Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian (8 page)
Sometimes I can’t believe what I went through to become a comedian. What I subjected myself to: ten years of open mics, doing anything to get stage time . . . and still, I never slept with anyone to get a gig. Who could sleep while you were being mounted by a club owner from behind? Like a lot of beginners in comedy, I was coming from a young insecure place of wanting people to like me. I lived like most actors and comedians live when they’re just “a kid with a dream”: in a single apartment in a part of L.A. with the occasional sound of late-night gunfire.
The kid-with-a-dream thing is a cliché but it’s true. In order to have a chance of making it in any kind of career in the arts, you have to start with full-blown idealism and a belief that you’ll succeed even though everyone tells you, “It’s impossible, you won’t make it.” The people who say that are, in some cases, just not right.
But on the flip side, if you are incorrect about your super-talent, there may be a field you’re better suited for . . . a cool Internet company, welding, fluffer . . . Show business is hard as fuck, so if you’re perhaps a young person who’s thinking about getting into it but you’re undecided, I’d recommend you jump at any opportunity you have to avoid the pain of it. But if you know this is what you want and you’re driven beyond belief, then go for it. Carpe diem.
Some young people ask me for career advice. I know . . . me. And then I try to answer them with something valuable. It’s complicated because some people just want to be a
star
to show up everyone in their life who thought they’d never amount to anything. That mind-set makes me throw up in my mouth a little. It’s tough to give advice to a person who has only that as their motivation—rather than any desire to cultivate a talent. I understand it. Sometimes it’s youth. Sometimes it’s delusion. I suffered from both. These days I love the craft of it all—writing, stand-up, acting, directing, producing, and dancing to “Gangnam Style” in a onesie with Velcro eyeholes.
You can’t listen to what other people think about you or your work. You’ve got to just follow your instincts. Most people don’t know shit. That’s not true, most people do know shit. And shit stinks. Although I once knew a woman whose shit really didn’t stink. That’s what she thought, and she was right. Because it just didn’t. I won’t say her name, but here’s a picture of her. No, I wouldn’t. Not in this chapter.
Back online: So you can’t let anyone define you. In my career, if I had let other people define me, I could’ve ended up dustbusting the halls of a YMCA and asking the other tenants if they wanted to buy some bootlegged tapes of people getting hit in the nuts.
The balance for me was to suppress my renegade “id” and stay open and learn from other people whom I was enlightened by being around. I was influenced by many individuals, some famous, some not. My biggest inspirations as a young stand-up were the comedians I would watch every chance I got, sitting in the back of the Comedy Store or the Improv late at night: Richard Pryor, David Letterman, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Andy Kaufman, Michael Keaton . . . to name six. The list of people I learned from was endless. Still is. To this day, I’ll drop by a club late at night to meet a stand-up friend and stare at the stage in awe watching a super-talented new guy or girl who just “has something.” And some of the time it’s on their lip.
In the early eighties I also learned from people who were less known—comedians who remain undiscovered today, who are only appreciated by true “comedyphiles” and by those who knew them back when. There are some comics who were and still are gut funny—who everyone thought were going to “pop” as the newest comedy stars but for some reason didn’t. They took chances onstage and for whatever reason, their path didn’t get to be realized in the way it deserved. Many were self-destructive and some just had a bout of bad luck. They say luck is when opportunity and preparedness meet. They also say, “Your lucky numbers are 2, 7, 13, 44 . . . 66 . . .” Jeff Ross. Just felt like writing his name here. He’s a buddy of mine. He loves Chinese food, yoga, and changing his hairstyle as often as he changes his underwear. Once a month.
Comedians are obsessed with their bodies, no matter what shape they are in. I knew several comedians over the years who would come out onstage completely nude. Maybe they did it for shock value or just to show they didn’t give a shit. Going onstage nude is a public act that can work for or against you. I am certain it would work against me.
