CHAPTER 135
Noam: With Robert Kelly, we had one fight at the table where he was talking about how road clubs are … Clubs on the road can be very … ‘They pay badly and blah blah blah and they don’t …’ And I was trying to tell him that I thought they’re probably not being as greedy as you think they are because they struggle. And for people who can’t draw on their name, which is a lot of comedians, the people go to the comedy club and they see somebody they’ve never heard of. And people who can’t draw on their name, they don’t have the right to be demanding anything top-dollar because they’re not the reason that the people are in the club. Anyway, I was trying to explain to him the business aspect of it and he lost his shit, screaming and yelling at me.
Author: Because he thought you were implying he’s not a draw?
Noam: No. I can see why … From the way I said it … That wasn’t it, because he is a draw, you know.
Author: Was it because you were trying to tell him about the business?
Noam: He just didn’t want to hear the other side of the story. This is not unique to comedians. This is anybody on the receiving end of any power structure, they always want to believe that the other side is just, you know, the most … And the people on their side, ‘We’re the good ones.’ And it’s never the case. It’s like, I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but I’ve had it. People hate landlords. They hate landlords until they invest in a condo or become a landlord in any way, in which case they’re like, ‘Holy shit, this is ridiculous. These tenants don’t have to pay their rent.’ They’re literally shocked. Dumbfounded. There’s that famous George McGovern column in the Wall Street Journal, you should look it up. You know who George McGovern is, don’t you?
Author: Yeah, yeah.
Noam: And after a whole career in the Senate, basically the most liberal Senator in the country, he left the Senate to open a small bed-and-breakfast-type place. And a year and a half later he went bankrupt and he wrote a column about his experience, essentially saying, and I think I’m being fair to him, saying that, ‘If I had known then what I know now, I just wouldn’t have voted the way I voted.’
CHAPTER 134
Artie Lange does a spot at the Cellar. He tells a joke about being fat and having sex with someone. @cherrell_brown watches then tweets,
Almost got kicked out of Olive Tree Cafe bar down in the Village …
So there a comedy show downstairs where the bathroom is, and I have to walk by the comedian/stage to go to the bathroom
There’s this white guy who starts a joke with ‘… these protests are messing with my personal …’ so I stop to listen …
‘I was having sex w/this black chick, & she said ‘I can’t breathe’ and I said ‘come on don’t bring politics into the bedroom.’
The majority white audience cackled and laughed. I flung my braids over my shoulder, pointed at a group and said ‘that shit ain’t funny’
Then got escorted back upstairs
A black person’s dying words become punch lines.
They looked at me perplexed as to why I was angry. I mean the entire room was doubled over in laughter, yall.
I’m still here and I’m going to get the comedians name.
They walked my ass back upstairs and now have someone at the door.
Got a name …
So comedian @artiequitter thinks it’s funny to make #ICantBreathe jokes at the expense of Eric Garner at @NYCComedyCellar tonight
Dear @NYCComedyCellar don’t book bigots like @artiequitter again. I will be sharing his offensive and disgusting routine w/folks
Wow, clearly @artiequitter has a reputation already. Def didn’t know dude before tonight. You’re an awfully unfunny bigot.
If @NYCComedyCellar supports acts like @artiequitter then we don’t need to support their business!!
Here’s the painful kicker, everyone laughed yall. I almost cried.
If yall don’t get out my mentions with ‘it’s comedy’, what do you expect from him?’ ‘move on’ type responses. Bye
We have to let establishments like @NYCComedyCellar know we’re not accepting this racist shit. Not even in the name of comedy
I also found out from a server that @artiequitter is a regular at @NYCComedyCellar. Think yall should end that agreement
Or I will find out the next time he is performing and come disrupt his disrespect, racist, act
And you’ll say ‘but jokes. But comedy.’ But if we were talking the holocaust or the Boston marathon you’d be outraged. #BlackLivesMatter too
@NYCComedyCellar if you don’t cancel @artiequitter were bringing the protest to you
This isn’t just a/b police accountability. Never was. This is about valuing black lives& disrupting anything that perpetuates the opposite yall. I was suppose to be here with Emerald, Eric Garner’s daughter, tonight having a bday drink. She got sick. What if she came & heard that?
