This Might Get a Little Heavy

by Ralphie May

  Lee finally got a lick in that put the banger flat on his ass, and Lee wanted to end it for good. Lee did not suffer triflin’ motherfuckers, plus he was on the clock. He had a job to get back to. So he went over to the valet stand, grabbed one of the stanchions, and raised it up over his head like he was going to bash the guy’s head in.

  Jay ran over and got in between Lee and the banger: “No, no, no! Lee, no! That’s five years, man, that’s five years!” Jay wishes. If Lee had put the corner of that stanchion through this dude’s eye socket and brained him, we’d be putting a 1 or a 2 in front of that 5. Fortunately, Lee is a reasonable man who can quickly gather his composure. So he set the stanchion back down in its place at the valet stand and kicked the banger in the face again instead.

  That’s when Mitch Mullany pulled up in his ’62 Chevy Impala and saw what was going on. Mitch was a good comic. Mitch was also very white. On the Wayans Bros. show on the WB network, he played a character named White Mike, for fuck’s sake. What we didn’t know about very white Mitch was that he was raised in very black Oakland. You don’t get out of there in one piece without learning how to handle yourself. He jumped out of that car, rolling up his sleeves with a look of pure joy plastered across his face. See, Mitch was a legitimate actor by then. He’d done the Wayans Bros. thing and he’d even had his own show on the WB for a couple of seasons called Nick Freno: Licensed Teacher. He was a grown-up, a professional; it had been a long time since he’d gotten to whip somebody’s ass.

  When he squared up on the bloody tweaking banger, Jay and I were like Iceman and Slider at the end of Top Gun when Maverick reengages with the Russian MiG they couldn’t shake. We could not fuck this guy up no matter what we did, and now we were exhausted. (I was winded the next day.) Mitch hit this guy with combos like he was Roy Jones Jr. He’d go to the body, then feint, and come over with a cross right on the button that sent spit and blood flying from the guy’s mouth. It was like ballet. If I wasn’t so tired, I would have been aroused.4

  Finally the cops showed up and took over attempting to “subdue” the “perpetrator,” except they got to use fun toys like a Taser and a couple of those telescoping batons. They beat the fuck out of him. With all the paperwork those cops were going to have to do, I would have beat his ass too even if he’d done nothing to me. Meanwhile, Shirley, the true victim of this altercation, was back inside the club, no worse for wear, getting pampered by the waitresses and watching the show.

  Eventually the cops got the guy under control and took him around the corner on Laurel Avenue so they could get his statement away from us and get him treated by the EMTs, who had just arrived.

  After a few minutes the arresting officer came back around the corner onto Sunset and approached us. “We need you to come identify the guy who attacked you.” He motioned for us to follow him up the street. We looked at him like he was crazy. “For our report, we just need you to say ‘That’s him’ basically.”

  “Yeah, is he a bloody Mexican? That’s him,” I said. What the officer didn’t realize was that the adrenaline from the fight had almost completely worn off, and what was left in its place was sheer terror. We were so afraid of the guy now that we didn’t want to go near him, even though he was handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser. With what we had seen, he could come flying through the windshield at us for more.

  “Take our word for it,” Jay said, “that’s him.”

  * * *

  The greatest thing that Jay Mohr ever did for me was something I didn’t want to do: audition for the first season of Last Comic Standing on NBC in 2003. Jay had been working on this show idea for at least a couple years. Originally it was called Comic House and Doug Stanhope was going to do it, then it became something else, then NBC got involved because CBS and Fox were eating its lunch with competition shows like Survivor, The Amazing Race, Big Brother, and American Idol. Jay worked with them to refine the idea and it became Last Comic Standing.

  It was February of 2003 and I was doing a week of shows at the Laugh Factory in Hawaii when I got a call from Jay. It was Thursday morning.

  “Remember that pilot I told you about? It’s now called Last Comic Standing and you have to audition for it on Saturday.”

  “Jesus, Jay, that’s not exactly down the road, bro. Can you just put me on it?” I figured since Jay created it and was going to be the executive producer, he could give me a first-round bye, so to speak.

