by Ralphie May
When I took the stage, most of the audience was skeptical. Like any audience is with an opener they’ve never heard of, they were willing to put up with only so much before they turned. The question they were asking themselves wasn’t “Oh, who is this fine young man? He must be great since Sam has selected him.” Their question was “Who the fuck is this fucking guy, and where the fuck is Sam?”
Thankfully, my first four or five minutes of jokes clicked. I got a couple big laughs and a few decent ones. Enough to confirm that stand-up comedy really was for me, that this was what I was going to do with the rest of my life. The plan was for me to do six to seven minutes of material, then bring Sam onstage with the intro his brother gave me: “Ladies and gentleman, the greatest comedian alive today, the rock star himself, Mr. Sam Kinison!”
“That’s it. No fucking ad-libbing, got me, kid?” Bill said.
“Yes, sir.” Like I needed to be told twice. The last thing I wanted was to have to come up with more new shit to say. Seven minutes was already a stretch.
People talk about how hard stand-up comedy is, but I was feeling myself after my first five minutes. Maybe I really am a natural at this, I thought. Then the comedy gods stepped in. With ninety seconds left in my set, my mouth started moving faster than my brain, and I flipped a punch line and a setup, and the joke bombed. The next joke was effectively my closer—my big finish and dismount. Its punch line was a bigger tag onto the previous joke, which meant that its success was predicated on the success of the previous joke. You know, the one that just Nagasaki’d my set.
All these years later I don’t remember the joke I flipped, but in that moment I remembered exactly what Sam had told me on the ride over. So I went with it.
“Hey, you fucking stupid, inbred, pig-fucking, dumb, illiterate pieces of shit, you couldn’t get these jokes if I wrote them down in crayon and ear-fucked them into your brain for you. You hillbilly, backwoods sons of bitches. You fuck your mothers and get fucked in the ass like Ned Beatty.”
It was beautiful. It was Shakespearean. It might have even been in iambic pentameter. I was screaming and carrying on like that for what must have been thirty seconds, but felt like five minutes of full catharsis.
Immediately, thirty-five hundred people started to boo in unison. Not polite Southern booing, like their expectations had been falsely set. This was like red flag at Talladega booing. These crackers were pissed. In later years, I would get the crowd riled up like this on purpose, just to see if I could win them back before my set was over. But this was literally my fourth time doing stand-up comedy. I was decimated. I got offstage as fast as I could, fighting back the tears so the spotlight didn’t catch them shining in my eyes—which is like blood in the water for an audience that has decided to hate you. I didn’t even introduce Sam. That was my one job, and I couldn’t do it. All I wanted to do was get the fuck out of the venue and back home as soon as possible.
With no introduction, no music, no fanfare, just booing that was slowly morphing into a mob mentality and general sense of lawlessness, Sam came out. He grabbed the microphone and waited for the reaction to die down.
“Can you believe that kid?! Talking to you good people like that?! He will never work in comedy again! I’m gonna squash him like a bug! Oh oh ohhh!!!”
The biggest guy in stand-up besides Eddie Murphy was trashing me onstage.
I. Was. Crushed. My idol had just said I’d never work again. My calling had lasted two weeks. The disappointment was overwhelming. Backstage I found the house phone and called my mom collect to come pick me up before anybody saw me. I’d taken my fair share of shit over the years, but this kind of intense, focused public humiliation was too much even for me.
My mom picked up on the third ring. I couldn’t get any words out. They were stuck in my throat like a dam, holding back a river of tears. Just as the dam was set to break, a hand came from over my shoulder, grabbed the telephone receiver, and hung it up. It was Sam’s brother, Bill.
“Kid, don’t take it so bad. Sam thought that was hilarious. He never thought you’d have the balls to do it. He and I were laughing our asses off, and trust me, we were the only ones laughing. We’re proud of you.”
“You’re what?” All the words Bill was saying were English, but none of them made sense in the order he was speaking them.
“Hear that?” The audience was howling. “They love you now.”
“They what?” I’m trying to suck up tears and snot bubbles, trying to get my shit together enough to respond in a way that didn’t make me sound like a child.
“Sam wants you to come to the after-party. Stick around.”
I was so confused. Did Bill and Sam think I was genuinely funny? Was Bill still just fucking with me like Sam had on the ride to the venue? Was this all some big sadistic joke to get their rocks off? Were they just inviting me to the after-party so they could keep fucking with me?
It turns out another dynamic was in play. At the time of the Arkansas gig, Sam was under tremendous pressure. His ticket-buying audience expected him to be extremely controversial at every show. But he was being protested everywhere he went by people who hated him and what they thought he stood for. Initially the hatred stayed outside in the parking lot, but in recent weeks it had made its way inside clubs and theaters. People would buy tickets just so they could jump up in protest and interrupt his show. Every gig on the tour felt like a trek through a minefield, and this stop in Arkansas would be no different. Sam knew that doing his bit about Jesus getting nailed to the cross was not going to fly here without some serious consequences.
