It's Not Easy Bein' Me: A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs (4 page)

This is me sixty years ago. As you can see, I haven’t changed at all.
Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.

Chapter Two

How Can I Get a Job Like That?

I tell ya, I don’t get no respect. One
time I was workin’ a club, and the
manager said he’d pay me under the
table. I waited down there for two
hours. He never showed up
.

W
hen young people ask me, “How do I become a comedian?” I have to tell ’em: it’s not easy. Everyone struggles when they are starting out, even Andy Kauffman, Sam Kinison, and Jim Carrey. Jim Carrey, who’s about the most talented guy I’ve ever seen onstage, opened for me for two years on the road, and I remember plenty of nights when he couldn’t get a laugh. But he didn’t give up.

To be a comedian, you have to get on the stage and find out if you’re funny. The thing is, how do you get on the stage? Here’s one way: Get a job in a local comedy club as a waiter—or anything. Observe the comedians as much as you can—even down to studying the way they walk on- and
offstage. See how they approach their material and what their attitude is. What will your attitude be when you walk up to the mike? Should it be joyous? Should it be troubled? Figure out what attitude fits you best.

In high school, when I played football I got no respect. I shared a locker with a mop.

T
he next thing you gotta do is start writing your own stuff. If you can’t write your own material, you have very little chance of making it as a comedian. When you’re starting out, just try to get five minutes of good material, then work on it and work on it until you think it’s great. By now you should be friends with the owner or whoever runs the club you’ve been hanging out in. When you feel you’re ready, ask if you can go up and do five minutes. If he likes you, he’ll put you on. He may not pay you, but he’ll put you on. It may be at 3
A.M
. on Monday morning, but he’ll put you on. And now it’s up to you to show how funny you are.

From the moment you walk onstage, try to make the people like you. That’s the most important thing. If they like you, you can get a big laugh with a mediocre joke. If they don’t like you, you’ve got some serious thinking to do about your career choice.

That’s how you become a comedian. It’s the hard way, but it’s the only way. As Peter O’Toole said in the movie
My Favorite Year
, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”

I began writing jokes when I was fifteen. I think I was so unhappy all the time that I was trying to forget reality with jokes. I was always depressed, but I could tell a joke and get a laugh. But not from my mother. She never thought my jokes were funny. I’d write a joke and tell it to her. Nothing. I’d never get a laugh.

I can remember only one time that my mother had a good laugh after something I’d said. I told her that one of my friends had told me, “Hey, Cohen, don’t let ’em shit all over you. Open your mouth.”

That made her laugh.

When I was a kid, I got no respect. I told my mother I’m gonna run away from home. She said, “On your mark…”

A
round that time, I started performing in amateur shows. In those days I did a Chinese act—On Too Long. My act consisted of two impressions: W. C. Fields and Al Jolson. My stage name then was Jack Roy.

I got my first paying job as a comic when I was eighteen.
The agent’s name was Jack Miller. Jack would pack ten acts into his car and drive us from New York City to a theater in Newark. Everybody got paid the same—two dollars—and Miller paid all his acts in quarters. Why quarters? No one ever knew.

I remember my opening joke that first night. I said, “Would you look at the audience we got here tonight? All these women, they look like a beautiful bed of roses. Of course, there’s a weed here and there.”

I guess I did okay that night—I got all eight quarters.

At nineteen, I landed my first job in the Catskills, a big resort area north of New York City. I worked ten weeks at $12 a week, plus room and board. My act was a lot of jokes, some impressions, and a few songs.

That gig lasted through the summer, and after that I couldn’t get booked anywhere. All day I walked around in the heat, going from agent to agent, trying to get a job in show business. After three weeks I gave up. I had to make some money. It was back to the laundry truck and fish truck.

But when I wasn’t behind the wheel, I was writing jokes and trying to get in good with the small-time agents, who could book me on a Saturday night for five dollars—less their 50 cents commission.