A guy named Ollie Joe Prater did it once. Ollie was a likable, rotund, Yosemite Sam–type guy who wanted to take the stage once while Richard Pryor and Robin Williams were on simultaneously in the Main Room of the Comedy Store. The only way to upstage the two of them was to come out with his cowboy hat and boots on—and nothing else. It worked on some level. I mean, I’m mentioning it in this book, so it stayed with me.
But I wasn’t sure exactly how it happened so I called my friend director/writer Mike Binder to get my facts straight. His response was calming for me: “I remember it as if it were yesterday. It sure did happen. I was there.” I asked Mike, “So Ollie came out naked except for cowboy boots and a hat completely nude and stood between Robin and Pryor on the Main Room stage?” Mike responded, “Yep. With his dick tucked in between his legs to make it look like a vagina.” So it is written, and so it was done.
Another comedian I’d come up with at the time who came out nude was the brilliant Jim Carrey. Jim’s reason was much simpler. A bunch of us had performed on the Comedy Store’s twentieth-anniversary special and during the curtain call Jim came out naked and stood right next to me with just a sock over his dick. Part of my instinct was to pull it off, and the other part was to move away.
What I remember most is wondering if he’d attached double-stick tape to it, or was his penis just that wide. The man to this day has a genius’s balls. In retrospect, they must have been shoved into the sock along with his dick. In any case, it was funny and memorable, and as soon as tape stopped rolling, I ran away. I could’ve run away the moment he did it, but then I guess I thought I’d have looked like I had a televised moment of gay panic, so I waited until they were done filming. So I could have a moment of gay panic not on tape. Another conundrum had presented itself. It’s hard to upstage a naked person. Then again, if you’ve ever watched a porn film, your eyes will sometimes focus on the only person who’s dressed.
Starting out in stand-up requires a vivid imagination. You need one to actually go up onstage and think you have something to share that people would even want to hear and could find compelling and amusing. And you have to be in the zone to perform whatever that is and enjoy being there. Lots of things have to align for standup to just
happen
.
For me it took ten years to even start to happen. All I knew was, I wanted to go onstage and entertain the people as much as I could—either with what I had prepared or with something I made up spontaneously on the spot. All of my early humor sprang from some kind of warped truism. Sick jokes, all about my girlfriend, my parents, my youth, career self-deprecation—the usual topics for a beginning comic.
One of my first jokes was “My mother never let me go to camp as a little kid because she thought I’d get embarrassed undressing in front of little boys. But I kind of like it now . . . That’s not true, I like it a lot . . . That’s not true, I’m not a senator.”
That was the closest I came to political satire at the time. I don’t recall what senator was in trouble for being a pedophile. But the camp part was true. My mom was overly strict with me, partly because camp cost money that we didn’t have a ton of. So instead of going to camp, I stayed home and mowed lawns every summer, which also has lascivious connotations. So as absurd as my beginnings as a stand-up were, there was always truth at the root, which was an interesting thing to come to grips with, because throughout my childhood I was pretty much a serial liar.
I had been perjuring myself since I was about nine, because I didn’t want to get in trouble with my mom and other authority figures. My dad was always busy working and having weekly heart attacks, so my mom was the taskmaster at home. Again, authoritative mothers are often textbook stuff if you’re going to wind up in comedy. And textbook stuff if you’re a human being. Repression leads to rebellion. Took me thirty years to not be able to lie anymore. A’ight, forty years. Do I hear fifty?
We have all lied. Because we don’t want to disappoint. Animals lie. They learn it from us. Ask your cat if they’re the one who crapped on the carpet and they’ll try to distract you to take your mind off the fact that their cat turd is sitting in the middle of the living room. But who hasn’t done that? “Bob, did you shit in the living room?” “No, Dad, it must’ve been Mom.”
My dad would always laugh at stuff like that. He was my biggest comedy influence. He turned me on to Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, all the old radio comedians. He was also a huge fan of his own childhood heroes, the silent film comedians like Harold Lloyd. My dad liked Lloyd better than Chaplin. I would disagree with him on that. At nine years old. The only thing worse than a nine-year-old who thinks he knows everything is . . . Well, there are a lot of things worse, but a nine-year-old who thinks he knows everything is pretty fucking annoying.
