Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian (24 page)

A few years after we’d shot
Dirty Work,
I ran into Don at a restaurant in Santa Monica. He grabbed me and hugged me, held me as close as he could, and whispered in my ear so only I could hear . . . “I don’t miss you at all.”

Such a funny man. If you have a chance to see him live, do it now. Put down this book, go online, and buy tickets to wherever he is. He is one of a kind. A major influence in my life.

After directing a few more TV movies and some television shows—one of my favorite being my friend Mike Binder’s HBO series,
The Mind of the Married Man
—I got a call from Broadway. And it wasn’t from a hooker on Thirty-Fourth Street. It was from her pimp.

In 2005, I was offered a role in this off-Broadway play at the Second Stage Theatre called
Privilege,
written by Paul Weitz. I loved every moment of it. It was a serious show about a man who goes to jail for insider trading. A seriously well-written play.

One of the performances wasn’t as serious. It had been closed-captioned for the hearing impaired. I hadn’t followed the script exactly, and the audience started to laugh, but only when my character spoke. It helps to be off-book. The hearing-impaired were much less impaired than I was at doing my lines while they were reading them. The play had been copied into the closed-caption monitors previously. Whatever, at that performance, my lines did not match what the audience was reading.

Working on
Privilege
changed me as an actor and as a person. I got some stripes in acting. Loved the people I got to work with. And I also learned it’s probably not best to participate in insider trading.

But the next experience I had with Broadway was even more thrilling. My old executive producer from
Full House,
Bob Boyett, reached out to me to take over the lead role of an amazing show,
The Drowsy Chaperone,
playing the character called “Man in Chair.”

My mother’s response was, “You couldn’t get a bigger part? I mean, he doesn’t even have a name. He’s just a
man in a chair
?” I banned her from the theater. Actually, she couldn’t make the trip to New York because we’d just lost my dad and she was afraid to travel all that way and sleep in a strange bed alone. I told her I’d arrange for an old stage-trained actor to sleep with her every night and pretend to be my father, but she still wasn’t enticed.

The incredible Bob Martin wrote this play and had eloquently originated the role of “Man in Chair.” I was the last of several Man in Chairs
.
Before I’d even arrived to replace the Man In Chair, the show had already garnered five Tony Awards during its two-year run.

I made many friends during this experience. Such good friends that one day I showed up to work with the flu to give it to them all. I’d taken NyQuil the night before and was still pretty heavily on it by morning. When you’re staggering to the bathroom in the middle of the night to take a swig of NyQuil and you have work in the morning, I’d recommend turning on the light to see how much you consume.

Sorry, I’m going back on my drug soapbox—do not show up to your Broadway play on NyQuil. You may not be congested but you won’t know where the fuck you are.

Out of roughly eighty performances, this was my least professional moment during this life-changing Broadway experience. This is what happened on that NyQuil morning . . .

I showed up to rehearsal an hour early and immediately got into my wardrobe—a cardigan sweater and cords. Even pre-mic’d my glasses so I was able to hide the microphones in my large eyewear. I sat there for an hour waiting for the stagehands and cast to assemble. An actor in work mode can be like a Pavlovian trained animal. I was a seal on cold medicine.

The play had no intermission, and I was doing okay, remembering all my lines and hitting my cues, though I later found out I was talking at a slower pace than I had ever spoken at in a performance of the show. By the way, on Broadway, there is no just “okay.”

Then the problem came. It was a fantasy play, all within the Man in Chair’s head. At the end of the show there was a scene where the entire cast of twelve people were frozen waiting for my line. I was fed my cue: “What is that?” My answer was supposed to be . . . “A record.” Seems simple enough. The cast waited, the brilliant well-established Broadway actors—a couple of them in the “more mature” age bracket. I couldn’t keep them waiting. But I did. Not by choice.

I couldn’t come up with the answer to “What was that?” I stared at them all. Almost as though I was gazing at Jimmy Stewart decades earlier—it was an eternity. My friend, the perfect actor Danny Burstein, started to glare, his eyes trying to squeeze the line out of my lips through his frozen statuesque pose. And then, I finally said it: “ . . . A record . . . ?”

