring now. But I couldn’t resist throwing in an obvious joke: “Well, not real ones, anyway!” I smirked.
No one laughed. These guys weren’t fooling around. Then the wind must have changed, and the smell drifted my direction. I almost gagged. What the hell? I put down my backpack, walked over, unlatched, and then opened the trunk. The deadly smell hit all of us at about the same time. It was hard not to throw up. Then I saw it. It took me a while to piece together what happened, but it must have happened while I was having that beer in Boston five nights before. I shut the trunk in the dark, never looking, and then left it in the oven-hot garage for a week. There in the bottom of the trunk, lay a rotting dead Boston rat.
Oh yeah… and that wasn’t the worst of it. I deposited the rat in the garbage, threw the characters back in the trunk, gave it to the baggage guys, and then headed back up to the Jetway to catch my flight. But when I got the trunk to the Tucson club in 115-degree weather, I opened it again, this time in the hot alley behind the club, and almost threw up once more. The smell was every bit as strong and had permeated all the characters, their clothes, and even the bare plywood on the inside of the trunk. I got some Lysol, some Febreze, and even some house paint for the wood to try and mask the smell. All to no avail. I have no idea what the first couple of rows in the club thought the next few nights, but I almost passed out from the death stench for days after that. No manner of chemicals could rid Bubba J. of smelling like a dead rat. And of course the paint simply sealed the smell inside the trunk.
So there. That’s my Boston dead rat story.
Bubba J.: (sniff, sniff)
Jeff: What’s wrong, Bubba J.?
Bubba J.: That was gross and sad all at the same time. I don’t know how you do it.
I got to know Ellen DeGeneres a little when she and I worked the grand opening of a short-lived Improv comedy club in Seattle. This was long before Ellen had publicly come out of the closet, but most people in comedy already knew. “Most people” means everyone but me.
All I knew was that she was a darned funny comic, she was sharp, she was incredibly kind to everyone around her, she had a great energy, and she was cute as could be. Luckily, one of the other guy comics knew more than I did. I was talking to him backstage one night, and I remember saying, “She’s pretty cute.”
“Uh… yeah,” the guy said.
“I’m gonna ask her out,” I said offhandedly.
I remember the guy looked at me sideways and said, “Uhhhh… really?”
“Yeah,” I said. “She’s not married, right?”
The guy goes, “Nooo. No, she’s not married.”
“No boyfriend either?” I asked.
“No, definitely not,”
he replied.
“Then, what the hell, I have a shot, right?”
Once again, he looked at me like I was from Pluto.
“Uh, nooo, not really,” he said.
“Oh, come on! I bet she’d say yes! Why shouldn’t I?” I asked, almost pissed off.
“Dude… she likes women,” he said.
I sat there for a second, trying to let that register in my head.
“Really?” I asked, a bit deflated.
“Yeah.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well… wanna go get a beer?”
I still wonder to this day how Ellen would have turned me down.
Walter: You are so clueless…
Jeff: I really couldn’t tell.
Walter: No, I just meant that in general.
During the early 1990s, I signed with Rick Bernstein as my manager, who was a genuinely good soul, and our business relationship turned into an incredibly close friendship. My agency brought in Robin Tate, a longtime rock-and-roll and comedy promoter who’d worked with acts like Jerry Seinfeld and Tim Allen, just to name a couple. After seeing my club sales, Tate was convinced I could fill eight-hundred- to two-thousand-seat theaters across the country.
Now this was theaters—not clubs. It’s a huge step in the comedy world to go from the small to the large. It’s referred to as “breaking out of the clubs.” Now the real fun was starting.
Brightwell was once again my opening act as our touring began. After a few years, we had now shared many jokes, too many beers, and way too much time playing Myst. We had become true road warriors together.
There were no limos or extravagances at this point, because we all wanted to make as much money as possible. We played it cheap. No huge catering bills, no wild parties, not even upgraded hotel rooms. Whenever we arrived at an airport Robin would be there to meet us in a rented SUV or big sedan, and we’d head to the gig on our own.
One weekend in the dead of winter, in some Midwestern city, Robin wasn’t with us, but his secondhand guy, Suneil, had taken his place for this particular run. We were in the SUV on the way to the theater, when Suneil and I discovered that Gary had never been treated to a White Castle burger. Well, we told Gary that you absolutely cannot go through this life without experiencing the taste and aftereffects of a Midwest gut bomb. He was willing to give it a shot. It was cold and it was windy with snow and ice covering everything in sight, and none of us were looking forward to leaving the toasty warm vehicle. Suneil volunteered to go inside and get the food. He stopped the car in the middle of the almost-empty parking lot, left the keys in the ignition with the engine running so we would stay warm, got out, and then slipped and slid in the freezing wind to get our food. So there Gary and I sat. I was in the front passenger seat, and Gary in the back. Gary poked me on the shoulder and said, “You know he just broke the rule.”
“Yeah. It’s tempting,” I replied. We were both thinking the same thing at the same time. You never, ever leave your vehicle with the keys in it, much less running when two of your buddies are still in the car. This was just asking for trouble. And the brutal weather made it even more tempting.
“I think I’ll do it from here,” I said.
“Be careful,” Gary replied.
“Of the car?” I asked.
“No, the burgers,” he said. “We don’t want him to drop them.”
