If at Birth You Don't Succeed (17 page)

“Dude, they're not gonna boo you,” Mark said. “I bet you anything we win. And if we do, can I use the hundred-dollar prize money to pay off my phone bill? I just realized that my long-distance plan is only free throughout Texas. I spent a hundred and eighty-seven dollars talking to someone in Buffalo, New York.”

“That's where I'm from,” I said.

“Ooooh! That makes so much sense!”

When we headed into the theater I was more nervous than excited. We settled into our seats and Mark ordered a bucket of six beers. It was only our first public screening, but we'd managed to bring an entire cheer squad with us, comprised mainly of girls Mark found attractive. One of these unofficial cheerleaders had even designed a flag made of pink felt adorned with glitter and kittens with dialogue bubbles that read, “That's Paw-some!”

We sat through two hours of the most random hodgepodge of videos I'd ever seen, and after watching a hidden camera segment about high school students who wear diapers and attempt to covertly crap themselves in a public library, I knew that at least our video wouldn't be booed. Mark thought that our strongest clip was an interview I'd done with Dennis Quaid. It'd been a hit at the TV station, but I had no idea if the Drafthouse audience would like it.

Finally the host introduced our clip. The video began with me confiding in Dennis that as someone in a wheelchair, I don't get a lot of acting opportunities, and then I invite him to improvise a scene with me called “British Middle-Aged Couple in Crisis.” Without missing a beat, he puts on a cockney accent and says, “All right, go ahead.” We play out a scene where Dennis is my wife and we're on the brink of divorce. The audience was laughing and even if they didn't know what to make of it, they were just buzzed enough by this point to go along with such a bizarre concept. Exasperated that my wife has spent too much money on new furniture, I shout at Dennis in a faux-British accent, “Oh my God, I can't believe I'm married to you! Why don't you just go drown yourself in vodka?” and Dennis, trying not to crack up, replies, “Well, why don't you go fuck yourself then?!” The crowd went wild.

The prize for the winning clip was a hundred dollars and after the uproarious response to ours, the host said, “I have a feeling that if you guys come in every month you'll be twelve hundred dollars richer by this time next year.” Open Screen Night was the first time I ever got to be with a live audience watching something I'd made. It was also the night of my twenty-first birthday. I didn't have a single drink because the rush of being recognized and even paid for doing what I loved was greater than any buzz I could get from a Jägerbomb or Flaming Doctor Pepper (plus, I was kind of a lame Goody-Two-shoes when it came to drinking).

I'd never had a fan base before and it felt great. The dream of making a living as an on-camera personality suddenly seemed like it might be a plausible future. At first, it didn't matter that my notoriety was based solely on being an insult comic who held nothing sacred. But after a while, I started to worry that people thought the asshole I played on camera was who I actually was.

Strangers would pitch me ideas for segments they themselves would never have the gall to execute, suggesting things like, “Our former governor, Ann Richards, just died. You should totally do a sketch where you play her at her funeral.”

“And how would I make that funny?” I asked.

“I dunno, you're hilarious. You'll figure it out!”

Students would yell out to me, “Say something funny about AIDS!” or “Riff about Kirstie Alley being fat!”

Complete strangers seemed to have a firmer idea about who I was than I did. I started to wonder if people were finding me funny for all the wrong reasons. In trying to escape being a stereotype, was I unwittingly turning myself into a novelty?

Little nagging concerns began to creep up in the back of my mind, but I largely ignored them. Maybe these red flags were actually shiny red ribbons wrapped around the gift I was giving the world. After all, there were a lot of people around me laughing and telling me how great I was, so who was I to disagree?

As
That's Awesome!
gained traction on and off campus, Mark and I began to get more and more volunteers who were interested in being part of the show. Every time we headed down the long white hallways to the “War Room” for our weekly meeting, we were hoping at least one hot girl would walk through the door. Instead, one Wednesday night, we met Justin Lowrey and his roommate, Chris Demarais. Justin looked like a laid-back, redheaded Keebler elf and I guess Chris was eighteen but puberty certainly hadn't gotten the memo. Chris had spiked hair like a real-life version of Bart Simpson and a boyish charm that made girls want to take him home to meet their mothers. He took off a backpack, unzipped it, and removed twenty cookies, six crumbled pieces of cake, and a plastic gallon jug of orange juice. As more volunteers filtered in, he announced, “I just stole all this stuff from the dining hall, so if anybody wants it, it's over here.” I could understand stealing cookies, but the logistics of lifting an entire gallon of juice meant that he had to stand at the fountain for fifteen minutes while it filled up and just hope that nobody noticed. This kid had gumption!

Chris had already managed to make five half-hour episodes of his own sketch comedy show in high school. He'd even made a thirty-minute sci-fi short called
Adventures of PJ
. It was better than anything we'd ever produced on
That's Awesome!
and didn't have any humor in it that would offend millions of people. Chris and Justin had planned to make their own show but, after watching my Sixth Street antics, decided it would be better to just join forces. They weren't the only ones.

Over the course of the next semester,
That's Awesome!
transitioned from being a project that was shot and edited by Mark alone to a weekly collaboration with ten to twenty volunteers. From this new blood I found colleagues like Chris Demarais, Aaron Marquis, and Josh Flanagan, who are, to this day, some of my most consistent collaborators.