  “Technically it’s a game show now, so there are rules.”

  “Fuck, who would I be auditioning for?”

  “Bob and Ross from The Tonight Show.”

  Now I was pissed. Bob Read and Ross Mark were the talent coordinators for The Tonight Show. From about 2001 until Jay Leno left in 2014, if you were a young or unknown stand-up comedian who wanted to get on The Tonight Show, you inevitably had to get through them first. I’d already showcased for Bob and Ross and they loved me. They knew I was funny.

  “You’re not auditioning for that show, you’re auditioning for this show,” Jay said, just like a fucking producer. There was no way around it: if I wanted to be on this show, I had to audition and it had to be that Saturday.

  Lahna was in Hawaii with me as my opener. We were making it a minivacation. When I got off the phone with Jay, we looked up the airfare for a Friday red-eye to LA and a Saturday-afternoon return to Honolulu so I wouldn’t have to miss any shows. First we had to see if one of those tickets even existed (which it did), then we had to find out how much it cost: $850. I was only making $1,200 for the week. This was going to be a huge bite out of my ass for what amounted to a gamble.

  I wasn’t sure what to do, but Lahna said not to worry. She told me she believed in me and put the ticket on her credit card. Having parents who hate you was a big downside to dating a rich suburban Jewish girl, but there was an upside: good credit. And thank Yahweh for that!

  I landed on Saturday morning, went from the airport to my apartment to shower off the smell of poi and chocolate-covered macadamia nuts from the Honolulu airport gift shop, then went straight over the hill to NBC in Studio City. The auditions were being held on Johnny Carson’s old stage, which is this gargantuan room, basically like an old hangar, where they’d set up a temporary stage. The Johnny Carson aspect of the audition was cool. What was not cool was the goddamn Walk of Methuselah you had to make from the parking lot to get there. I was already pissed off and irritable from the flight and the walk, and the twelve stairs I had to climb at the end to get in the building just put me over the top.

  Still, I choked down my Southern-fried fury, summoned up some positive energy, and started in on my three minutes. It felt pretty good, but ninety seconds in, they stopped me.

  I was so fucking mad. “Do you have any fucking idea what I had to do to get here today? On a Saturday! I might miss my spots because of this, Jamie’s gonna have my ass, I might not be able to pay my rent!” I was just unleashing.

  Bob and Ross tried to slow me down, they tried to interject, but I was inconsolable.

  “Ralphie!” one of them shouted finally. “Chill out, you’re in.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Sometimes I should think before I start biting people’s heads off. I was still annoyed. I had to fly all the way across the Pacific Ocean on my girlfriend’s dime to spend ninety seconds confirming what I’d already told Jay. Then I had to get right back on a plane and fly all the way back.

  I couldn’t complain. Not because I should have been grateful that I passed the audition (which I was). I literally couldn’t complain. Jay wasn’t even there. He’d slept in.

  15.

  SECOND-TO-LAST COMIC STANDING

  The performance part of auditioning for Last Comic Standing was fairly straightforward. You did three minutes in the first round on the Johnny Carson stage. If you made it through, the second round was at the Laugh Factory the following Tuesday. If you made it through that, they flew you to Las Vegas the next day and put you up at t
he Paris Hotel, where you’d audition a third and final time for a chance to get into the house.

  After passing the first round, I did my shows back in Honolulu, flew back to LA on Monday, and gave myself a good twenty-four hours to prepare for my Laugh Factory spot Tuesday night, which meant sleeping. The judges for this phase of the auditions were Jay, Buddy Hackett, and Joe Rogan. It was a Ralphie-friendly crowd, on my home turf, which was comforting, but by no means a guarantee. From how they judged the comics who went before me, Jay, Buddy and Joe were clearly using the audience response as a gauge for their scores, which was fair. Fortunately, I got through that round and the next one in Vegas, which set us up for a couple days of shooting in Vegas leading up to the selection for getting into the house.

  Reality shows can fuck with you. I had performed the best and most consistently across the three phases of the audition, yet I was the last of the ten people selected for the house. As the house filled up and the available spots dwindled, I was so nervous. How the fuck could I not end up in that house? I thought maybe they were doing it this way for dramatic effect, like by selecting me last they’d shake my confidence a little and give the guys they selected first a bit of an ego boost. I was incorrect on both counts.