It was rough. Even then, with hundreds of clubs in New York, no one would take a chance on a kid starting out. And the few times I was lucky enough to get a job, the places I worked in were tough. How tough? If you didn’t do good, they would pick a fight with you. I remember one bouncer said to me, “You’re an asshole.”

I said to him, “If I’m an asshole, there’s a reason for it…you’re contagious.”

When I woke up, the first face I saw was my dentist’s.

When I was a kid I worked tough places—places like Fonzo’s Knuckle Room, Aldo’s, formerly Vito’s, formerly Nunzio’s. That was a tough one, Nunzio’s. I sat down to eat. On the menu, they had broken leg of lamb
.

O
ne time I was booked in a place in the Bronx called the Neck Inn. I was supposed to get five dollars for emceeing two shows on Saturday night. When I arrived that night, the boss greeted me with the news that he didn’t need me because one of his waiters was going to emcee the shows instead. He was nice enough to give me ten cents for my trip up to the Bronx and back—the subway was a nickel back then.

I was very depressed because I had been counting on the $4.50. Being a true thespian, though, I asked the boss if I could be a waiter for the night. He said okay, and gave me four tables in the back. I made $2.50 that night. Not bad, but some of the waiters really made out. There was a two-piece band in the club—piano and drums. Some of the waiters sang with the band, and people threw money at them.

I could sing, so I thought,
How can I get a job like that?

On Monday, I went to the Entertaining Waiters’ Union in Manhattan and pleaded with the man in charge for a singing waiter’s job. His name was Ed Delaney, and he was cold to me. His union was practically all Irish, and you might say that I didn’t fit in.

In my desperation, I pulled three dollars out of my pocket—all the money I had—and said, “Mr. Delaney, look. This is all I got.” I put the money in his Christmas Fund jar. “I really need this job bad.”

He softened up. He said, “Okay, kid, let me hear you sing.”

I sang two songs. I must have sounded okay, because Delaney gave me a job.

That was my first big break in show business—a job as a singing waiter at the Polish Falcon nightclub in Brooklyn. I worked there Friday, Saturday, and Sundays, earning $20 or $30 for the weekend. In between songs, I would try out jokes.

I also worked in several other places as a singing waiter just so I could break in jokes. One time, it was a Saturday night, and the place was packed. I told a couple of jokes, the audience laughed, so I just kept telling jokes.

As I walked off after two songs and about ten minutes of jokes, the boss was waiting for me, and he was livid. “What the fuck are you doing?” he said. “You’re a waiter! You want to tell jokes, tell ’em to your fuckin’ friends! These people are thirsty! Get ’em their fuckin’ drinks!”

With my wife I don’t get no respect. I made a toast on her birthday to “the best woman a man ever had.” The waiter joined me.

O
ne of the strangest nightclub owners back then was a guy named Meyer Horowitz. He owned a club in Greenwich Village called the Village Barn. Business was so bad there that he had to let his chef and two waiters go. But his customers never knew it. When a couple would walk in, Meyer would be working behind the counter. They’d sit down, he’d take their order, write it down on the check, then walk over to the kitchen door, open it, and yell out the order into the back—to no one. Then Meyer would come back to the counter and do some work. Three minutes later, he’d go back to the kitchen door and yell, “I’m waitin’ on the roast beef!” Then he’d go into the kitchen. A few minutes later he’d come out with the sandwich—which he had made himself.

When Meyer’s place got busy, watching him work was a thing of beauty. He’d be going back and forth, back and forth—a cup of coffee here, yelling into the kitchen here, a sandwich there, a piece of pie over here, back to the kitchen, a cup of soup over there…

My wife told me she likes to have sex in the backseat of the car. I drove her and that guy around all night
.

T
o get work in those days, I had to spend a lot of time in and around Boston. There were plenty of nightclubs up there, and I could work steady at $100 a week, less 10 percent commission, travel expenses, and a place to stay. But hey, I wasn’t complaining. I was in show business, I was young, and I had the optimism of youth.

