This Might Get a Little Heavy

by Ralphie May

  Something told me not to quit, though. Being a broke-ass motherfucker with no meaningful skills was probably part of it, but that wasn’t all of it. Something else was pushing me. Something that I would realize much later in life was called drive or passion or purpose or obsession, depending on who you talked to.

  I gave it another shot the next day. This time the club was open, and I met a woman named Anne Emerson. I told her that my name was Ralphie May, that I was a stand-up comic, and that I wanted to work there. I have no idea what was going through her mind when she heard those words come out of my mouth. I was eighteen years old at the time, but with my rosy, chubby cheeks and my impish, toothy smile, I must have looked like a thirteen-year-old trying to scam my way into a place with liquor everywhere and people saying “fuck” all the time. She knew better than to turn me away out of hand, though. Great comics were coming from everywhere and nowhere back then. You couldn’t risk not at least hearing a fella out. You might miss the next Sam Kinison or Eddie Murphy or Rita Rudner or Andrew Dice Clay. Anne told me to come back that night and ask for a guy named Danny Martinez.

  * * *

  Along with his wife, Blanca Gutierrez, Danny Martinez owned and operated the Comedy Showcase. They opened it together in 1983 after Danny fell in love with comedy a couple years earlier, doing open-mic nights at the Comedy Workshop, of all places. The first thing I noticed about Danny was his great radio voice (which is where he started). It had just a hint of Texan behind it that made him sound even more trustworthy than he already was. As I got to spend more time around him and got to know him a little better, I watched how he carried himself. He had this incredible gravitas and quiet confidence that you would not expect from someone who stands five feet four and a half inches tall. Back in the day that last half inch really mattered to Danny too. Don’t you dare shortchange him and call him five feet four inches. Short people are five feet four inches.

  Even as a young kid, I quickly realized that Danny Martinez is about as good as they come—truly the salt of the earth. Onstage, it was no different. I’d never seen a comic as smooth at transitioning between jokes, or as unflappable, as Danny was when working audiences. On nights when he felt like getting up and doing fifteen minutes, he’d regularly earn standing ovations from the crowd. It didn’t matter what kind of show he was on, he always had something to say behind his jokes, and he never had to curse. He was like a tiny Mexican Cosby minus the raping (allegedly).

  The night I met Danny, I introduced myself the same way I did to Anne:

  “My name is Ralphie May, I am a stand-up comedian, and I want to work here.”

  “You’re not a comic.” He didn’t say it like it was a challenge; it was just a fact. “I’m sure you’re a funny kid, but it’ll be a while before you’re a comedian.”

  “How long is a little while?”

  “If you really want it, you just have to respect the process.” Like some little Mexican Yoda.

  This was the process: Come to the Comedy Showcase every night. Hang out. Don’t get any stage time. Just watch other comics who had, presumably, done what I was now supposed to do. Do this for weeks. On Mondays, go to the Laff Stop over in the River Oaks Shopping Center1 for open-mic night and work on some jokes. Wait for Danny to give you a shot. You get five minutes. Don’t fuck it up.

  Eventually, Danny let me get up. Most good comics have a great origin story about the first time they got onstage at a real club in front of an actual audience. Usually it involves bombing like the Enola Gay yet feeling the addictive rush of getting their first laugh that kept them coming back. My story wasn’t quite like that because I didn’t even get a chance to bomb. Only eight people showed up to the Thursday-night early show that Danny put me on, so he canceled it. My first time … wasn’t. It was like the stand-up comedy version of “just the tip.” What made it worse was that Friday and Saturday are headliner nights, when the shows are stacked with seasoned pros, so I had to wait until Sunday to get my shot. Those were the longest sixty-six hours of my life. Fuck Baby Jessica and her fifty-eight hours stuck in a well. This was real suffering.

  When I finally got up, I did okay. I didn’t kill, but I didn’t bomb either. In my allotted five minutes I managed to avoid flip-flopping any setups with punch lines, and I even got a few good laughs, mostly with lowest-common-denominator shit and fat jokes full of curse words. Imagine a sweeter-sounding nineteen-year-old version of me slinging fat jokes at my own expense. On a Sunday night at 8:00 p.m., of course that shit’s gonna get some laughs. I knew that, even then.