Suneil wasn’t a big guy, which made this even funnier. He came out of the White Castle, arms loaded with burgers, fries, and a drink tray. He couldn’t have carried any more, plus he had a huge winter coat on. We watched him struggle to make it over the icy parking lot and to the car without slipping and dropping everything. Gary and I sat there watching him do his balancing act, and right as he put his ungloved hand on the car’s door handle, I hit the electric locks. Clunk.
The engine was running, the wind was howling, but when he tried the door handle a couple of times to no avail, he looked back and forth at both of us through the window, and very suspiciously yelled, “GUYS… UNLOCK THE DOORS, PLEASE.” We just sat there and smiled.
Gary said, “Can you do it from there?”
“Duh,” I replied.
I then reached my foot over, stepped on the brake, and pulled the transmission into gear. Suneil’s eyes went wide. “HEY! COME ON!” I slowly let off the brake and the car started to roll. Over the ice and snow it went, and Suneil stumbled back so his foot wouldn’t get run over. After about ten feet, I stopped. Suneil then walked to us and tried the door again, and we just smiled some more. “YOU GUYS! I HAVE YOUR FOOOOOD! ” The car rolled again, this time a little farther. Gary and I started laughing and the cat and mouse game continued. Finally I crawled over into the driver’s seat, and while Suneil stood solitary in the cold and wind, Gary and I did donuts over the ice around the empty parking lot. “GUUUUYYYYSSS!” Gary and I were laughing so hard, we couldn’t stand it.
Finally we stopped, opened the door, and yelled, “Come on! Let’s go!” Suneil slowly made his way over to the car, and of course when he got within five feet of us, we slammed the door again and locked it.
It sounds cruel now, but man oh man was that funny. Good ol’ Suneil.
Walter: I think this part of the book really gives the folks some insight into the “real you.”
Jeff: Who’s the real me?
Walter: An emotionally boneheaded man-child.
Robin Tate was a different story. He was about twelve years older than me but had certainly been around the dark side of showbiz a lot more than I ever knew. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Tate was a full-on alcoholic and cocaine addict. If there’s such a thing as being professional about abuses, I never knew it and never saw it, and from what I could tell, it never affected his work. It wasn’t until years later that I found out about it, when Tim Allen, a client of Robin’s who had gone through the same problems but had cleaned himself up, had Robin and his wife, Glenda, pretty much kidnapped from their house in St. Louis, then flown on his private jet to Los Angeles, where they went through thirty days of rehab at the very famous Promises rehab center. To this day, Robin attributes the saving of his life to Tim Allen. I never saw anything, and never knew there was a problem.
Occasionally I would receive fan letters from or meet people at my shows who had seen me on The Tonight Show, and were at the live shows because of those appearances. When working the theaters with Tate, I’d still sometimes do clubs in the markets where there wasn’t an appropriate-sized theater. In early 1992, I received a fan letter, which I still have.
… I have recently had a major change in my life that has kept me home in front of the TV at night instead of going out! Anyway, that is how I discovered you! At first I saw you on a few of the comedy channels—then I started looking for you. I really began to look forward to your appearances. You have brought so much laughter into a life that really needed some—and I wanted to thank you.… I was so excited the night I saw you on Johnny Carson and heard you were coming here. I have been telling my friends about you for months—now they are going to finally understand the things I keep saying! (Peanut’s sayings!!) I’m bringing them to see you on Thursday night.
That Thursday night I was told backstage that a cute blonde was waiting to see me. I found her, signed a picture for her, and we chatted a bit and went our separate ways. A few months later I went back to work at the same club, and there she was again, waiting after one of the shows to talk to me. This time I asked her out. She hemmed and hawed and said that maybe she’d come back on Sunday, but she didn’t. Then a few months later, I once again played the same club and on the Friday night while the opening act was on, I was walking through the lobby of the club, killing time until I went on. In the nearly empty lobby over by the far wall was a young woman talking on the pay phone. I walked over, and she looked up, stopping her conversation midsentence. I didn’t recognize her, but I did recognize good looks.
“He’s going to stand you up,” I said.
“What?” she answered.
I
said, “He’s going to stand you up. The guy on the phone.”
She laughed and hung up. “Do you remember me?” she asked.
I was a little stumped. She continued. “The last time you were here we talked after the show. I sent you a fan letter and said I’d see you here.”
“Oh yeah,” I said, remembering the letter more than her. I also remembered the sentence about something keeping her at home.
I asked her out again that night, and this time she said yes. She was extremely good-looking as well as engaging, and we had fun at lunch one day. I can’t remember exactly when she told me, but soon I knew she was a single mom and her new daughter had kept her at home almost a year before. I was impressed by her boldness and her strength. She and her daughter lived with her father in an apartment, and she had a job at a local gym working part-time. The strange part was, unlike most first dates that I went on, I went back to my hotel that day and thought, “Nope. Not the one.” Usually I was enamored for at least a few dates with someone new, but this one was different.
The next day she called me at the hotel and this time asked me out. With nothing else to do that day, I thought what the heck. Long story short, we began dating cross-country, and I would buy her and her young daughter airline tickets to meet me in cities here and there where I was doing shows. A few months later, we got engaged. Paige and I and twenty-one-month-old Bree lived together for a while in San Diego, and then we had a wedding in May of 1994 on the beach near the Hotel Del Coronado with a small gathering of friends. It was a small but wonderfully charming ceremony. White trash to the core, however, we had our wedding dinner at Chili’s!