Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian (18 page)
There were “Flaming Klansman!” with Michael McKean, “Skinhead Hitting Another Skinhead in the Testicles with a Baseball Bat!” with Mark McKinney and Jay Mohr, and “Headless Militiaman” with the great Chris Farley and David Spade. It was refreshing to be able to make fun of myself and that form in a subversive way with those incredibly talented comedy people.
An
America’s Funniest Home Videos
was something that doesn’t happen very often. It was an immediate hit. I remember clearly when Vin Di Bona called me on a Monday to tell me we were the number one show on television the night before. It was a cool moment. I appreciated the success I had from the show for its eight-year run with me at the helm.
If I’d have been paid per nut hit I’d have bought an island. Or two. One for each of the two billion nuts hit. If you laid all the nut hits end to end, nut to nut on the ground . . . you could cover the state of Nevada with a very long paper-doll-like daisy chain of men all attached by their nuts. May sound like an absurd premise, but if we could do it, I really believe it could create some national healing. Healing for all those nuts that had been bashed and pounded and winged during the making of the show.
Today, Tom Bergeron does a wonderful job leading the series into its twenty-fifth year on television. The show will live forever. Unlike many of the people in the videos, whom we see falling hard onto the cement until the camera quickly cuts away to a studio member throwing his head back in laughter.
Those two family shows—
Full House
and
America’s Funniest Home Videos
—that burst me onto TV ran simultaneously for about a six-year crossover period. I was lucky as hell. Two shows on the air at the same time. Other comedians I’d known over the years used to force me to apologize for taking one of their shows away from them. I was a bit of a maniac from the pace—acting on
Full House
and cowriting the video show and recording all the voice-overs. Regardless, it’s the complaint of a complete pussy if he’s telling you how hard he has to work each week on a family sitcom while simultaneously hosting and voice’ing-over a video show.
With the voice-over work, I just attempted to copy the great Mel Blanc, the genius who voiced all the Warner Bros. cartoons, including Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. Except I had one-hundredth of his range. My dog voice was the same as my little-kid voice. And most of my female voices were just different ranges of my mother’s voice. It would’ve been a good day job for Norman Bates, Anthony Perkins’ character in
Psycho.
A’ight, one last confessional. I did something at a taping of
AFHV
that I
still
feel bad about. I was having a frustrating day. I know, over a blooper show. Anyway, I remember I was wearing a wireless microphone that day, and as I walked to the men’s room to take a pee break, I made a gesture to the sound guy, telling him to cut my mic off.
I was standing at the urinal when a crewmember came in to pee next to me, and I jokingly told the guy, “Bad fucking audience today, right? What the fuck’s wrong with them?” He agreed, and we had a long pee-filled two minutes of audience bashing. Lotta coffee.
Life lesson learned here: First, don’t talk bad about anybody—good luck with that. Second, don’t ever leave anywhere wearing a wireless microphone and then speak to anyone. I came back into the studio and said, “How are you guys doing?” A young girl in the stands looked at me innocently and said, “We could hear you in there.” It was like a moment from a
Naked Gun
movie.
Turns out the sound guy turned off the house speakers but the audience monitors were still on. I tried to dog-paddle out of it—“Oh, that? The sound guy was supposed to turn the sound off. I always say that about the audience. That’s how the crew and I joke around about how
great
an audience is. It’s like an opposite-day kind of joke.” I still want to apologize to that girl, her family, and the whole audience. Okay,
blanket apology
to all the audiences who came to a live taping of that show.
Another life lesson learned. After eight seasons, and no more mic’d bathroom rants, my time on the video show was winding down. Also my marriage had begun to unravel and this was happening at the same time that my second sister was dying. And as we all know, especially during times of crisis, our personal lives can’t help but bleed into our work lives.
When I reflect on those days of making the two family shows, my only regret is that I didn’t relax and enjoy it more. Take it easier. It’s just family television, not harnessing solar energy. I tried to treat everyone I worked with well. Sometimes I was a bit too serious about the whole thing.
Throughout my work life I’ve learned that most people are just trying to do their best. And the ones who aren’t don’t stick around too long—unless they are sleeping with the producer. I was always wide awake. Sleeping is an issue.