  But that wasn’t good enough for Danny. He wasn’t interested in developing comics who got mostly cheap laughs. He wanted you to get the good laughs, the right laughs. When I got offstage, he button-holed me and pulled me into the greenroom so he could yell at me:

  “Ralphie, what the fuck are you doing out there? Quit cursing!”

  Danny explained that anyone can get a laugh from a well-placed fuck, shit, asshole, or cocksucker. Anyone can write dirty. The problem is, once you’ve gotten used to writing dirty, it’s next to impossible to learn how to write clean. And writing clean is how you find your best six minutes for The Tonight Show or Letterman if you get that far. Once you learn how to write clean and you can put together a solid twenty minutes, then you can think about working in some dirty shit.

  The next night I went up, I cut out the curse words but continued to lean on the easy laughs from the obvious fat jokes. I was young. I had no real life experience compared to these other guys. At least it felt that way. What else could I possibly talk about?

  Danny buttonholed me again.

  “Listen, Ralphie, you have a choice. You can be a fat person who happens to be a comic, or you can be a comic who happens to be a fat person. Which one do you want to be?”

  * * *

  For a self-educated high school dropout with no father to speak of, the importance of Danny’s willingness to mentor me and share his wisdom cannot be understated. He wasn’t just teaching me how to be a comic—a real, good comic—he was showing me how to be a man. He was telling me, by virtue of spending his time on me, that I had value. Not many things in this world can make a man feel more vulnerable than standing alone on a stage three feet from a room full of people who are expecting you to make them laugh. The only way you can get through it and persevere toward success is to have confidence in yourself. Danny injected that into me like the cheese into a chile relleno.

  Over the next eight years, I basically went to college at the Comedy Showcase. Danny Martinez was my professor. My itty-bitty Mexican Socrates. He worked on jokes with me. He told me what I was doing wrong, and most important, he taught me what it meant to be truly, authentically funny. I was not the only one he did this for. A laundry list of hilarious comedians and writers owe some amount of their success to Danny, the classroom that was the Comedy Showcase stage, and the office hours that were those straight-shooting greenroom chats.

  It’s funny when you think about it: I came to Houston looking to get my start as a comedian at a developmental club called the Comedy Workshop, at the urging of a short, funny man who got his start there and who was great at yelling. Instead I got my start at a different developmental club called the Comedy Showcase, urged along by the short, funny man who started the club and who was also good at yelling.

  I know there’s some serious hakuna matata circle-of-life karma shit in there somewhere, but all that matters to me is that Danny Martinez, who I still call my great friend, turned out to be one of the most positive forces I’ve ever had in my life, and his club became my new home.

  7.

  YES, AND …

  Wednesday-, Thursday-, and Sunday-night shows at the Comedy Showcase were dedicated to local comedians. Brand-new people did five minutes. New people with a little experience maybe did ten minutes and hosted the shows. They were the warm-up guys, so to speak, responsible for getting the audience pumped and introducing each comic on the bill. As you got better and developed bigg
er bits, you got more time and better spots during those local shows. Eventually, maybe you even closed the show, doing thirty or forty minutes if you were planning on going on the road in the near future.

  It was a great system, and pretty soon I started getting regular spots during the week. To get more reps, I volunteered for spots that nobody else wanted to take. In the beginning, I couldn’t believe that was even possible, that open spots were even a thing. In the early nineties, there was no shortage of young comics hanging around at any of the clubs. How could there be open spots? I couldn’t understand for the life of me why anyone who was trying to get good at stand-up would turn down stage time. Comedy is a muscle after all—you have to work it. If you don’t, it atrophies. And the stage is your gym. In my opinion, as a young comic at eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, there was no such thing as a bad spot.

  Eventually, after talking to Danny about it, I figured out what was going on. The spots I was volunteering for were open because they were between some of the funniest fucking people anybody had ever seen in their lives: Thea Vidale, Brett Butler, T. Sean Shannon, his brother Charlie, Frank Lunney (aka Captain Rowdy), and a handful of other local legends. These comics could come in any night of the week and get standing ovations every time. Even when they were working out new material onstage, they’d kill. And when they brought twenty or thirty polished minutes, Lord Jesus, they would destroy. Going on between two of those people was like asking to perform in the eye of a hurricane. On either side of you is this whirlwind of energy produced by an awesome force of nature, and then there you are, standing in the middle of it, everything eerily silent, surrounded by destruction. The local comics who had been around awhile and felt the hot, stifling panic of comedic death that came from trying to follow Thea or fill time before Charlie had decided, almost as a group, that the emotional pain of a silent crowd wasn’t worth the money or the experience you’d earn from enduring it.