I was influenced by just about anyone who was inspired and passionate about what they did, which turned out for me to be mostly filmmakers and comedians. My path as a kid was laid way before I was.
When I was about eleven, I used to send away to Blackhawk Films in Davenport, Iowa, and buy all the eight-millimeter silent films of Chaplin, Lloyd, and others. Just loved movies—didn’t matter there was no sound, I would sit and watch them with subtitles. I loved Groucho and took in every comedian I could on television. Not a lot of edginess to be had in the early sixties. Quickness of wit was the edginess of the time. The spontaneous performances of TV icons like Jack Paar, Ernie Kovacs, Steve Allen, Johnny Carson, Dean Martin. Those guys were quick-witted and classy, professional.
I also loved the same things everybody loved: Lucy, Jackie Gleason, and anything I could pick up from what I was too young to have seen when it was the number one show on television:
Your Show of Shows
. Later, I was obsessed with
The Dick Van Dyke Show
. And
Get Smart
. And then anything made separately or together by Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks.
Comedy is a highly subjective art form. There are those who would possibly prefer
my
comedy if it had come out during silent film days—
mit
out sound, a term coined by a 1920s German-émigré director. If only I’d been born German and silent. With the personality I have, if I was born in Germany in the twenties, I would have been silenced for sure.
I never got to see heroes like Chaplin in the flesh, but amazingly when I was fourteen, Larry Fine of the Three Stooges spoke at my middle school, Mulholland Junior High. This was during the time my family was living in L.A., having moved from Norfolk for my dad’s job as head of meat. I was only at that school for six months, but the Larry experience stuck with me my whole life. He was already quite old at that point and not in great health, but I was starstruck.
I adored the Three Stooges and was so enamored with Larry that I asked him after the assembly if I could visit him at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital, in Woodland Hills, where he lived—supported thankfully by the Screen Actors Guild. He said, “Sure,” although it was hard to understand him as he’d had a pretty bad stroke a couple years earlier. I think his actual response was more like “Schlllhompmpmphhh.”
I was dying to talk to him more, hear all about his life, and pump him for more great Stooges stories. Not pump him sexually; I’m sure some of your minds went to that place. Remember, I was only fourteen and puberty didn’t come for me until I’d gotten my learner’s permit. Anyway, long story short—you’re welcome—my mother, Dolly, drove me to visit Larry at the Motion Picture residence. He was very happy to have a guest.
The first time I went, he told me how tough his life was inside the nursing home. He never got to see any of the old shorts he’d made with Moe and Curly—and Shemp and Curly Joe—because the place didn’t have UHF. There was no cable, and back then they only ran Three Stooges shorts on UHF channels.
Until I wrote these words, I hadn’t even thought of the acronym
UHF
for decades. It’s crazy; this writing and reminiscing is the only thing that makes me feel older. That, and my knees and my back and fupa, which fluctuates in size weekly.
In that first visit with Larry, he also told me about how much he’d gotten hurt in the Stooges films. How Moe Howard would have them do their own stunts and they’d fall and break ribs. And how sometimes when Moe would rip out pieces of Larry’s hair in a slapstick fashion on camera, real hair would come out with it. Hair extensions are not always a friend of comedy.
I’ll never forget that before we said good-bye that day, I went with Larry to go pick up his new set of false teeth at the front desk. With his good leg he kicked himself straight backward in his wheelchair—he couldn’t wheel himself forward because one side of his body was inactive, so he’d have spun around in circles if he’d tried. When we finally got to the reception desk, he picked up the envelope from the receptionist, ripped it open without missing a beat, and popped his new set of falsies right into his mouth.
I’m glad he didn’t wash them off first. I didn’t want our visit interrupted by any kind of hygiene. It felt exactly like a Three Stooges moment. Bittersweet. Funny and sad. They often go hand in hand, especially with comedy people from a different era.