After doing that for a few years, though, I decided it was time to hit New York City again and go for the big time. This meant walking around all day, seeing all kinds of small-time agents, trying to get booked for the weekend, or even just a Saturday night.

No luck.

Once again, I was driving the laundry truck on Mondays and Saturdays, and the fish truck on Thursdays and Fridays. I had Tuesday and Wednesday off, so that’s when I’d go into New York and hang out in front of the 46th Street Pharmacy in Times Square. That’s where all the comedians were, and I tried to learn as much as I could from them.

My uncle’s dying wish, he wanted me on his lap. He was in the electric chair
.

A
fter about two years, I had improved my act to the point where I could work pretty steadily, earning approximately $150 a week—more when I worked out of town.

I worked out of town a lot, and whenever I’d come back to New York, other comics would ask me, “How was the job?” They didn’t want to know about the club, or the crowds, or the pay. Comedians judged a job by how well they did with the girls. If a comic was out of town for a week and didn’t score, he’d say, “What a joint! Forget it. Don’t go up there. It’s nothin’.”

But if the comic did a job out of town and slept with three or four chicks during the week, he’d say, “Man, you gotta play this place! It’s great!”

I can’t explain it, but there’s something about the aura of show business that really helps with the girls. If a guy is only fair looking, he becomes good looking when he goes into show business. Not me, but most guys. Girls treat me like I’m their father—they keep asking me for money.

I told my doctor I want to get a vasectomy. He said with a face like mine, I don’t need one.

O
ne of my best memories of working out of town was of a nightclub in Chicago called the Silver Frolics. After my first show, I joined the boss for a drink at the bar. There were about forty people at the bar—mostly girls, and most of them not hookers. It was a place where people came to hang out, and who knows who you’d meet?

As we were drinking at the bar, the boss said, “Kid, I like you. If you see a girl you like, let me know.” I immediately put down my drink and started checking out the crowd. I was walking around looking at legs, arms, shoulders, boobs…

When I saw someone I liked, I said to the boss, “Who’s the girl over there?”

He yelled out, “Viola!” And she came right over.

Viola and I went back to my room and frolicked our brains out.

I tell ya, with my wife, I got no sex life. Her favorite position is facing Bloomingdale’s.

I
was working some nightclub in Asbury Park, New Jersey, when I was around twenty-one. After the show, I saw this girl. Our eyes met and it was clear that we were both thinking the same thing:
Now!

But where were we gonna go? Neither of us had a private room, so we drove down to the beach. We made ourselves comfortable on the sand and started going at it…

I don’t want to go into too many details, but I met the nicest cop in the world that night. He let me finish. Then he shined a huge flashlight in my face.

So what did I do? I sang “Mammy”!

No, I didn’t. But I should have.

That same night, I also found out that I had the nicest booking agent in show business. I had my bed, he had his. The girl I had gone to the beach with still felt the same way I did—we wanted more. So we went back to my room. My agent was already in bed, so I quietly opened the door and peeked in. I could see that he was sleeping, so I told the girl, “Come in. It’s okay. Just be quiet.”

We slipped into my bed and started warming each other up. Everything was going great. I was ready for seconds, and then she told me to put on a rubber. “I don’t have any more rubbers,” I whispered. “I used my last one on the beach.”

She said, “If there’s no rubber, forget it.”

Just then, my agent gets out of bed, goes to the closet, takes a rubber out of his coat pocket, hands it to me, and goes right back to bed without a word. Now, that’s a booking agent.

I asked my wife, “Last night, were you faking it?” She said, “No, I was really sleeping
.”

S
ometime later I was working in New York, at the 78th Street Tap Room. It was a very small club—about a hundred people—but business was good there. One night after I finished my show, the waiter came over to me and said, “Jack, there’s a man over here with a girl. He’d like you to sit down and have a drink with them.”