  I was still too young and too green to make that calculation. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. To me, every spot was a good spot, so I took every spot Danny was willing to give me and then asked for more. I was like a guest in a Greek grandmother’s house: as long as you keep eating, she’s gonna keep feeding you.

  I took what you might call an improv approach to my career. One of the fundamental principles of improvisational comedy is this idea of “Yes, and…” When you’re in a scene, your job is to accept the premise of what your partner is doing (say yes to it) and then build on it. You’re a needy, codependent God? Okay, and I’m a dyslexic angel who thinks you’re a dog and keeps calling you a “good boy” and trying to make you sit.

  Beyond the crowd work I do now at the beginning of my sets, I have never done much in the way of actual improv. Don’t get me wrong, I love watching it. It’s hilarious. But I’m a joke guy, an observation guy, a story guy. I like writing bits and building an hour with jokes and stories that transition seamlessly and call back to one another. Still, this idea of “Yes, and…” helped me with my career choices, especially in the beginning. For nearly all of my time in Houston, I “Yes, and…”–ed the fuck out of every opportunity that came my way, no matter where it came from, who brought it to me, or where it sent me.

  * * *

  I’d been settled in the Houston scene for a while when I heard that Sam Kinison was coming to town for a run of shows at the Laff Stop, so I decided to get ahold of him through the club. When I asked the Laff Stop general manger to connect me, he looked at me sideways like Who does this fucking kid think he is? You don’t just call Sam Kinison. He’s famous! Why wouldn’t I reach out? I legitimately knew the man. I wasn’t trying to fanboy him or anything. What’s the worst thing that happens—he says no? Make the fucking call.

  All the GM would tell me was that Sam was scheduled to do radio the Thursday morning at the beginning of his run. That’s all I needed. The GM didn’t have to tell me which station, there could be only one place: Rock 101 KLOL. Home of the legendary morning drive-time Stevens and Pruett Show, starring the “Radio Gawds” Mark Stevens and Jim Pruett, along with my man Eddie “The Boner” Sanchez and Brian Shannon (no relation to Charlie or T. Sean). Only a show with as many FCC fines as Stevens and Pruett racked up could host a man like Sam Kinison in Houston first thing in the morning.

  I went down to the station that Thursday at 6:00 a.m., when the show started, not knowing what to expect. Sam rolled in at seven, reeking of pussy, booze, and burnt Styrofoam—which I’m pretty sure are the three base ingredients for Drakkar Noir. The pussy smell meant he’d had a good night. The booze meant the night hadn’t ended. And the burnt Styrofoam meant he’d been smoking cocaine. So clearly he was in great shape.

  When he saw me, he told me to come into the studio with him and help him out on the show. I was more than happy to oblige however I could—writing him quick jokes, giving him stuff to riff off of, whatever he needed. When you’re nineteen and you don’t know shit, you do whatever a guy like Sam Kinison asks you to do. Of course the guys on the show had no fucking clue who this baby-faced fat kid was trailing behind Sam, so almost immediately I became the topic of conversation:

  “This is the kid,” Sam said. They looked at him a little confused, like they were supposed to know who “the kid” was. “Kid, what’s your name again?”

  “I’m Ralphie May.”

  “Guys, I pulled a joke on this kid up in Fayetteville a couple years ago that you wouldn’t believe.” Sam told them, and a million other people (more probably), the entire story of me opening for him and screaming wild curses at his loyal fans. Stevens and Pruett loved it.

  “I gotta give it to him,” Sam concluded, “he rolled with the punches like a pro. Kid’s got a bright future. Remember that name, guys.”

  I was floating on a cloud.

  “Hey, kid,” Sam said, “what’s your name again?”