He managed to make a violent joke about BW and mock Black Death. @artiequitter is trash
Now @artiequitter is RTing me. Keep it cute, until we show up to protest at your shows. We got dates, homie.
Now his fans are all up and through my mentions with rape threats
Rape threats. Bitch. Cunt. Humorless whore. Die. All in the last 20 mins. White supremacy defending itself, folks
CHAPTER 133
Author: So that was your second album? Wow. And I wondered if there was any backlash on that? Because a lot of what I’m trying to write is showing how, you know, audiences change, and public discourse, and people being offended, and how they react to how they feel about jokes and stuff like that. And because you’re one of the … A lot of the Cellar people are quite over towards the Conservative side. And you’re quite on the Liberal side. And I wondered if people ever reacted badly to you using that word on the stage?
Ted Alexandro: No, I never got any pushback. It definitely, like, when you say that word on stage, you know, you can feel the energy in the room change. They’re listening very … They’re kind of on high alert. But I think the fact that I use it as a quote, like the girl that I was dating who was black used the word, so to me then it was just a matter … Like, I would never use the word myself, just saying it on stage, but I had to kind of weigh the value and import of, ‘Do I use the word and does it benefit the joke?’ And I think ultimately I felt like I had to use the word because it just heightens the circumstances of the joke, and I’m quoting her so, yeah, but never any blowback.
CHAPTER 132
Author: So when you were trying to figure that out, did you try doing it on stage saying like, ‘the n-word’, as in, you know … So I’m going to say … So, did you try it on stage saying ‘nigger’ and then did you try it on stage saying ‘n-word’?
Ted: I don’t know that I ever said ‘n-word’. Yeah, no, I think … I’ll tell you this, it was a bit that I shelved for a while. I put it away because I couldn’t figure out how to do it properly in a way that to me felt justified that it landed where it needed to land comedically and, you know, as far as telling a story. But then once I finally got the ending of, ‘it was like my own civil war, north against south, brother against brother’, like because I say how I froze, like, ‘When she said it I froze from the waist up, but I kept fucking her, so it was the most racist ejaculation I ever had. It was like my own civil war, brother against brother, north against south, except this time the south won.’ So yeah, when I got all of the pieces to it finally I felt like, yes, I need to say the n-word in the joke because it was such a visceral thing that really happened in my life. So sometimes, for me, you work backwards from something real that happened, you know, that wasn’t necessarily funny in the moment but it was visceral.
Author: She really did say that?
Ted: Yes, that was true. I wouldn’t make something like that up, you know. Like, yeah, that really happened, so yeah,
then it was just a matter of like, how do I tell it in a way that’s true for me, and if it offends anyone I’ll be okay with it. You know.
CHAPTER 131
Rachel Feinstein: This other thing happened, I don’t know if this fits in with anything, but it gives you an idea of what it was like on the road. I went to Harrah’s. I flew across country. I got to the casino. It’s this long awful week. It’s, like, Tuesday through Saturday, you know? Comics hate that long Vegas weekend. It’s just so lonely and isolating. And so I get there Tuesday and my room key isn’t working. I walk back down, all the way down, bring my luggage up and down. They give me another key and then I walk back up again and it’s not working, that second key, so then I walk back down again I was like, ‘My key’s not working.’ And then they said … It turns out it was like the magnetic thing on the door, you know, and there wasn’t an extra room, so they sent the mechanic up to fix it. So I was sitting in the hallway of the hotel while the mechanic was fixing it, and he’s chatting with me. He was really nice and he was like, ‘Oh, that must be lonely, just like being this woman on the road.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s hard,’ and whatever. We talked a little bit. He was really overly friendly to me. And then he leaves. Then the next night my boyfriend at the time came to visit me and at four in the morning this mechanic walked into my room. Like, open the door, walked into my room, standing over the bed, you know.