  Later that night Jay pulled me aside to explain. “Man, you have no idea how fucking hard it was to get you into this house.” I didn’t know what he meant. “NBC does not want you on this show. They’ve never had anyone as big as you on prime-time television. They think people will make a laughingstock out of them.”

  This was not the first time I’d felt explicit antifat prejudice in show business (the implicit kind is everywhere). I once showcased at the Laugh Factory along with twenty other comedians to go on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. I followed Dane Cook, which seemed to happen a lot in those early days, and was the only comic who got a standing ovation. After the show, Dane and Mitch Mullany went up to the booker to find out how everything was going to shake out.

  “So when can the rest of us go on the show?” Dane said.

  “Ralphie did the best, so he’ll obviously go first,” Mitch added, “but what about after that?”

  “Actually,” the booker said, “we can’t have Ralphie on,” and told me right to my face I was too fucking fat.1

  Now it was happening again.

  “You have to keep doing what you’ve been doing,” Jay told me. “You have to get a standing ovation every time you perform. Every. Fucking. Time. Otherwise if you leave it up to them, they will kick you off this TV show the second there’s an opportunity.”

  There is a moment when a man gets kicked in the nuts when there is no pain, just shock. The moment is just long enough for the brain to register that you’ve been kicked in the nuts, at which point the shock dissipates and the pain explodes. It’s like a massive earthquake that sends shock waves of agony through your body. When the shock waves reach your head, creating stars and double vision and virtual blindness, they rebound back toward the epicenter like a tsunami. That’s when the nausea kicks in and doubles you over, eventually bringing you to a knee and maybe even to the ground, in the fetal position.

  That’s what my conversation with Jay felt like. And it was only Thursday, exactly a week from when he first called me in Hawaii about coming on the show.

  The final cast was me, Rich Vos, Sean Kent, Cory Kahaney, Geoff Brown, Dave Mordal, Tere Joyce, Rob Cantrell, Tess Drake, and Dat Phan. I didn’t know about the others, but I was a wreck. In two days I’d gone from being nervous about getting into the house to stressed about getting kicked out of it. Worse, I didn’t have any money. I knew we were going to get paid for the show, but I didn’t have time to wait for their check to cycle through payroll. I’m sure they were just trying to mindfuck us and cause drama, but I’d had enough.

  “Why haven’t we been paid? Why haven’t any of us seen our per diem?” I was shouting this at anyone who would listen. “You’re trying to purposely cause drama, and it’s bullshit. Fuck this, I’m done. I’m out!”

  I stormed out of NBC onto the street and called Lahna to come pick me up. For the second time in little more than a week, she was my voice of reason. She said I needed to stick with the show and that she’d take care of the rent in the meantime with a cash advance on her credit card. My Southern male ego didn’t like that one bit. Paying my way once? That’s a gift. Twice? Now that’s charity. Lahna blew off that braggadocio right fast and said I could pay it back later when I’d won the show. Fucking women and their reverse-psychology mind tricks.

  Hearing that, I calmed down enough that when the producer came outside to wrangle me back into the NBC studio, I could be reasoned with. I was still yelling, though, because I knew I had them by the balls. I’d shot at the Laugh Factory and in Las Vegas for the show, and there was no way to edit me out. I told them they needed to start treating everybody like talent. This wasn’t the news, this was a TV show. They were freaking out because they knew I had the upper hand. Within ten minutes of my coming back inside, we were all being taken care of, and not long after that we were all in a limousine on the way to the house.

  * * *

  Our first night in the house, Cory Kahaney made dinner for everyone. She had worked as a chef in her other life, so she rummaged through the understocked, unfamiliar kitchen and busted her ass to put together a great meal. It was nothing fancy—just a good, hearty simple pasta meal—but none of us had eaten hardly anything that day, so it tasted amazing.