I think the entire audience could feel the exhaling of the cast wafting over them.

The reason I relay this story is it explains why I loved being on Broadway so much and why I definitely want to return. Not one person in the cast or company mentioned the NyQuil incident to me for weeks. Then one day, we were hanging around and one of the actors made a joke, to which the punch line was, “At least Bob wasn’t on NyQuil.”

It was then I pumped them for information on the show that I had no memory of. The moral here is similar to every other moral in this book. This one specifically is: Don’t take NyQuil while on Broadway.

So a lot can happen in ten years. People’s perceptions of you are their perceptions, but they don’t define who you are and who you have to be. Unless you’re into that sort of thing. If you are, wanna go camping?

If you’ve been around awhile in the entertainment field, people say stuff to you with no ill intent that you’re not prepared for. Over the years I’ve had people come up to me and ask, “What are you doing now?” One time I answered, “Right now? I’m talking to you.” They didn’t know what to do with that information. My intention was to be in the moment and not be pricky about it.

I mean, it was an honest question. At the time I thought my answer was better than saying, “Oh, I’ve been making porn films with your sister.” I don’t think that would’ve sat well with that lady who drove all the way from Long Island to see the guy from
Full House
be in a Broadway show that she had heard good things about from her friends.

Sometimes when people ask me what I’m working on now, I get the “good luck with that” comment in return. Granted, I’m an overly sensitive guy, but just once in a while it’s hard to tell if “good luck with that” is meant sincerely and sweetly or if it’s meant how it sounds—as if the person is actually saying what their face looks like it’s saying . . . “I just ate bad fish.”

Anything good is hard. But enough about my penis. Show business definitely has its ten-year ups and downs. That is, if you’re lucky enough to get ten years out of it in the first place.

It’s pretty easy to tell how someone is doing in show business. If they’re doing well, you will see them on the side of a bus. If they’re
not
doing well, you will see them
inside
of a bus. Here’s to another ten more years.

Chapter 10

THE ARISTOCRATS, ENTOURAGE,
AND GETTING ROASTED

A’ight, I’m writing this chapter from my pool while smoking a cigar. Sounds badass, but I’m in a thong and a tube top. Not true. V-neck and bathing suit. What are
you
wearing?

Sometimes I’ve ended up in a club that in the past wouldn’t have accepted me as a member. Oh, to be popular. Over the course of my life I’ve spent a lot more time being unpopular. And why do we care about being popular? Those of you who don’t care at all, let’s start a club. I was the Phantom of three different high schools. Comedians are outsiders, and if you move town to town like I did during high school you became an outsider’s outsider.

Living in Los Angeles or New York and being part of a “clique” is what some people strive to accomplish in their lives. Of course, it has nothing to do with anything, but I have no right to judge it, because for me it was fun once in a while. It’s always been a love/hate affair with wanting to be accepted—being unpopular for a long time makes you secretly want to be able to
choose
whether or not to be part of the “coolest people alive” club.

And if you roll with those people in France or Italy, then your life has even more meaning. At least on Instagram it does. And yeah, it’s fun for the privileged few to be on a yacht in the Caribbean over Christmas—as long as the yacht doesn’t turn into the Carnival cruise ship that had poop backing up in it. They had to rewrite the Wikipedia definition of
poop deck
after that incident.

After being exposed on TV as a good guy I sometimes get offers to do something 180 degrees from the persona I projected on the family shows that hit. One of my first “opposite day” cameos was in the movie
Half Baked,
written by Dave Chappelle and Neal Brennan.

I was directing
Dirty Work
in Toronto and I’d read
Half Baked
. I wanted to direct
Half Baked
because I liked the script so much. I’m not a stoner but I’ve always appreciated stoner books and movies.
Half Baked
and
Dirty Work
had the same producer, Bob Simonds. So while I was directing
Dirty Work
I was asked if I would do this cameo in
Half Baked.
I immediately said yes without thinking about it. It required no thought because the couple lines I said stood out like a sore cock.

