Laugh Lines: Conversations With Comedians (41 page)

Corey: Are these characters you do based on your personality?

Jeff: I think every stand-up, if it’s not something written for him, he’s drawing on his own background and on his own personal experiences. An artist paints what he sees. I think these characters are inside of me; they’re part of me. They’re also extensions of me, that in any other social situation, it would be completely unacceptable to be able to communicate with other people the ideas and thoughts that I have. So sure, it’s all me and anybody that studies human behavior and psychology could come to my show and say, ‘Wow, he is really screwed up.’

Corey: Was ventriloquism a way for you to feel accepted?

Jeff: That’s one reason I started it as a kid. I wasn’t an athlete. I think in third or fourth grade, kids are looking for acceptance from friends, and this is what I had to come up with. I saw a dummy in a toy store, taught myself, started doing book reports, and it just took off from there. My wife and kids were looking through my high school annual trying to find every picture of me, and honest to goodness, there were probably nine pictures of me, and in seven of them, I had a dummy in my hand. And my wife looked at me and said, ‘Didn’t people think you were a nut, a weirdo?’ I guess it just became a part of what I did.

Corey: Where do you put them at night?

Jeff: In the suitcase, locked up. It’s lined with lead. I don’t want anything happening.

Corey: Do you have any new characters to keep things fresh?

Jeff: Yeah, Melvin the superhero guy. There’s bits and pieces in my act, and I love doing them. I read an interview with Seinfeld before he really exploded, and he said it was tough, people would yell out the name of bits from the audience. It’s like going to see a rock group. If Wild Cherry didn’t play ‘Play That Funky Music,’ you’d be mad. So, it’s the same thing. At the same time, if I go out and do all the same stuff the same way, they’re gonna be ticked, too. It’s a fine line of old with new. Now here’s this little guy dressed in a superhero outfit, and my mind started zooming, and I thought, ‘What if there was a guy like Bruce Wayne, but he didn’t have any money and he didn’t have any super powers, and he wanted to be a superhero? What would happen?’ And that’s how this guy came about. He’s a lame superhero, pretty much.

Corey: Plus it keeps you interested, right?

Jeff: Yeah, but it sure would be easier.

Corey: Do you check them or do they come on to the plane with you?

Jeff: Some of the stuff that doesn’t matter, I check through, but I carry Peanut and Walter on. They have to go through the x-ray machine.

Corey: Have they ever gotten lost?

Jeff: Yeah, it’s happened. I’ve learned. One time Walter’s body got lost, but I still had the head. So he had to do the show sticking his head out from behind the suitcase. It was funny because he was real ticked he had no body.

Corey: Do you have any really bizarre stories about when you were performing?

Jeff: The drunken, mooning midget. I was at the Improv in Addison, Texas, and this guy was heckling me, heckling me, heckling me, and I happened to have Peanut up at the time, and we threw a couple heckle lines here and there and getting big laughs, and finally the guy wouldn’t shut up. I couldn’t see him. He was just beyond the light wash, and I couldn’t see him. Finally, we gave him one really, really mean dirty heckle line, and the audience went bananas and this guy jumps on top of the table.

He is, honest to god, 3 feet tall, drunk, and he mooned me. Every stand-up comic has their ad-lib lines ready for whatever happens. The drunken, mooning midget line was not in my arsenal of snappy comebacks. I don’t have any idea of what I said, but I was completely dumbfounded.

Corey: You have the audience ask Walter questions during the show, and now you have a Walter book?

Jeff: The ‘Dear Walter’ book, yeah. Every show we have a Dear Walter segment where people ask questions, and over the past eight years we saved all the best ones.

Corey: Can I ask Walter a question? Should I stay in the newspaper business, or move onto another career?

Walter: Yeah, congratulations, you’re a writer for a newspaper. I guess the next step would be throwing them.

He was "rushed out of Russia, lost in Los Angeles, fought a war in Warsaw, cut up in Connecticut" and got loose in St. Louis. I caught up with legendary comedian and “Godfather of Rap” Rudy Ray Moore in the deserted ballroom of the St. Louis Union Station Marriott.

