Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian (9 page)

My next visit to Larry, I brought along the silent eight-millimeter Stooges shorts from Blackhawk Films that I’d bought with money I’d made as a retail clerk. At that time I was working in a store in Reseda, a job my dad had teed up for me, and actually it was in that same store that I had my own Three Stooges–like moment . . .

I was pricing Corelle dinner plates late one night when some armed men burst in, ran through to the sporting goods section to steal shotguns and bullets—yes, they sold those in a Target-like store in L.A. back then—and proceeded to fire off rounds as they grabbed cash and hauled ass through the aisles to make a getaway. I ducked behind the dinnerware display, because I knew those items were made by Corning (my mom had them) and they didn’t break when you dropped them, so I figured they could stop a bullet. Luckily, no shots were fired in my direction, but I still hid behind dinner plates, the fifteen-year-old pussy that I was.

So by the time I had turned fifteen, all I cared about was comedy and old films. Oh yeah, and smuggled
Playboy
s. When my mom drove me to see Larry—with my projector and
mit
-out-sound Stooges shorts in tow—I couldn’t wait to show him the old reels. Three Stooges shorts were an acquired taste for some. For a fifteen-year-old boy, they were the shit. But without sound, there were no sound effects, no Moe going, “C’mere, you,” and ripping out Larry’s hair, no “
Boink!”
when he poked Curly in the eyes. No “Whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop” from Curly.

Larry seeing himself in those films touched him deeply. He told me he hadn’t seen them in ten years. I found that hard to believe, but it was true. He told me his producer, Jules White, had taken all the money and left him with nothing. Later I’d hear the same story time and time again from various comedy icons about their own lots in life. By the end of our visit, Larry was crying and so was I.

What he and the other Stooges went through is what paved the way for many who came after—working for the man, getting the laughs and maybe some fame but not being rewarded for it. They were legends to me, even though some to this day consider them lowbrow. I visited Larry a few more times but then I decided to stop. I wasn’t related to him, it’s creepy to be a young fan, and I didn’t want to bring him down any more. I felt bad that all he wanted to tell me about were the hardships he’d been through his whole life.

It might seem strange that even though I worshipped the Three Stooges and was a budding student of comedy, I had no idea at this early age that I would end up with a career in show business. I’d always planned on becoming a doctor. At that time, it was just part of who I was. I was a lover of comedy, films, and apparently, old men who’d had strokes.

I spent the next few years a little lost, trying to figure out where I fit in. Had no clue what I wanted to do. For the sake of moving this story forward, let’s just say the ages of fifteen to seventeen were not much fun. I was overweight, with zits, and my signature look at the time was a late-seventies comb-over and welding-size bling-y PhotoGray glasses. Bling.

Shocking as it may be, even donning my welding glasses and possessing my über-nerd eight-millimeter film collection, I was not considered cool. I made a few good friends of value, and I’m fortunate to still keep in touch with some of them. I did some way-below-par student films—
Hitler on the Roof
with Neil Leiberman and Bob Kohn in L.A., and in Philly,
Beach Blanket Blintzes,
with my dear friend Gary Wagner, about a giant Claymation blintz who got on top of the Empire State Building and turned people into sour cream. It was much worse than it sounds.

It was after eleventh grade that I moved from L.A. to Philly, where I graduated from Abington Senior High. My dad helped me get a job in a supermarket deli. I used to have nightmares of slicing my face down in layers on the deli slicer, reminiscent of an M. C. Escher painting.

It was also around this time that I started to think about comedy as something I might actually get paid for someday. I had always gotten off on making people laugh, in my household and at school. I still didn’t think I’d actually become a stand-up, but somehow it just started to happen.

At about seventeen, on a fluke, I entered an FM radio station contest (WMMR in Philadelphia) and won. I went onstage at a club and sang a song I’d written called “Bondage.” At seventeen. I wasn’t exactly Janis Ian, although I looked like her a little. I’m glad the song was loud and upbeat so I couldn’t hear people asking for their checks.

The chorus was something like: “Masochists and sadists unite one and all, bondage is the rage, come on let’s have a ball.” Don’t ask me why I was compelled at seventeen to write an S & M anthem. When I say it was upbeat, understand you still couldn’t sing or dance to it . . . but I guess you could stand up and look like you were having some kind of seizure to it.

Hey, you gotta start somewhere. That was my first official stand-up gig, but my first paying gig was through a friend of mine, Alan Baral, who gave me $50 to perform at his school, Beaver College. Oh, how I wish I had gone there. It had been an all-girls school originally—you can’t make this stuff up—and then it became coed, which is how Alan got me booked in their college lounge to perform some of the songs and comedy bits I did. I was supposed to do an hour but only had about eighteen minutes of material at that point: a couple comedy songs, originals and parodies—the highest form of comedy music behind lip-synching.

There was no light in the cafeteria lounge so I brought my own floodlight bulbs on a metal strip, which I pointed up at myself from the floor. It was lit like a horror film and played like one as well. Only someone coming up and throwing a bucket of blood on me would have given me a better closing. In 2001, Beaver College changed its name to Arcadia University. I believe I had everything to do with that.

So that was the beginning of it all, the illustrious start to my life on the comedy stage. And for the next ten years or so, from the age of seventeen to about twenty-seven, I tried to make a career out of it.

In that time I watched some of my peers become big successes and others fall by the wayside. Always a nice expression:
fell by the wayside
. In some cases, people fell off because they didn’t have what it took, but often they were doing many of the right things but events beyond their control just hit them out of nowhere, like lightning hitting a tree in a thunderstorm. Or lightning hitting
you
in a thunderstorm.