  They all got a big kick out of that one. So did I, because Sam had just vouched for me to the whole world, or to my whole world at least. I’d been in Houston less than a year, and I was already an anointed man. It was like Donnie Brasco—a friend of Sam’s was a friend of ours. Getting spots at the other six clubs in town immediately got easier. They weren’t better spots than I deserved based on my skill level, but they were spots that could have gone to other local comics with the same amount of experience. The way I looked at it was that they were extra reps working that comedy muscle.

  Stevens and Pruett liked me enough to invite me back all by my lonesome a couple weeks later. They wanted me to sit in and do kind of what I did with Sam: write jokes for them, give them stuff to riff on, all sorts of other shit. This wasn’t stand-up comedy exactly, but it wasn’t not stand-up comedy either. There was a microphone and a captive audience who were listening because they loved to laugh. How could I not say, “Yes, and … anything else you want me to do too?”

  The station couldn’t afford to pay me to start, or they weren’t willing to, I never found out which, but it didn’t matter because I didn’t care. This was high-pressure experience on a show that pulled a 29–34 share of the local market. Do you have any idea how many people that is in a city the size of Houston? It’s approximately a fuckload. And all of them, by virtue of listening to a show like Stevens and Pruett, were comedy fans. They were my people. So I threw myself into it. Soon enough it got to be that I was a regular and I was sitting in five days a week. I worked for no money that whole first year, though that didn’t mean I wasn’t paid. The exposure and practice I got, the people I got to meet, those things were worth ten times what they could have paid me in American dollars.

  Where I really made my mark on that show, though, was in my willingness to do all sorts of crazy stunts. Man-on-the-street stuff, on location, in the studio, out in the parking lot—you name it, I did it. I remember in 1994 hometown hero and greatest pitcher of all time, Nolan Ryan, came into the studio for an interview. He’d retired the year before, at the age of forty-six, after tearing a ligament in his pitching el
bow during a game up in Seattle.1 In the production meeting that morning, Stevens and Pruett thought it would be a great idea to deck me out in catcher’s gear and get Nolan to throw me a fastball. Not only would it be cool to see if the hardest thrower in the history of baseball still had his stuff, but it would be hilarious to see the fat kid who never played organized baseball try to catch a missile from sixty feet six inches away.

  Nolan arrived right on time dressed in a sharp suit and tie, looking as fit as a fiddle. Once he got comfortable, Stevens and Pruett ambushed him with the stunt idea. He reluctantly agreed and followed them outside to the parking lot, where he found a regulation pitcher’s mound, a home plate, and me wearing a mask, two chest protectors, a very large cup, and a brand-new catcher’s mitt that looked like someone had carved the vagina out of a large cow, spread it open, and lacquered it in place with some pottery glaze. This thing was stiff as a board.

  Good sport that he is, Nolan threw a couple of warm-up pitches to get me ready, then climbed on top of the pitching rubber and told me to get down in a catcher’s stance. I have never been to a bullfight, but I imagine staring up at Nolan Ryan from sixty feet away must feel similar to staring into the eyes of an angry bull that has just fixed on your cape as its target. Nolan rubbed up the ball a little, waited for Boner Sanchez to get behind me with the radar gun, then went into that patented high leg-kick and unleashed the Ryan Express right down Broadway. Somehow I managed to catch it, though it’s probably more accurate to say that it caught me. Boner showed everyone the radar-gun readout: 98 mph. It was insane. A forty-seven-year-old man had just walked out into a parking lot in a business suit, in the middle of the morning commute, and fired a bullet. If that pitch were a car, he’d get a ticket for reckless endangerment.

  As impressive as the raw speed, was the sound of the ball, hitting the fresh leather of my mitt. It was the combination of a gunshot echo and a bullwhip cracking through plate glass. The sound was scary loud. The pain was just plain scary. It felt like I’d just tried to catch a fireball that cut a hole through my left palm. I pulled my throbbing hand from the glove, and already I could see the blood blister forming. I couldn’t move my hand either. The guys insisted it was just numb, but when you’ve broken forty-two bones in sixty-four places, you know the difference between numb and broken. When something’s numb, you can move it and you don’t feel anything. When something’s broken, you can’t move it and you can feel everything. This was broken—two bones right where the base of the fingers meet the top of the hand. All part of a day’s unpaid work.