(This was, of course, when Rudy Ray was alive and kicking. He passed on in 2008, and as the “devil’s son-in-law,” he’s likely chillin’ somewhere toasty.)

I brought along a couple of pals, Scott Kastrup and James Hallar, who took photos. Rudy Ray seemed to be disturbed by the fact that it was very chilly outside—he had a shawl on his lap during the interview—and Scott was sans jacket.

“
Aw, Scottie ain’t got no coat,” he kept muttering.

Even though Rudy Ray’s breakthrough comedy album, “Eat Out More Often,” was a hit at late-night parties, record stores were afraid to stock it. Many of them had it under the counter. Seventeen more "party" albums followed. The most-popular character to come from those routines was fast-talking Dolemite. Rudy Ray had the idea of taking the character to the big screen.

He was again teased for spending his own money to finance a sure-fail project. Instead, "Dolemite" was a hit action adventure. It became an instant cult classic in the “blaxploitation" genre.

Following the success of "Dolemite," Moore made a string of other movies including, "Human Tornado," "Monkey Hustle," "Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil's Son-In-Law," and "The Avenging Disco Godfather."

Corey: You were inspired by ‘Moms’ Mabley and Redd Foxx, both considered ‘blue’ comedians. But you took your act to the next level.

Rudy Ray Moore: I do raw humor as an art form. I am a perfectionist at using four-letter words. I am the first comedian on the face of the earth that came using that kind of language on phonograph records. I have laid the ground work for all the Def Jam comedians. I am the front runner. A lot of people give the credit to Richard Pryor, but I did it four years before he came and picked it up.

Corey: How do you feel about not being vastly credited for your work?

Rudy Ray: I was so far ahead of my time, I actually made taboo popular. Then others jumped on the band wagon. Eddie Murphy and Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay came in and stole my structure. I know I was the first, and that’s enough for me.

Corey: Lenny Bruce got arrested for obscenity in the early ’60s. Weren’t you worried about what might happen to you?

Rudy Ray: Since I was the first, I thought I could get arrested on stage. When I first made the album (‘Eat Out More Often’ in 1970), I carried it to the distributors, and they said, ‘What do you expect me to do with this shit? You've gone mad. You can't do anything with it.’ Two days later, he called me asking me to get him 1,000 copies of my album, and he said, ‘Rudy, I'm sorry. I didn't know what you had.’

Corey: How did you end up being known as the Godfather of Rap?

Rudy Ray: I am called that because I have influenced all the young rappers today with the tall tales I told. They started taking bits of my old rap and putting it into their new rap. Of course, I was through with it before they knew what to do with it.

Corey: After doing this for more than 30 years, what are your retirement plans?

Rudy Ray: Did George Burns ever retire? Did Lena Horne? Pearl Bailey practically died on the stage. You know where I'm coming from? If you retire, you may go.

Moore reprised the Petey Wheatstraw character for the song “I Live for the Funk,” mere months before he died from complications of diabetes.

I feel a sort of protection toward Margaret Cho—kinship even.

She has long been an advocate and fighter for gay rights, and she has seemed more vulnerable than most comedians I have encountered.

During our interviews, she is quieter than she is onstage, yet not guarded. She’s always honest, if not always hilarious. It was during our last tete a tete that she cut loose the most, but perhaps that’s because she was once again opening herself to a massive audience on ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars.”

She’s always been sweet, appreciative and lovely in person. The first time I met her was when I was a freshman in college when she performed for about 20 of us in the basement of the student center.

What follows are segments of a handful of interviews I’ve done with Margaret over the last decade or so.

Corey: Are you doing an audio version of your book?

Margaret Cho: I’ve already recorded it.

Corey: Are you ever tempted to change the emphasis of certain words to confuse people?

Margaret: No.

Corey: How long does it take?

Margaret: It takes about three days, and I think it’s hard to read a book, because there’s so much to read. You don’t have a lot of time to do it. To me, there are things that seem more comfortable being written about than actually said, which is sort of why I write books. It was fun to say that it was done.

Corey: In the book you write a letter to Richard Pryor. What was your first experience of him?