Over time, I worked with Mark less and less and spent most of my nights editing with Chris in his dorm room. His entire floor smelled like piss and the building looked like a prison (not a classy one either). But in Room 610 Jester East, I felt a sense of belonging I never had before. I spent more time in Chris's room than in my own dorm. We'd pass countless nights there together, dreaming up sketches, shooting them, and editing until dawn.

While Mark was the first person to believe that I was going to be a star and worked tirelessly to make that happen, my new friends were more in tune with the type of content I actually wanted to create. They were interested in making me part of a team in which I was valued, not for being able to make dick jokes at the drop of a hat, but for my creative input. The show was still crass and vulgar, but for the first time I actually thought some of what we were doing was funny. Mark still ran our weekly meetings, but it started to feel more and more like the rest of us were telling a joke that Mark didn't get.

“Dude, I just don't think Chris or any of those other guys are as funny as you. I think some of our best stuff is the first stuff we shot with just you and me. You're why people watch the show!” Mark was adamant that I should always be the centerpiece of
That's Awesome!
Month after month we went back to Open Screen Night, winning each time. But even though we packed the house with
That's Awesome!
volunteers to cheer for whatever video we were showing, I could sense that the rest of the audience was growing tired of the same group winning, and I wanted to give other people a chance to shine. Of course, I never really expressed any of my concerns to Mark.

I had to miss one Open Screen Night because my grandpa was in town. When I'd taken him to the Drafthouse earlier that day, he'd deemed it “too dirty” and said he'd prefer to spend the evening shopping for dorm furnishings at Walmart. The clip we were supposed to show that night was relatively straightforward, so I didn't feel I needed to be there.

Mark had filmed me at a book signing for President Bill Clinton's autobiography,
My Life
. The goal had been to get an interview with the president himself, but the publicist for the bookstore was insistent that no questions would be allowed. Quietly, Mark and I both agreed that if I had a chance to say something, I should take it. So as the former POTUS walked out and the flashbulbs of photographers subsided, I disregarded all the rules and shouted, “Well hello, President Clinton!”

Taken aback, he asked, “Are you the first person in line?”

“No, I'm with the student television station and I work on a show called
That's Awesome!
and I was just wondering if I could ask you a question,” I said, pouncing on the moment. Perhaps not wanting to deny a disabled person wearing a homemade shirt that said
THAT'S AWESOME!
on it, he said, “Ask away!”

Rather than inquiring about his legacy or the actual content of his book (which I had not read), I said, “I know Democrats are very concerned with the environment. But how do you intend to save the trees with a book that's this long?” Always quick on his feet, Bill replied, “Yeah, we should have made it out of plastic.”

The best part was not the exchange itself, but that going rogue had sent the publicist into a frenzy and my journalistic chutzpah had caught the attention of a local news reporter. I took the opportunity to flirt with her and give her my number, saying we'd go out to dinner later.

Then the whole segment sort of ends. It wasn't uproariously clever and neither Mark nor I was sure we could win Open Screen Night with it. But the next day, while I was sitting at Schlotzsky's eating a sandwich with my grandpa, Mark called to deliver the news that we'd won yet again.

“That's surprising!” I said. “I didn't think the sketch was that funny.”

“Yeah, there were some really hilarious videos this time too. There's no way we would have won if I hadn't changed it.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Well, you know when you're hitting on that girl from the news and you tell her that you're gonna call her later? What I did was, when you say that, I cut to a title card that says
LATER THAT NIGHT
and then I found a clip of a porno with this girl getting pissed on who looks EXACTLY like her, so it seems like you guys went on a date and it ended with you pissing on her face!”

“Uhmmm … I'm not sure how I feel about that,” I said, watching my grandpa enjoy his turkey on sourdough.

“Good sandwich!” he said to himself, not noticing the horrified look on my face.

I don't even think the implications of what Mark had just said sank in until I had to explain the whole situation to my seventy-two-year-old grandpa.

“That doesn't seem very nice,” he said, chewing on his dill pickle spear.

When Mark showed me the reedited clip a few days later, it dawned on me that I had taken part in something that could potentially ruin a woman's career. Through Mark's encyclopedic knowledge of all pornographic material, he had indeed found someone that looked nearly identical to the perky blond reporter I'd talked to.

“Dude, it's fine! Everyone loved it,” Mark reasoned.

“But she's a public figure,” I countered. “This could get around.”

What made matters worse was that I couldn't really blame Mark. I had set a precedent that I was willing to do anything for the sake of a joke and that absolutely nothing was off-limits. Mark was just following my lead. It didn't even make sense to him that I would have a conscience.

I'd been able to justify crossing the line before by reasoning that confronting people with the most politically incorrect ideas forced them to hold a mirror up to their own bigotry. But what was this? All I was doing was literally pissing on somebody who'd been kind to me, to win a hundred dollars, and far too many people thought I'd be okay with that. This was the first time I allowed myself to admit that my offensive humor was not actually a subversive way to spark important dialogues. I was being loud but saying nothing, which is pretty much the definition of “asshole.” Just look at every twenty-four-hour news pundit who spews opinions at the highest volume about religion and race while having absolutely no regard for how it fans and fuels prejudice. I didn't have the courage or the clarity to express my concerns to Mark in a way that landed, so the content of the show remained. It was a formula. Why change it?

The one piece of moral fiber that I clung to during
That's Awesome!
's entire run was that I didn't want to make fun of those who didn't have a voice to defend themselves. This meant that I wouldn't joke about the cognitively disabled. It wasn't even seeing an innocent person get urinated on that forced me to acknowledge what was wrong with what we were doing.