by Ralphie May
That was the kind of shit I did on the regular, until one day Jim Pruett got busted flying guns down to Mexico and they needed me to fill in as a cohost for a while. I started getting honest-to-goodness fans then—and a paycheck. I was barely old enough to drink, but because I took a flier and reached out to the Laff Stop general manager, then said “Yes, and…” to Sam, to Stevens and Pruett, and to the Ryan Express, all the club managers and headliners were now willing to throw prime spots my way on the best shows all over town.
* * *
Houston had seven major clubs—all with seating for more than three hundred people—as I started to make a name for myself: the Comedy Showcase, two Laff Stops, three Spellbinders, and the Hip Hop Comedy Stop. Would you like to guess which of those clubs featured the fewest pasty white-boy comics?
That’s right, jack. The Hip Hop Comedy Stop was the black club in town. It was opened by a Houston comedian named Rushion McDonald at almost the exact same time in the late eighties as another black comedian in Dallas by the name of Steve Harvey opened a club there called the Steve Harvey Comedy Club. Those two would play each other’s club back and forth, bringing supporting acts with them and creating a hell of a scene for black comics in East Texas. It was a rare thing to see a white guy or even a brown guy on one of the regular shows at the Hip Hop Comedy Stop. They weren’t racist about it, they just didn’t need our asses, so if you got to play the room, it meant they thought you were a legit comic and a good fit for their crowd.
The first night I was invited to play the Hip Hop Comedy Stop I totally bombed, which I was told afterward was pretty typical. It’s hard to hit the bull’s-eye of a target you’ve never aimed at before. The next night I switched some things up and did well, which I was told afterward was not pretty typical. White guys who bomb the first night in black rooms usually bomb for a reason—a reason the crowd is insistent on loudly vocalizing for you. Because of that, most comics will bomb the second night as well, if they even come back. I didn’t kill my second night, but I connected with the audience and they liked me well enough that I got invited back to start playing the club regularly. There was no way I was the first white comic this happened to—not with the guys whose footsteps I was following in—but apparently I was one of the few guys to accept. I was definitely the only white guy to regularly play the black rooms during the time that I called Houston home. All of which helped me stand out and distinguish myself.
It’s always good when a crowd likes you as much as they like your jokes, but there is no experience quite like a good black room when that happens. Anyone who has watched an episode of Def Comedy Jam or Showtime at the Apollo knows what I’m talking about. The place fucking ignites. You could power a city block with the energy created in a black room by an audience that likes the comedian. There is no better feeling—not drugs, not sex, not even the sex you don’t have to pay for.
These moments have a downside unfortunately, and it’s with the other comics in the room. Comics can be petty, jealous dicks. We’re insecure by nature, so when somebody whose material we don’t like or respect does well, our instinct isn’t to figure out what he or she is doing right that we might be doing wrong, it’s to lash out at the crowd, lament that the world is going to hell, and assume the comic in question is a piece-of-shit joke thief. That’s not all comics, but it’s definitely a lot of the working club comics whose names you’d never recognize.
I remember one show at the Hip Hop Comedy Stop specifically where I had just killed and gotten a raucous standing ovation, and the emcee came up after me to introduce the next comic and started making all of these fat jokes about me. One or two fat jokes? Whatever, that’s fine, it’s part of the game. But this motherfucker kept going. What he didn’t realize is that no one who isn’t fat has more than a couple good fat jokes. Unless you spend every second of your life fat, doing fat things, thinking fat thoughts, there’s no way you can develop the kind of arsenal of fat jokes I’d written and perfected over those first couple years in Houston. The emcee’s jokes got tired real quick, but he couldn’t stop himself, I think, because he was jealous that the room liked me so much and he was pissed that the white guy did better than he did in a black room.
Eventually the crowd started getting restless and annoyed. Bad fat jokes are bad enough, but at a show with this much energy and this much straight fire getting spit, people only have so much patience for the emcee. They want you to do your two minutes and bring up the next comic. You’re the sizzle, not the steak. This dude just wouldn’t quit. Then suddenly, from a booth at the back of the room, a drunken one-eyed, four-foot black man walked down the center aisle to the front of the stage holding a nickel-plated, pearl-handled .45-caliber handgun. He raised it to just the right height so the stage lights would bounce off it in multiple directions, then pointed it directly at the emcee and yelled:
“Put the fat white boy back onstage and shut the fuck up, nigga!”
You’d think that when a charbroiled Oompa-Loompa pulls a gun in a crowded club, people would run for cover, but not this place, not this time. Instead the crowd went nuts because this was not your run-of-the-mill black midget. This was Bushwick Bill from the Geto Boys—the greatest rap group ever to come out of Houston. They were at the height of their fame and influence at the time, and Bill was sort of a cult figure after getting shot in the eye by his girlfriend during a fight a few years earlier because, drunk on Everclear and high on PCP, he threatened to throw their kid out the window.