Driving to the auditorium with this seventeen-year-old kid who had no experience and no closer, Sam sensed an opportunity. I could be a human shield. By giving me a closer that was certain to incite the wrath of all these people, I’d absorb the lion’s share of their moral outrage, which would not only ease the burden on him but also reduce the likelihood that some asshole would jump up to interrupt the show.
I knew none of this until years later. At the time it just felt like they were fucking with me for the sake of fucking with me. It felt like I was being hazed. Still, I took the brothers Kinison up on their offer and went to the after-party at Sam’s hotel. I’m not sure what possessed me to say yes beyond lacking the words and the will to say no, but I’m sure glad I did. A local TV weatherman was there, some radio guys from KHOG, some minor celebrities from the University of Arkansas, and a bunch of girls. So many girls. This was no place for a seventeen-year-old kid, which meant it was the coolest party I’d ever been to in my life. I still haven’t been to a party that crazy in Los Angeles. I mean, rails of blow, booze everywhere, group sex all over the place. These women made Coal Hill girls look like sexless pig people.
I had no idea what to do. There’s no handbook for parties like this. Basically the rules are don’t do anything to make the cops come, and don’t die. I stood off to the side and sipped on a beer, discreetly pouring half of it out as I talked with girls who thought I was part of the crew. After a while Sam came out of a room with two women. He walked over to a table, snorted three huge lines into one nostril, then finished half a huge line in the other nostril, before looking over at me with my little baby beer.
“Hey, kid, order some pizza.”
You mean you can do cocaine and eat at the same time? According to my advanced knowledge of Miami Vice and Scarface, that was supposed to be impossible. But who was I to doubt Sam Kinison? He was a legend for a reason.
So I call up the Shakey’s on Highway 71. It was the only place I knew the number to, and I ordered like ten pizzas. They laughed. We were way out of their delivery zone. When I told them who it was for, they got real serious. I’d never seen pizzas made and delivered so fast.
It was like the delivery guy drove a DeLorean back through time to get us our pizzas. When Sam finally came to the door to accept delivery, he paid the driver in cash and tipped him in three little baggies of coke. Thirty minutes later we got a phone call. It w
as Shakey’s Pizza calling us back: “Hey, you guys need more pizza? We can be right back over there, no problem!” It turns out that you may not actually be able to eat lots of pizza when wired on cocaine (we went through maybe three of the ten pies), but you sure as shit can make a bunch of it.
It was the best pizza I never tasted.
* * *
Stand-up comedy is one of those businesses where no matter how talented you are, you will never make it as far as you could have unless you have someone in your corner championing you, opening doors you could never open yourself. In the 1980s, Johnny Carson was that guy for a lot of comics. If he gave you the okay sign or called you over to the couch, you had a TV show within a year. Club owners like Jamie Masada, Budd Friedman, and Mitzi Shore gave extra stage time to comics they thought had “it.”
Sam Kinison was, in a way, my first comedy mentor. He kind of took me under his wing after my baptism by fire. He was the first guy who believed that I had actual talent. He said I was ballsy enough that I could really do something in stand-up comedy if I wanted it bad enough. But most important, he told me to get the hell out of Arkansas and go get started where he did—at the Comedy Workshop in Houston, Texas.
“They’re not gonna be nice to you, kid,” he warned me, “but you’ll learn a hell of a lot.”
PART 2
HOUSTON: 1990–1998
6.
THE SHOWCASE WAS THE WORKSHOP
America was at the end of a golden age for stand-up comedy when I left Clarksville for good. In the 1980s and early 1990s, every big city had multiple clubs that were filled nightly. Every bar, café, and restaurant that had a couple slow days during the week—like the Shakey’s on Highway 71 Business—would host an open-mic night to draw in customers and double or triple their sales. Even television was getting into the act. HBO debuted the Comic Relief fund-raiser in 1986. Then in 1989 they started One Night Stand, which aired half-hour stand-up specials. In 1991, the Comedy Central network started, and at least half the programming in the first few years was stand-up clip shows. When network executives started throwing sitcom deals at comics, that’s when everything really started to heat up.
The sitcom boom started slowly at first in the 1970s, with Redd Foxx and Sanford and Son, Bob Newhart and his two shows, Robin Williams with Mork & Mindy. Then in the mideighties, Bill Cosby’s Cosby Show debuted and blew the doors off everyone. Once network executives realized you could take a stand-up comic and translate what he or she does onstage to the sitcom format, they started scouring the big clubs for people who they thought could replicate the model. Roseanne Barr got her self-titled show in 1988. Jerry Seinfeld got his in 1989. Lenny Clarke and Kevin Meaney, both out of the Boston scene, got a crack at their own shows in 1990. Then Tim Allen got his, with Home Improvement, in 1991, which was when my eighteen-year-old baby face rolled into Houston after a brief and unremarkable stint in Baltimore living with my sister Melanie to save money after I got kicked out of high school.
Houston is a culture shock for a kid from Clarksville. Not only does the Houston metro area have twice the population of the entire state of Arkansas, but the city itself is probably one of the most diverse in America. It has large populations of Vietnamese, Indians, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, blacks, whites, and everyone in between. You can get Tex-Mex one day, creole the next, Ethiopian food the day after that, Salvadoran pupusas the day after that, then finish the week with the best steak you’ve ever had. Then you could do it all over again every week for fifty-two straight weeks and almost never have to go to the same restaurant twice. The city has a place for you whether you’re white-collar, blue-collar, or no-collar people. Whether you’re a cowboy or a roughneck, a gangbanger or an arts patron. Whether you listen to country music, rock ’n’ roll, or rap—all of which are being made in Houston.