I was in
Half Baked
for barely thirty seconds, in a drug rehab scene where Dave Chappelle said, “I am here today because I’m addicted . . . to marijuana.” Another rehabber, played by Dave Edwards, stood up and yelled, “
Marijuana!?
Man, this is some
bullshit
!” Then I stood up right after and proclaimed, “Marijuana is not a drug . . . I used to suck dick for coke!!”

That wasn’t even the incriminating part in the scene. Immediately after I shouted that out, the rehabber yelled out even louder off camera, “I SEEN HIM!”

I continued: “Now, that’s an addiction, man. You ever sucked some dick for marijuana?” Dave Chappelle thought about it and finally said, “No, I can’t say I have.” I finished my “scene” with “I didn’t think so,” and sat down.

The rehabber yelling out, “I seen him!” was not good for my character. That meant that he actually saw me sucking dick for coke.

Anyway, that line has followed me around ever since. I get shout-outs at airports, at a store with my daughters . . . The coda on this one is, if you’re going to do a cameo in a movie, and that’s your line—think about it first. It’s one thing to have people yell out, “Danny Tanner!”—but it’s a whole different thing if your claim to fame is that you sucked dick for coke.

Times have changed though. In the past ten years you can really, for real, suck dick for coke and then get a reality show that’ll make you rich beyond your dreams. Oh, man, I’m feeling another retraction coming on . . . I’m going to go out on a limb now, because I think most people who suck dick for coke . . . are not rich. They just suck dick. For coke. Again, I am a very fortunate man. Did not have to do that.

I don’t regret the
Half Baked
cameo in any way. It’s kind of a shock-value badge of honor—the only gig that fell in my lap, so to speak, where I was cognizant of it being for shock value. But the fact that things I spend many years working on can have the same impact as something that took less than two hours to shoot does cause me to reel a bit.

So here’s another moment that took only thirty minutes to film but became comedically poignant in my life. I’ve spent many hours discussing it in interviews and I want to discuss it in this book.

I’ve already shared the traumatic events surrounding the birth of my first child and the uncomfortable comedic comment I made to my friend Paul Provenza back in 1987 when he was visiting my family after the trauma was passing. It was because of our history together that years later, Paul says he thought of me early on to be part of a documentary he was directing,
The Aristocrats,
produced by Penn Jillette. He felt my comedic attitude toward “acts unthinkable” was in the proper bent mode that the movie was actually about.

The interesting thing about the whole
Aristocrats
experience for me was I didn’t know what the movie really was, and I’d only heard the joke once, from comedian Dom Irrera. Dom and I were standing in front of the Improv in L.A. after doing sets and Dom said something to me like, “It’s like the Aristocrats joke.” I told him I’d never heard the joke before.

Dom said, “Are you serious? This joke was
made
for you. You’re gonna
love
this . . .” He then went on to tell me the story of a family who is so desperate to make it in show business that they would skate in their own feces . . . Is this a good time for a bookmark?

People ask me to tell this joke all the time, and I’ve only been able to even start it a few times since I first told it for the documentary shoot in 2004. Dom was truly delighted to introduce me to the joke for the first time. And it did affect me. Because it’s about an act—an “act”—that is so heinous, so horrific, that it touched that part of me that responds to taboo humor. It’s the unimaginable. And it’s not for everyone. It’s like making a joke about any horrific incident where it’s always too soon to tell it. And it was dementedly funny to me. And my telling it in that film was the second time I’d ever told it in my life. It’s exhausting and needn’t ever be told again.

A few times when I’ve done a charity event or a religious-themed benefit I’ve accidentally/on purpose just thrown in the setup for the small percentage of the audience in the room who loved the movie.

“A family walks into an agent’s office . . . ,” is the gauge to see how many people even
know
the joke. Just to “take their temperature,” as it were. And more people know it than you’d expect. And it’s not meant to be told anymore.