Author: Your boyfriend was there?
Rachel: Yeah, but think if he wasn’t. I would have been assaulted. So I got up. I screamed. He got up and grabbed the guy, pushed him out of the room. The guy ran down the hallway. So we called downstairs and the mechanic tried to claim that he thought there was a call from my room. First of all, even if there was a call, why would you walk into the place, you know? And then I tried to call everybody and, like, try to get them to take this seriously, because I don’t want this guy to do this to somebody else.
Author: Yeah, it’s really psychopathic.
Rachel: Finally, one person at the casino was like, ‘Yeah, well maybe he didn’t … maybe he …’ I said, ‘I want to know the calls. I want to know all the calls he had that night because there’s got to be a record of which room.’ And so he finally told me, and when I was like hassling them they just wanted me to shut up about it, give me like a nicer room, and then he’s like, ‘Well, you’re right, the last call was in a different tower, hours before, on a different floor. So there’s no way that he was called to your room.’ And he said, ‘We’re going to look into this.’ And I told everybody that would listen, but it’s like … But they all just kind of quietened it. But it just shows how vulnerable you are. If my boyfriend hadn’t been there I don’t know what would have happened to me that night. I really don’t.
CHAPTER 130
Kurt Metzger: He called the cops to say I assaulted him, but the crowd, luckily, was like, ‘No, he attacked the comic.’ He was trying to show off because his girl’s like a model or something. And on stage what I do when somebody sucks is I let them annoy the crowd before I make fun of … The rookie mistake is to try and do … Or what I would do wrong when I was new was, I would go mean too hard too fast on somebody, but now what I do is let the audience … Because sometimes the audience has no idea how bad someone’s fucking you up by talking. So I wait until I can see that they’re, ‘Are you going to do something about this person?’ Because you need like a mandate from them, you know. Once you have that, you can do whatever you want, but I still didn’t make it that confrontational. I was, like, you know, I go, ‘Does this girl get you in a lot of fights man?’ I was trying to give him ways out, but he was drunk and I think that he felt his wife was too hot for him so he had to show off.
Author: And I just want to go back to the start of it, I think you were on a podcast talking about it. I think that you said the woman shouted, ‘You suck’?
Kurt: Yeah, it was weird, because it wasn’t like I was bombing. I was doing well with the crowd. So I ignored it for a minute.
Author: So you ignored it, told another joke and people laughed and then …
Kurt: And then I go, ‘Maybe it’s you who sucks?’ I don’t know. I said something. It’s not an overly … And then I said, I mean, this is kind of a stock line that I use, but I told her that she’s very attractive, ‘And that’s probably why you think that people want you to talk a lot, but you know, that’s a lie they tell you because you’re pretty.’ I said it, not even that … You need to go through a comeback line. And then this guy goes, ‘I’ll fucking kick your ass.’ But I still wasn’t … I mean, I wasn’t taking it seriously that there was going to be a fight. I was thirty-six or thirty-seven. I was a little old to be getting in a fist fight.
Author: That’s when you said, ‘Seriously, does this girl get you in fights a lot?’
Kurt: Yeah and he goes, ‘That’s fine, I win fights.’ He really was aggressive. I just had to … I didn’t want to ruin my set, you know, so when I got off stage, that’s when I kind of fucked up, because I was just dying to know who this was wanting to fight me. Jay had kind of defused it. Even he was kind of making fun of me, because I had this long coat on. I can’t remember what he was calling me.
Author: What did he say?