“Things I Shouldn’t Have Done.” Could be one of the many titles of this book. Some of the things involve my own foibles: neurosis, self-involvement, experimenting with controlled substances in my twenties, and dating people who may have been considered inappropriate for me in my eighties. Sorry, flashed forward.
I feel bad about having done anything that ever hurt anyone. But as long as we learn from our mistakes we don’t have to relive them. “Mistakes, I’ve made a few. But then again, too few to mention . . . I did what I had to do and saw it through, without exemption.” For those of you who may not know (hopefully not too many), those are the lyrics to the classic song “My Way,” written by Paul Anka and sung by Frank Sinatra. I love that the word
exemption
is in a song. And it’s not about taxes.
Things I shouldn’t have done. All of us could probably write that at the top of a memo pad and make a list of things we’d like to set the clock back on.
Infidelity. Before I knew what the word meant I thought it was a type of banking. It is actually. If you are practicing infidelity you will wind up being very involved in banking. You will end up going to a bank and withdrawing more than half your account to give to the person you practiced your infidelity upon.
I always wondered, if Fidel Castro cheated on his wife, would the person he cheated with be an “in-Fidel”? Because they had been “in” “Fidel.” Thanks, Bob, for spelling that out. Okay, I never wondered that.
I did once wonder if Fidel Castro would’ve been good playing Tevye in
Fiddler on the Roof
.
Fidel on the Roof
could’ve worked. Castro was already a dead ringer for Tevye, and it would’ve been such a happier ending because he could’ve become the dictator of the village of Anatevka, and no one would’ve had to flee. A feel-good ending.
We need feel-good things. Life can be really hard sometimes. But it’s better than being a butterfly where you only live a month. I posted that statement on the beloved Twitter and one girl answered, “Yes, but that’d be worth it cause it’d be the best month
ever
.” I don’t think she got the idea: that one month
is
your life. One month and done. Or perhaps she did understand and just didn’t care about her life that much.
I can understand that heaviness. Or shallowness. She may just live to party for one month and not care about anything else. I can’t do that anymore; I’d retain too much fluid. I don’t like to not get stuff done and, on top of that, do harm to myself, possibly others—and on top of
that,
and most importantly, be bloated.
I’ve taken Midol before. My daughters find that hilarious. I’m concerned it makes me one of them. What’s wrong with that? To continue my own discourse, there
is
something wrong with that, because I do not want to be one of my own daughters. Although if I was, I could borrow some of their clothes as sisters do. What?
The Midol thing was—I had a headache and cramps and there were no other pain relievers with caffeine in the house. Too. Much. Information. But I think that’s what a book’s supposed to be. Well, this one apparently is.
Okay, I’m of course skirting the subject of “things I shouldn’t have done.” Here goes. I did a bunch of stuff when I was young that I regret. I mentioned earlier how I lied throughout my childhood. I shoplifted meaningless things—toy guns, candy, just crap. Set some fires too. Not like warehouses or mountainsides, but things like sticks and leaves. Little boys do really dumb things. Really good to not do that. And imperative not to do it when you’re older.
I’ve talked to a lot of friends who’ve told me they too had a weird fascination with fire. At any age a fire starter is an arsonist. How do I come up with these gems? I was really dumb. Here’s an example of one dumb thing I did, and with no motivation. That’s the worst, when you do something you know is ethically wrong on every level yet you have no motivation . . .
My grandmother, the one we called Bubbe, was visiting us from Philadelphia. I was about nine years old. She was taking a nap in my bedroom, a small room, the middle one upstairs between my sisters’ rooms in our sweet little house in Norfolk, Virginia.
I don’t know why I did this, but I was with a friend of mine, I think either my neighbor buddy Trey or my best pal, Jonathan—I actually can’t remember. In any case, I know I had an innocent accomplice, as this stupid event of foolishness was all my concept. In my room, with my bubbe sleeping, I took an aluminum Band-Aid box, stuffed it with cotton, poured lighter fluid on it, struck a match, and set it on fire.
