It's Not Easy Bein' Me: A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs (15 page)

Now, Ron Jeremy first became famous for a movie in which he said to a girl, “How about a blow job?” and she blew him off by saying, “Why don’t you give
yourself
a blow job?” He said, “Not a bad idea,” and went down on himself.

It was a wild thing, and people talked about it. That’s how he became famous.

That’s why I broke up when he said he wanted to move to New York—a guy who makes a living going down on himself thinks people in L.A. are too crazy.

Last week, I went to a discount massage parlor—it was self-service
.

S
peaking of big movie stars, I first met Dustin Hoffman at my club back in the early seventies. He was about to play Lenny Bruce in Bob Fosse’s movie and he wanted to get the feel of a nightclub and of doing stand-up. So he came over to Dangerfield’s and hung out for a week—
although I told him, “You can’t learn to do stand-up in a week. You have to walk the boards for twenty years.”

One night Joe Ancis, who was Lenny’s longtime friend and mentor, dropped by to say hello. In the course of our conversation, Dustin said to Joe, “Do you think I’ll make a good Lenny Bruce?”

Joe said, “No.”

Dustin wasn’t exactly thrilled to hear that, but I told him, “Don’t worry about it. Very few people ever saw Lenny work, so no one will know the difference. Whatever you do, they’ll figure
that’s
Lenny.”

Dustin went on to win an Oscar nomination for
Lenny.

One of the most talented guys I ever saw was Sam Kinison. I first met him in the early eighties when I was working in a place called the Arena, a theater-in-the-round in Houston. After the show, a few of us went to a local comedy club.

The show was Sam and two other young comics. He was young, raw, but had something wild that I liked. After the show, I asked the club manager, “Can I meet the guy who went on second?”

They brought Sam over to our table, and we talked for about fifteen minutes. He told me he was struggling with his act, but I told him, “You’ll be fine. You’re great.”

Sam had a crazy background—he’d been a preacher and came from a family of preachers. So there was plenty of anger and turmoil in him, which came out brilliantly onstage. Hilarious—but full of obscenities and rough talk
about sex and drugs and religion. Sam didn’t hold back. He was raw, and honest, and very funny.

Here’s Sam Kinison giving me a lecture on how to handle women.

Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.

I met him again a few years later in New York at Catch a Rising Star. After we said our hellos, Sam said, “Rodney, I finally got it, man!”

So I stayed for his act, and he was right. He really did have something. His material was still wild, but his delivery was now mature. He was sensational. Sam, who’d been divorced three times, said he wasn’t going to get married again—“I don’t have to give away everything I own
every five years!
”

After that show, I said to him, “Jeez, you’re great, man. I’m doing an HBO show. I’ll put you on it, okay?”

He said, “No. That format’s no good for me. I can’t do just six or eight minutes like that. I need more time. I can’t cook until I’m out there at least ten minutes.”

I said, “You’re wrong, man. You can cook as soon as you walk onstage. Just go right into it.”

“I don’t know…” he said.

Sam went back to California, and two weeks later I got a phone call. It was Sam, and he was very excited. “Rodney,” he said, “I’m cookin’ right away now! Can I still get on your show?”

I said, “You got it.”

So he came out to New York and did my show, and he was hilarious. That’s when he did his now-famous Ethiopia
joke. The papers were full of stories about a horrible famine in Ethiopia, so Sam said: “Hey, I’ve figured out why you people are starving—you live in a fuckin’ desert! See this? This is sand. NOTHING WILL GROW HERE!”

After that show aired, Sam started packing places that seat four or five hundred people. He used to say that that HBO show was “the six minutes that changed my life.”

About a year later, I said to Sam, “I’m doing another special. Kill ’em on this one and you’ll be playing two-thousand seaters.”

But I was wrong.

He did the show and killed ’em again. The next time I saw Sam he was headlining at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles.
Six thousand
seats—packed—and everyone yelling, “Sam! Sam! Sam!”

Sam once told some writer that “Rodney is like a god to me.” That touched me deeply…but he probably said it because he thought I’d saved his life, not his career. Let me explain.

Before that second HBO show, Sam and his brother Bill came to see me. They were very worried. They said Sam had pissed off some Mafia guy who was now after him. They thought this guy was going to kill Sam.

I said, “Ah, I don’t know about that…” I’d met plenty of Mafia guys, and I was pretty sure Sam had nothing to fear. So I told him, “You got nothing to worry about. Concentrate on your show. The guy’s just trying to scare you. I’m telling you, nothing’s going to happen.”

Sam said okay, and he felt better. And of course, nothing happened to him. But because I had been so sure that nothing was going to happen, Sam and his brother got the idea that I had made a phone call to someone in the Mafia. Sam and Bill were now under the impression that I was connected, that I was “mobbed up.”

If you never saw Sam’s act, do yourself a favor and buy one of his albums, or all of them. Sam had a rather strange sense of humor. When his father died, Sam’s mother was very morose. To console her, Sam said, “Ma, look at it this way. You’ll have more closet space.”

Sam had a lot of great bits. Here’s one: “Today, everybody’s sick. They even have dog psychiatrists. I’d like to get in on that racket. ‘What’s that, Mr. Raven? I’m sure Spot’s a good boy. Let me take him inside and talk to him for a few minutes. Wait here. I’ll see what I can do.’” Then Sam would walk to the other end of the stage and pretend to open and close a door. Then he would yell at the imaginary dog, “What the fuck are you doing? Behave yourself! You’re a fucking dog! You shit in the street.”