Kurt: He called me the Equalizer or some shit. It was fine, there was no need for it to be a fight, but I guess this is where … I wouldn’t do this again if I had to go back, because I wouldn’t have got my eardrum popped, but I looked over and this girl was, like, stunning. She must have been like some kind of hot shit in Texas. That’s where they were from, Texas. And I go, ‘Oh, hey, Jay, I was right she’s like a hot bitch.’ I said it like in an urban sense of the word. Whatever. I said it slang. She goes, ‘Don’t call me a bitch.’ And I lost my temper then, because I mean, she was a huge bitch. So I go, ‘Oh no sweetie, I’m calling him a bitch and I’m calling you a cunt.’ But I was in the door, I wasn’t on the stage. So when I said that the dude got up. And I still didn’t understand that he was going to hit me. And I had my neck all the way out. And I remember I was going, hey, he’s coming over here. Like, no guard or nothing. And he just cupped his hand. I didn’t even see it happen. I just felt pop.
CHAPTER 129
Author: Whose side did you take?
Noam: I took my side. I mean, I didn’t take anybody’s side. I took the side of … Look, I mean, Kurt called the guy’s wife a cunt. Now that’s never a good idea. It’s fighting words, and of course the guy hit him. You’re never supposed to hit somebody just because they call your wife a cunt, but it’s a predictable outcome when you do call somebody’s wife a cunt. So I thought Kurt shouldn’t have called her a cunt. I thought the guy should not have hit Kurt. I thought Kurt shouldn’t have hit him back. It’s a whole unfortunate sequence of events, but in the end if there was anybody who was really legally wrong it was the guy who took the first swing, which was the audience member.
Author: So this is like, you’re dealing with a business where strange things happen, because if you ran a doughnut shop those things wouldn’t be happening, but you’re dealing with people who’ve had alcohol, and you’re dealing with comedians who are sometimes difficult …
Noam: And you know, the thing is, I have no control over what they do on stage, and the first person who’s going to get a law suit is me.
CHAPTER 128
Author: If you’re going to own a business, a major motivation is money, and it’s a motivation for all of us in our jobs and stuff. But why would you pay more money than other clubs? Is it just because it benefits the business in the long run?
Noam: Well, first of all there’s two things I’m thinking about. First of all, as far as money goes, they say a black hole has such a gravitational force it actually bends light and time. Money seems to have that effect on people’s reasoning. It is such a powerful motivator that they will rationalise the most ridiculous distortions of logic and truth to work backwards into the situati
on where they maximise their money. I have seen it over and over and over again, where people, out of their mouths will come things where if they were listening to it from a third party they would just laugh. But not only do they say it, they believe it. This is the powerful effect of money. I’m sure the Bible has similar observations on it. So it’s really true. And the next question is, why would you pay people more? Well, yeah, there’s two reasons. One reason is that it’s better for the business to pay people more because the more you pay the more everybody gives you their first choice of spots, and the more everybody feels good about the place, and the more everybody wants to be there and puts on their A-game and is afraid of tossing their sets. And, you know, for a million reasons everybody respects the place that they have the best feeling about the most. And then also, when business is good you feel guilty, but this is more than with the comedians, it’s the people who aren’t comedians who work much harder for less money at the Cellar.
CHAPTER 127
Noam has opened a second comedy room, the Village Underground, on Third Street. It used to be his live music venue. He’s decorated it the same as the Cellar. It seats about two-hundred. It’s a short walk from the Comedy Cellar.
Author: There must have been a lot of eyebrows raised when that opened at first?
Noam: Yeah, there were, but my father would have been all for it, no question he would have been all for it. There’s no way we were going to be turning away the number of people we were turning away. Here’s the thing, many people’s instinct at that point would have been to raise the prices. That instinctually goes against my philosophy and his philosophy. You don’t want to raise prices because you don’t want to do anything to bring down demand. Essentially when you raise the prices you always lose customers. Now it’s true, if you have overflow you may not feel it, but at some point as business dips, all of a sudden you’re going to have empty seats, so expanding was a way better way to go than raising prices. As a matter of fact, I was able to lower some prices by expanding. He would have been all for that.
Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.) Page 11