Basically anyone or anything that Archie Bunker ever went on a rant about in an episode of All in the Family you can find in Houston. The city is so diverse it has at least a half dozen nicknames: Space City, Bayou City, Capital of the Sun Belt, Energy Capital of the World, H-Town, Hustle Town, Syrup City.
Clarksville? We’ve hosted a peach festival every summer since 1938.
The landscape is no less different in Houston. I was used to seeing mountains and green forests every day, but there are no mountains in Syrup City. There are skyscrapers, everything is brown, and the air is so humid in the summer—which starts in mid-February and goes until November—that you can chew it. Houston was a strange place to live in, but it was the perfect place to move to for a young kid starting his career in stand-up comedy.
By 1991, Houston had become the biggest and arguably the most important city (along with Boston) for stand-up comedy outside of New York City and Los Angeles. Within a couple years of my arrival, two Houston-based comics—Brett Butler and Thea Vidale—would have their own shows, and one of the funniest men alive, T. Sean Shannon, would become a writer for In Living Color, before eventually moving on to write for The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live. On top of it all, two of the greatest stand-up comics who have ever lived—Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks—called the Houston clubs their home.
The club at the center of the Houston comedy universe was a place on South Shepherd Drive in the Montrose section of the city, just west of downtown, called the Comedy Workshop. Opened in 1978 by some people from Minnesota, it was one of the first dedicated comedy clubs outside New York and Los Angeles. In the eighties it was home to a group of guys that called themselves the Texas Outlaw Comics. It was Sam and Bill Hicks, Carl LaBove, Ron Shock, Riley Barber, John Farnetti, and a handful of others that came in and out over the years. They were all great Texas comics.
I knew none of this at the time of my arrival. All I had to go on was that Sam had said I should go to a place called the Comedy Workshop once I got the fuck out of Arkansas. So once I got settled in with my other sister, Camelia, and her husband, who were thankfully living in Houston proper at the time, I set about finding the address for this magical place. This was no easy feat in the early 1990s. We didn’t have Google or Uber. Hell, we didn’t have the internet and cell phones. At least not in the form or with the ubiquity that we have them today. I couldn’t just type in Comedy Workshop and address and wait for an answer to be served back to me. I had to …
Eventually I found the address for the Comedy Workshop and gathered my nerve to finally show up at its front door and start my career in stand-up comedy. That’s how I thought about it. I wasn’t just “giving this a shot.” This was my first day at the office. This was the first day of the rest of my life. The drive from my sister’s house to the club was a brutal internal struggle. Part of me wanted to hammer the accelerator and blow all the red lights to get there as fast as I could. The other part of me wanted to make a hard U-turn at every light I hit. Either approach would have achieved the same result, ultimately, because when I pulled up to the address I’d been given, the Comedy Workshop was gone.
In its place was a goddamn dry cleaner’s.
* * *
It turns out running a profitable comedy club is very difficult. Even under the best circumstances, even at the peak of the comedy boom, it’s hard to recoup all the costs related to running a business when you’re in an industry that operates primarily on the weekends and only after dark. I can’t even imagine how hard it was during the 1980s and early ’90s, when cocaine floated in the air like glitter at a titty bar. I had no idea what combination of factors brought the Comedy Workshop to a close (though there were plenty of rumors), and I had no interest in findi
ng out, because I had bigger issues to deal with: my nonexistent career in stand-up comedy had ended before it had even begun. I mean, Sam cut his teeth at the Comedy Workshop. It’s where Bill Hicks became Bill Hicks. This was the place. Obviously, it wasn’t the only place. Houston probably had eight or nine legitimate spots for comedy at that time. I needed to figure out not what to do, but where to do it. Sam hadn’t given me a Plan B. The path as my eighteen-year-old hillbilly brain understood it was to go to Houston, then to the Comedy Workshop, then to The Tonight Show, then get famous, then get all the ’giner meat. I’d done step one, but if I was going to become … whatever I was supposed to become … where the hell was I supposed to go now that step two was a dry cleaner’s?
The answer was the Comedy Showcase, another reputable developmental club that sat, conveniently, in a strip mall three miles from my sister’s house, next to a Kingboat Chinese restaurant.
I showed up on a Tuesday. The place was closed.
Did you ever have one of those periods in your life when you were younger when you figured some shit out and came to some realizations about who you are and what you wanted to be? Remember how that felt like you’d actually done some shit? Like you’d accomplished something? Remember how you thought that if you started checking the boxes people told you to check, everything would start opening up for you, like the levels on Legend of Zelda? Remember how it never worked out that way, and at the first sign of struggle you started to look around for something to blame, for an escape hatch and an excuse to quit? I was almost there. I was starting to feel like the world was conspiring against me, like maybe a fat kid from Arkansas isn’t allowed to do something like this, not for real anyway.