When a dude like that tells you to put the fat white boy back onstage, you put the fat white boy back onstage. It was flattering, but I didn’t have any more material. Plus I didn’t want to be rude to the comic who was up next. When you’re famous and headlining at Carnegie Hall, you can be like Dave Chappelle and walk into the Laugh Factory unannounced on a Thursday night and do four and half straight hours. When you’re early in your stand-up career, it’s important to respect your stage time. So when I got back up onstage I grabbed the mic and said:
“Thank you so much, but I don’t want to be disrespectful to the next comedian. Ladies and gentleman, I wasn’t planning on emceeing tonight so I don’t know the next comedian, but I know you’re going to love him. If he’s booked here, that means he’s fantastic. From Chicago, Illinois, please welcome Mr. Bernie Mac!”
I brought up Bernie Mac, can you believe that? All because Bushwick Bill had seen enough of that other triflin’ motherfucker.
They say the Lord giveth and he taketh away. Well he gaveth me a few minutes of feeling like I was on the top of the world, and then, by putting Bernie Mac on the stage after me, he tooketh my hopes and dreams and squashed them into oblivion. Guys like Bernie Mac are the reason you rarely find a successful stand-up comic who is a true optimist. Right when you feel like you’re making strides—getting better gigs, earning bigger and more regular laughs—you let yourself start to think that maybe your comedy fantasies could become realities, and this guy you’ve never heard of comes up and makes you think, I will never in my life be even close to as funny as this guy. Bernie was so funny, you almost couldn’t put it into words. He could do that thing that Thea Vidale could do and suck all the oxygen out of the room, right along with my dreams.
I was able to mute some of the existential dread for my career and start to feel myself a little again later that night when the Geto Boys called me over to their booth in the back. They loved my shit and wanted to talk to me. Willie D and Scarface were there. So was DJ Screw, the legendary DJ who pioneered the chopped-and-screwed style that was unique to Houston at the time. As they introduced themselves—like they needed any introduction—all that was running through my head were the lyrics from “Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta” and “Mind Playing Tricks on Me”:
Or is it the one I beat for five thousand dollars
Thought he had ’caine but it was Gold Medal flour
Bushwick Bill was there too, of course, but he was so fucked-up, he probably had no idea where he was. They
were all so nice to me, sitting there around the booth sipping out of Styrofoam cups, getting fucked-up on codeine syrup and Sprite (aka Purple Drank).2 They asked me if I wanted some, but I was barely old enough to drink then and that stuff was way above my level, so instead we smoked a bunch of weed. Right in the club, right there at the booth. Nobody gave a shit.
Houston in the nineties, man. Comedy in the nineties. It was a fucked-up, crazy-cool time that, despite my being a carpetbagger from up north in the holler, molded me into a true Texas comic—thanks in no small part to my commitment to saying “Yes, and…” to whatever came my way.
* * *
When you say “Yes, and…” long enough, two things happen: you become indispensable to people who need someone reliable, and you see so much that you’re never at a loss for what to do when things change or something goes wrong.
I learned that watching Danny Martinez emcee a show one night at the Laff Stop as a favor to the owner, Sandy Marcus. Danny was never one to refuse a favor or say no when someone needed help, so when Sandy came up to him later in the night with a wrinkle in the program, he was unfazed:
“Look, Danny, there’s a new guy on the bill. He’s a magician.”
“Are you serious? A magician?”
“He’s got some kind of magic competition in San Francisco coming up, and he wants to run his ten-minute set. So just do eight or ten minutes, bring up the magician, and then everything else on the bill stays the same.”
No self-respecting comedian wants to share the stage with a guy in a cape and a top hat, but Danny is a professional. All right, he told Sandy, no problem. So he does his eight to ten minutes and he’s wrapping up, and from behind the curtain there’s this voice:
“Hey, do more time!”
He wasn’t even the one who heard it. A guy in the front row of the audience heard it and yelled up, “He said to do more time!” So Danny does another five or six minutes and starts wrapping it up again, and he gets the same shit from the voice behind the curtain: do more time. Like a very demanding Oz. Danny begrudgingly does three or four more minutes, and now he’s reached the limit of his capability as host. Danny had a mountain of material, but being the emcee, he hadn’t set any of it up right to just run it out on command like this goddamn magician was asking him to. So he does a little bit of crowd work and finally just says fuck it and brings the guy onstage.
Don’t be fooled: this was no David Copperfield, Penn and Teller magician. Oh, no, this cat looked like the kind of guy you found either in the phone book or the sex offender registry. He wore a tuxedo with tails and a top hat. He carried out a small card table and draped a black cloth over it. Then he brought out some kind of bird perch and marched it over to the edge of the stage with a magical flourish. He could not have been any cheesier if he were made out of Brie.
After the standard corny magician’s introduction where they say a bunch of puns and reassure the audience that there are no wires or mirrors anywhere, he went into his act. First he did some sleight-of-hand bullshit that turned a bouquet of flowers into a dove. He let go of the bird, and it was supposed to fly a circle around the room and then land on the perch across the stage, the way it was trained. But the room was so dark and the stage lights were so bright that the contrast messed with the dove’s vision or homing mechanism. On its way to the perch, the dove overshot and fucking slammed into the wall behind the stage at full speed, like a live-action Tweety Bird cartoon. It dropped like a stone and started flopping around on the stage just violently enough that the audience went speechless. Had it just plain died, the crowd might have been able to convince themselves that it was part of the act, and at the end the bird would miraculously appear on someone’s plate of nachos, or something. But watching a helpless animal writhe in its death throes was too much for them. It was too much for Danny and me and two other comedians at the back of the room as well, because we broke. We were crying we were laughing so hard.