When Sam got hot, I told him to make sure he only worked in places where he could be himself, where he didn’t have to censor himself. “You’re a big hit on HBO,” I told him. “But if you go on network television, they’ll be cutting you and cutting you. ‘You can’t say this, and you can’t say that.’ It’ll drive you crazy.”

So I suggested that he stay with HBO. I said, “The audience will find you.”

About six months later, Sam’s manager convinced him to do
Saturday Night Live.
He said, “It’s
Saturday Night Live!
How can you turn it down?”

So Sam did it, and he had huge problems with the censors for doing two bits that the network guys had told him not to do. One was about the drug war and the other was about Jesus getting nailed to the cross.

Since the show was live from New York, people on the East Coast saw Sam’s full performance, but his bits were cut for the rest of the country.

Sam wasn’t just banned from
Saturday Night Live
, he was banned from NBC, which meant no
Tonight Show
.

That would have killed the career of a lot of comedians, but it didn’t hurt Sam. He just kept rolling.

If you saw my movie
Back to School
, you’ll remember Sam as the crazed Vietnam vet–history professor. As soon as I knew the movie was a go, I wrote a part for Sam. He exploded on-screen, as I knew he would.

Sam was killed in a car accident while driving from L.A. to Vegas in 1992. He was just thirty-eight.

I went out to L.A. for the service, to pay my respects. He was lying there in a coffin and it was so strange, because the morticians had made him look so peaceful. He seemed to be smiling—like he was happy to be in that damn box.

I looked down at him, lying there, and just to make sure, I, like an idiot, whispered, “Sam…? Sam…?”

He didn’t move.

I thought to myself,
He’s either dead—or very snobbish.

Thinking about Sam dying and movin’ on reminded me of one of his very best bits:

Up in heaven they asked Jesus to come back down to earth. They said, “C’mon, Jesus, it’s been two thousand years. Why not go back down, spread a little peace and joy.” And Jesus says, “Sure, man…JUST AS SOON AS I CAN PLAY THE FUCKIN’ PIANO AGAIN!”

I first met Tim Allen when he came to New York from Detroit to audition for one of my HBO specials. He was very funny and I wanted to put him on the show, but I screwed up—I had too many guys I was obligated to use for that show. When I told Tim, he took the news like a gentleman. When we did the next HBO show, he was my first call.

Years later, he was a big star, with his own sitcom,
Home Improvement.

Tim is not just a guy who tells jokes. He proved himself to be a very good actor.

When I did a guest shot on Tim’s show, I felt funny talking money with Tim’s people, so I said to the show’s producers, “I tell ya what. I don’t want to hassle with lawyers and things. Tim knows me, so pay me whatever you think is fair.”

Okay. Good. Everybody’s smiling.

I do the show, everything is great. But when they gave me my paycheck, it was much lower than what I had expected. I didn’t think they had been fair, but I forgot about it.

A few months later, Disney—which owned ABC and Tim’s show—came to see me about a project. We did our business, and then I said, “Let me ask you something. Do you think what you paid me for
Home Improvement
was fair?”

“There’s nothing we can do about it now,” they said. “What’s done is done.”

“I tell ya what,” I said. “The raincoat I wore on the show was nice.” Some shows will give you your wardrobe, but not Disney. They keep it all. I said, “Leave the money where it is, throw in the raincoat, and we’ll call it even, okay?”

They said, “Fine.”

A week later, they sent it to me. It turned out to be an Armani.

Now I’m the only flasher with a $5,000 raincoat.

My wife has a temper. She keeps yelling at me, “You’re an animal, an animal!” So I took a leak in the living room and I told her from now on that’s my territory.

I
first met Jim Carrey when I was working in Toronto, back in the early eighties. Someone told me to catch a young local comic who had something special. They were right.

Jim was about nineteen or twenty then, which means we’ve now been friends for more than twenty years.

Anyway, I caught his act in Toronto, and I thought he was fantastic. His mimicry was wild, and he had a rare gift for physical comedy. I saw he had talent to burn, and when he smiled you had to love him. So I hired him to open for me on a few dates.

He did a few one-nighters with me in Canada, and then I took him to Las Vegas to open at Caesars Palace.

When Jim first started working with me, he was mainly an impressionist, a sensational one. Who else can take his face and make it look like Mao Tse-tung, Brezhnev, Clint Eastwood, and Sammy Davis, Jr.?

But Jim wanted to stop doing impressions and be himself onstage. I could relate to that, because I’d gone through the same kind of thing as a young comedian. I used to do an impression of Al Jolson singing “Rock-a-bye Your Baby.” It was good enough that I would close my act with it, but I got to the point where I had to lose it, because I wanted to create my own voice, my own identity onstage.

So I understood what Jim was trying to do with his act, and I knew that it wouldn’t be easy. When he stopped doing the impressions and just did his bits, it didn’t go over with the audience. He was bombing every night.

Most headliners would say, “I gotta get a guy who gets laughs.” But I just said, “You’re great, Jim. Don’t worry about it.” I knew Jim had something special.

I have no respect left. I gave it to Jim.

Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.

In 1994 the American Comedy Awards honored me by giving me the Creative Achievement Award. Jim Carrey was very gracious when he accepted the task of introducing me and presenting me with the award. I was very moved by his words. His introduction of me was one of the highlights of my life.