I heard my mom walking by and didn’t want her to see it, or wake my grandmother, so I quickly slid the thing under the bed. Just like a kid, I now go right to a disclaimer: “It wasn’t a high flame.” My mom peered her head in and asked me, “What are you doing, Bobby?” I said what all kids say: “Nothing.”
She didn’t scold me, just walked by and said, “Don’t wake Bubbe.” After she was out of sight, I quickly took the Band-Aid box from under the bed and blew it out. But somehow that movement and the smell of the extinguished fumes woke my grandmother. Reminiscent of the “Bobby, stop shaking my bed” incident from six years later. Wow, I just realized why my bubbe was already paranoid years later thinking that I was messing with her bed during that 1971 earthquake.
No harm came to my grandmother, the bed, or me, but my mom finally smelled the fumes and then my grandmother told her what I’d done. Bubbe didn’t make a big deal of it though. That’s why I loved my dad’s mom so much. She’d had five sons and knew that sometimes boys do dumb stuff. In retrospect I may have done it
because
I wouldn’t get in trouble around my bubbe.
She lived another eight years; no more fires threatened her, just life. The loss of three of her sons and a lot of heartache. Good times too. Lots of laughs. I mentioned earlier the state she was in at the convalescent home in Philadelphia at the end of her life—having suffered a severe stroke—and how I’d take my guitar and serenade her with songs in the hopes to distract and ease her pain
.
From the sense memory of those last moments with her it still dawns on me that even today, my four-chord guitar playing and singing could have a euthanasic effect on people. I’m just glad no one has ever brought me onstage and introduced me as “the Claus von Bülow of music.” I meant well and deeply cherished my last times spent with my kind father’s sweet mother.
Okay, here’s a phase I wish I could’ve bypassed entirely, but I was a teenage boy and I could not avoid my innocuous version of teen perversion . . . Yes, I’m segueing from talking about my grandmother and her passing to delving into a tale about masturbation. If only I’d had a girlfriend when I was the horny teenager I was at fifteen, I could bypass this entry. I would’ve never bypassed any entry if one had only presented itself. It was hard out there for a wannabe pimp.
As I got to hit my teens, I’d secretly buy
Playboy
s at the newsstand and stuff them in my pants with my belt tightened super-tight so the mags wouldn’t fall down my pant legs and reveal my stash. I came home late one night to my parents’ apartment and they asked me to come into their room. Straight-backed, with a magazine-loaded front, I reluctantly entered, fifteen years old and walking like I had a spinal issue.
I had one modus operandi: Must keep the magazines from hitting the ground. I suppose I was age appropriate to be on foot, walking half a mile to the corner magazine stand to buy
Playboy
s and smuggle them into my parents’ apartment. And again, in my defense, there was no Internet. A prepubescent man’s gotta do what a prepubescent man’s gotta do. And I’d been a horny little bastard since I was six years old. I think all that came out of me back then was air.
At about eight years old, at my Uncle Sammy’s house, I discovered
Playboy
magazines. I always had a thing for “not the articles” but the pictures. That thing is called my penis. And it was more than that. It was my testicles too.
The magazine used to have staples that held it together. Years later,
Playboy
saved many a teenage boy’s life by finally becoming staple-less.
Playboy
is bound with glue now. I’m not speaking metaphorically. I mean it’s literally bound with glue—before people read it. Nothing sharp to snag any genitalia on. During my obsessive ten-year sexual awakening, in my lonely hours I could’ve easily positioned the mag incorrectly and accidentally poked a staple into my sac and bled to death.
Just a few years back when I was featured in
Playboy,
rather than go straight to the article about me, like the man-cub I inherently am, I skipped right to the pictures. Semi-man-cub silent pantomime fist-bumps all around.
Other than the soft-core porn, I guess I was relatively innocent as a kid. I didn’t do drugs as a “yute.” I’d moved so much I didn’t even have enough time to meet the harder-core people. And they certainly wouldn’t have accepted a nerdy kid like me, or taken me under their wing and allowed me to get fucked-up with them. Well, maybe they would have in a “let’s get the dog high” kind of way.