The magician knew right away that he was in trouble. He started sweating profusely. He should have wrapped that shit up, scooped up the bird with his top hat, and lived to fight another day. But he’d committed to a full run-through of his ten-minute act, so he soldiered on. As he worked his way into his next trick, I immediately understood why he was sweating: it involved another bird. Sure enough, he put his stupid hat on the table, placed a handkerchief over the top, waved his hand, and, voilà, produced a dove. He held that dove in his hand the same way he’d held the first, only this one he held for maybe a second longer, almost certainly asking himself whether it was a good idea to let it go. I guess his answer was let it ride, because he let that fucker fly. It left his hand, circled around the room, lined up its approach, and then—smack!—right into the wall. It fell to the stage and flopped around right next to the other dove.
Danny and I had never laughed so hard at anything in our lives. The audience was in total shock, but they heard us laughing, so a little bit of nervous laughter started coming from the seats. They must have thought, Well, if the other comedians are laughing, then this must be okay, it must be part of the show. They didn’t realize that comedians, aside from being petty, jealous dicks at times, are also sadistic assholes when someone is dying catastrophically onstage. It’s the best possible kind of performance art. It is true magic.
The magician did a couple of little card stunts and rope tricks before transitioning to his big finale: a big bunch of flowers with a cover over them. Oh, no, he couldn’t … could he? He pulled back the cover to reveal yet another dove. Oh, yes, he could. He couldn’t possibly let this one go, though, right? I mean, we all got it. We knew what was supposed to happen. He could fast-forward to the end; I think we all would have been okay with that. “The Amazing Sergeant Slaughter” wouldn’t hear of it. He opened his hand and let that dove go too. It left his hand and flew around the room just like the previous two, except this bird saw the carnage of his wingmen on the stage floor below, so he booked it over to the other side of the stage and the relative safety of a lighting array that, together, probably pumped out five or six hundred degrees of concentrated heat.
When the bird touched down, it went up in flames. Apparently, birds are highly combustible. Who knew? After a couple seconds of shocked silence, a ball of feathers and flames fell down from the rigging onto the stage. It was hard to tell if it was the bird flopping around or if it was the flames causing the ball of burning flesh to roll around. Either way it was a fire hazard, so a lady in the front row threw her drink on it to douse the flames. Only the drink was straight vodka, and it sent a fireball toward the ceiling that incinerated the bird.
Finally the magician started freaking out, which made the club manager freak out, which forced Sandy Marcus to do something. She sent Danny back onstage to save this magician from himself and try to salvage the rest of the show. But besides giving everyone their money back, what the hell do you do in a situation like that? Offer ten-cent wings? How do you follow that?
So Danny gets up there, grabs the mic, talks the magician off the stage, looks around at the bloody avian sacrifice at his feet, and says the only word that comes to his mind: “Taadaa.…”
8.
THE ROAD CAN BE AN ASSHOLE
There’s more to being a comedian than telling jokes. Your job does not begin and end with your ability to create setups and punch lines or develop callbacks and reversals. It’s more than knowing how to tell a story or do crowd work or shut down a heckler. It’s not as simple as that—as just doing all your time and making sure you don’t go over. Being a comedian is about understanding how and why the world works. It’s about seeing the matrix. To do that, you’ve got to go on the road. If getting up onstage as often as you can is how you become good at comedy, then going on the road is how you become a good comedian, because the road, when it comes right down to it, is where the world is.
Successful comedians have all done their time on the road, and the best ones do it with their eyes wide open. They learn to identify wh
at is universal about people and what things are different. They figure out what parts of their act play well wherever they go, and what needs to get tweaked and massaged based on where they are on a given night. They learn where in the country they resonate more and where they resonate less. It’s a steep learning curve early in a comedian’s career, partly because you just don’t know and partly because when you come to the clubs in many of these towns, you’re running into audiences whose reason for being there is to watch stand-up comedy, not necessarily to watch you. Most times you are totally irrelevant to them beyond your role as the delivery mechanism for the comedy they’ve come to see, which means that you have to overcome a fairly high bar of skepticism right away. They’re sitting there unfamiliar with you or your act, and they’re thinking to themselves, I paid twenty-five dollars for this ticket and twenty-five dollars for food and drinks, this fat fuck better be fucking funny.
Huge comedians like Louis C.K. and Jerry Seinfeld, or Amy Schumer and Whitney Cummings, or Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle, don’t have that problem anymore. They spent years on the road turning the raw comedic strength they developed in the gyms that were their home clubs into the kind of functional fitness necessary to do bigger and better things in their careers: hour specials, sitcoms, Saturday Night Live, movies, TV hosting gigs, that kind of stuff. They did the work and have nothing left to prove. Now they can play everywhere because people are buying tickets to see them. For a good, successful comedian, that is the brass ring, and the quest to reach it begins on the road.