  Sean Kent, who decided to fill the “asshole” role in this house, I guess, started shitting all over the meal. This didn’t sit well with me, especially from him. He’d already gotten my hackles up with his big fucking cowboy hat and his whole Austin, Texas, shtick. I knew every comic worth a damn in the state of Texas, and I’d never once heard of this fucking guy. Even if I had, if he was cut from the same cloth as most of the other Texas comics I came up with, well, then he could go fuck himself as far as I was concerned. Thus, his shit-bagging Cory’s meal wasn’t his first strike, it was the last straw. I calmly got up, walked over to where he was sitting, put his fork down on his plate, picked up the plate, and threw it out the sliding glass door.

  “Now you don’t get any, asshole. Get the fuck outta here.”

  The next day was the first day we had to challenge one another. I said, “I don’t know if this guy is a punk-ass bitch or a bitch-ass punk. I just know I’m funnier than Sean Kent.” When that played in front of him, he completely cracked. He was twitching he was so angry. It was fantastic. Naturally, he was the first one bounced off the show.

  All comedians do during the day is watch TV, so all of us knew that we had to constantly be doing crazy shit to entertain the home viewers or else NBC could cancel the show and we wouldn’t get paid. The way comedians normally do that is by relentlessly trying to bust on each other. Jay, who hosted the first season of the show in addition to creating and producing it, egged us on. The easiest target was Dat Phan, because he was relatively new to comedy, he was naïve, he was kind of annoying, and, as we found out later into the show, he was also a total degenerate.

  One night a few of us were sitting around talking about what we all wanted to do after the show ended. I said that I just wanted to go out and perform and headline my own shows. Rich Vos and Dave Mordal were thinking about going out on the road and performing together. Dat had different plans. He decided that after the show ended, he, and I am quoting here, wanted “to get a hot blond, fuck her from behind, and then have her piss on me.”

  Ooooooo-kay … time to go to bed.

  I’d seen and heard some incredible, degenerate things in my first fourteen years in comedy, but this was right up there as one of the creepiest things I’d ever heard come out of a comedian’s mouth that he intended for others to hear. And I’d worked with John Fox! All I could think about after hearing that was We could’ve had Ken Jeong, by golly, what a shame.

  It was true too. Ken had been passed through the first phase of auditions on the Johnn
y Carson stage, but when he saw the god-awful mountain of paperwork he would have to fill out just to move forward—background checks, releases, insurance waivers, tax forms, and on and on—he bailed. He’d been doing comedy for several years by then, but he was still a real doctor at the time, and this kind of bullshit paperwork was half of his job already. Why would he ever want to bring that part of his work home with him on the weekend?

  I was bummed when Ken told me he wasn’t continuing on, because not only was he hilarious, but we’d become friends over the last few years through Jay and through the Laugh Factory. We’d hung out quite a bit. In 2002, for instance, he and Jay and I went to the Super Bowl together down in New Orleans. Ken did his residency down there, so he knew the town pretty well. He and I shared a hotel room, because fuck Jay Mohr and his Jerry Maguire money! I didn’t have a goddamn dime to my name at the time, so Ken paid for me nearly everywhere we went on Bourbon Street that weekend. To show my appreciation I dragged him into what may have been his very last strip club thanks to some “dancer” who unsolicitedly showed him her ’giner meat and sent him reeling: “I think she’s got HPV on her butthole!”

  He shouted it at us over the music, right past her head. We were dying, figuratively speaking, at least. Unlike the neighborhood girl at my new place in Park Mesa Heights, aka Da Hood, who Ken saved from choking to death on a piece of meat at one of my weekly barbecues. He gave her the Heimlich maneuver right there in the yard.

  We could have had that guy in the house. Instead, we got a Vietnamese kid still wet behind the ears who claimed to want nothing more after his first, formative TV experience than to have a white girl pee on him.

  Welcome to Hollywood.

  * * *

  When the show got down to five people (me, Dat, Rich, Cory, and Tess), the producers kicked us all out of the house. The last two shows would be in front of a live theater audience, and TV viewers would be the ones voting. So from February until May, when the show began airing, we were all in limbo. I don’t do limbo well, either physically or metaphorically. I called Jay to see what was going on.