Growing up in Norfolk I had a friend named B. J. Leiderman who was hit by lightning when he was eight years old. He survived. I actually just spoke to him for the first time in forty-four years. I wanted to confirm I had the facts right. As I said earlier, everybody should write a book—it’s great, you get to talk to people you knew when you were eight.

I knew B. J. from riding the bus together to Hebrew school since we were five. And we weren’t even Jewish, we just wanted to meet young Jewish girls. Our bus driver was Mr. Wilson, and when I was bad he would pinch my butt as hard as he could so I would stop misbehaving and sit down. I realize now that was child abuse. But he’s long gone and so are the bruises. And between us, I don’t have much of an ass at all, so if he tried that now, he’d be grabbing ass bone.

And even if I did have any meat on my ass today that he was able to grab ahold of right here and now, Mr. Wilson is sadly dead, so he would have to be a zombie to grab my ass, and that just wouldn’t happen, because I would get away from him before he could get near my ass, ’cause—and I know it’s not popular-culture speak—but I fucking hate zombies. I used to love the band the Zombies, my fave song of theirs being “Time of the Season.” When I hear it, it takes me back to my Bar Mitzvah days.

For those of you who don’t know what a Bar Mitzvah is, it’s when a boy with a young girl’s voice becomes a man. Then there’s a
Bra
Mitzvah, which is when a thirteen-year-old girl becomes endowed with breasts ahead of her friends. And that is indeed a mitzvah (good deed). To have curves ahead of the curve.

As you may be able to tell, I did not have sex until I was seventeen. I was a troubled, lonely teen. Up until about the age of nine, I still had my mojo. But after that, it was all downhill for a long, long time. Nine was the perfect age for me. I was pseudo-popular, being a mixture of funny and obnoxious, and didn’t yet have the complication of fluids coming out of me that I had almost no control over. All this leads to how comedy was my salvation.

At seventeen, the first joke I ever actually wrote was one that sums up the comedy I still find funny today, dark absurdist humor. I was a huge Monty Python fan, so the joke was basically something I’d gotten from just ingesting everything they did. I was an awkward seventeen-year-old when I wrote this down, onto actual lined paper, and it became one of the staples of my first five minutes as a starting comedian.

The joke goes: “I have the brain of a German shepherd and the body of a sixteen-year-old boy . . . and they’re both in the trunk of my car and I want you to see them.”

No reason to analyze it, it was what it was. If you had read that in the newspaper, that a sixteen-year-old boy and a German shepherd were in the trunk of my car, and me being barely older than sixteen myself . . . well, that would make me a suspect. Not good for my reputation. But in the context of stand-up it made people laugh. (Today, it would be no more than a tweet that some people would go “eww” over and others would type back “What?” to.)

Upon further watching and reading comedy years later I discovered that the joke was, for all intents and purposes, derived from a Groucho Marx line: “I’ve got the brain of a four-year-old. I’ll bet he was glad to be rid of it.” It wasn’t intentional by any means and I didn’t even comprehend the joke until years later, but it was a start.

By freshman and sophomore year in college, I would take the train from Philly to New York and sign up on the twelve-hour wait lists to go on at the famed Improv and Catch a Rising Star clubs. That train ride built character. I was the kid with a dream—and a really shitty guitar. Not quite a regular-sized guitar, not quite a ukulele, kind of a Shetland guitar. Being such a freakish instrument, maybe it made my music seem larger in scope than it was. Right, no, it did not.

The next few years I spent in college at Temple University. I worked in the deli to buy film stock, got myself a supportive girlfriend, and did sketch comedy at the neighboring University of Pennsylvania with my comedy partner, Sam Domsky, who is now a great dentist. Actually, I don’t know if he’s a great dentist. I know he’s a funny dentist. Nitrous oxide story to come. Not involving Sam. Good dentists know good lawyers.

So to put it in a nutshell, which is what I call my sac, things started to take off toward the end of my college years—I was doing stand-up in Philly and getting onstage a lot at a club called Starz, owned by Stephen Starr (who is now one of the premiere restaurateurs of both Philly and New York). Stephen is really the first person of note that thought I was funny and gave me my start. You can blame him.

Most significantly at that time, I made a documentary about my nephew called
Through Adam’s Eyes
which went on to win the Student Academy Award in 1978. The Student Academy Award is exactly the same as the Academy Award except the Oscar has acne.

The film was about my nephew Adam, who underwent reconstructive face surgery. He didn’t need the operation. I made him get it because I wanted to make a film about it and win the Student Academy Award. That’s what a selfish narcissist prick I was at twenty-one. No, of course that’s not what happened.

My nephew Adam had a genetic birth defect and they rebuilt his face by taking ribs out of his chest and using them to construct new cheekbones. Adam was seven when the film was made and he narrated it. It’s really his film, embodied by his charm and intelligence and how he dealt with his young life’s challenging circumstances. Adam and his perspective is the reason the film got some notice.

I traveled back to L.A. to accept the award, and while I was in town I went on at the Comedy Store, where owner Mitzi Shore said I could be a regular if I wanted to be one. I was very excited. I was already planning to go to USC grad film school, but I decided instead to drop out and focus on stand-up. Mitzi’s offer was generous: I could work for free, and I didn’t even have to sleep with her. She was like an aunt to me. An aunt I didn’t have to sleep with.