Know Your Audience

Here’s the joke. It’s not my joke, just a street joke but it has to do with the story. A pedaphile is walking through the woods with a little kid. Kid says “It’s scary out here.” Pedaphile says “You’re scared? I gotta walk outta here alone.”. Now here’s the story. I’m on the road in Portland, Oregon playing Harvey’s Comedy Club by the train station. I’m working with James Inman, one of the finest alcoholics in the business and born to lose but certainly one of the few people I’d put on my short list of true artists in this business. The Portland condo is right next to a bar which is right next to a porno shop so it’s a natural progression for the likes of me and Inman.

After a few cocktails at the Tiger Bar we adjourned to the smut house, made a couple of obligatory remarks on the latex implements of destruction and then immediately, as though we’d been summoned over a loudspeaker, into the back to the jack-off booths. We took adjoining booths so we could heckle over the wall as we went through the different channels of filth. “Hey, chicks with dicks on channel 5!” This went on for a bit until Inman evidently found what he was looking for and all the jokes stopped. Witty commentary doesn’t come easily when your pounding off. I was still breezing through the menu when I came across a channel showing the porn awards from Las Vegas. Hosting the show is none other than comedian Bobby Slayton. I’m in a whackit box watching Bobby Slayton for a token at a time! I yell over to Inman, “Put on channel 28 quick!”. The last thing you ever want to see when you’re lumping it is a comic who’s doing better than you are.

I walked back out to the front with Inman following shortly afterward. As soon as we leave a guy in his sixties goes into our now vacant booths with a mop. I want to save him the trouble and tell him I hadn’t blown a load but figured an extra wipe-down wouldn’t hurt the place. We chat it up for a bit with the clerk, tell him we’re comics from the club, maybe hoping he’d offer up a complimentary rubber vagina in exchange for passes or something. I’ve tried dropping the comic card with hookers before, thinking maybe they’d be impressed and blow me for the prestige of it all, but so far no luck. Anyway, we’re talking to the clerk when the mop guy comes back to the counter. I invite them to the show, wondering if I’d succumb to the temptation of calling them out of the audience should they show, if I’d be so cold to look down at this sixty year old guy from the stage and innocently say “So, what do you do for a living?”. I probably would. I’m a prick like that sometimes.

An hour later I’m back at the Tiger Bar listening to Inman blather on with his conspiracy theories, some of which are probably true but who cares, when the spankhouse janitor sits down beside me and throws out the industry cliche, “So you’re a comedian? I got a joke you can use in your act!” He proceeds to tell a few terrible jokes that a retarded kid couldn’t laugh at if it were told by a fuzzy puppet. Now it’s my turn, so I tell him a joke. I tell him the pedaphile in the woods joke. He got offended and walked away. The mop-jockey from the jizz booth got offended at my joke and walked away from me. And my management says I just have to find the right audience.

A Brief History About My Dick In Public

When I was about 10 we lived in the small upperclass town of Paxton, MA. We lived right in the center of town and one night when my brother and I were home alone, I rode my bike aroud the town square wearing only my bathrobe, open and blowing in the wind behind me. I then stood on the corner in front of the house and flashed passing cars.

A short while later the police came to the door under the impression that an adult had been the one reported. He left after finding out I was only ten, but I still got in trouble later. My mother was always caught between trying to get me to behave and thinking I was really fucking funny.

Soon after we moved back to Worcester, where in the more blue collar environment, I was again veiwed as a class clown rather than a terribly disturbed child. Regardless, my dick stayed out of the public eye for years.

The first time I was naked on stage was in Austin, TX on Valentines Day 1998. It was the third show on a Saturday called the "Midnight Blue Show" where all of the local comics can go up and clean out their notebooks of all the filth they could never do in their regulars shows. The crowd had already sat through my entire second show and now through six or seven more acts doing their finest vulgarity and now I was due up again. With nothing left in my act to top it, I just went up naked and started doing bad, hackneyed airline jokes until the manager rushed the stage and threw my overcoat over me.

When the booking agent heard about it he cancelled an upcoming week in San Antonio ‘on principle”. I still defend my actions as appropriate at the time.

A few months later at the Montreal Comedy Festival, the Danger Zone show had a naked poet going on stage and were looking for someone to follow him with another genre of naked reading. The same booking agent who’d fired me previously recommended me for the job. One day it’s a pink slip, the next day it’s art. I obliged and went on to read a paragraph from a Charles Bukowski story in which he describes the difficulties in trying to suck your own dick. Upon finishing the story I lay on my back with my knees at my ears and tried to suck my own cock while Spoonman came out and sang a brief song in the buff. I still couldn’t get a deal.

After that my exhibitionism spiraled out of control, off stage if not on, until I finally had to keep it on a “by request only” basis. My mother still thinks I’m really fucking funny.

Name Recognition

This is quite possibly my favorite story all year... Josh Perlman is a comic friend of mine from Chicago, now in L.A.. He was in Vegas at the bar in the Rio hotel where he stumbled upon a hooker, as one is prone to do in that city. He strikes up conversation and, I’m betting, rambled aimlessly until she finally tried to close the deal.

She told him it would be two hundred dollars if he wanted her to come up to his room and “dance” for him. He said that he didn’t want someone to “just dance and asked specifically what he’d get for his money. She paused suspiciously and then asked “Are you a cop?”. He said “No, I’m a comic”. She said “Really? Do you know Doug Stanhope?”

It turns out that it was the ex-wife of a long time friend from Massachusetts. I was the best man at their wedding. I had sex with her shortly after their divorce and it was disappointing for free. I can’t imagine the shame of the man that pays for it but, then again, I guess I can.

I remember she talked all through it, in a bland monotone as though she was reading copy of a seedy porn flick. “ Oh ya, fuck that pussy, baby. Make that big hard cock come for me.” It was embarrassing mostly because we were friends and I’d never be able to look at her the same way again. She ended up telling Josh that it would cost $500 to bone her, adding that he needed to “make up your pretty soon, because I have to pick up my boyfriend at the dentist.”, a selling technique unprecedented in the field of prostitution. I’m assuming that since Josh can rarely buy his own beer, he probably didn’t fork over 500 clams, even with those high pressure sales methods. And although I’m not by any means a household name, it’s good to know I’ve got a following in the hooker community.



Tip Your Waitstaff, or They'll Beat The Fuck Out of You.

The first (and only) time I worked at the Improv in Tempe was December of 1995, and for me, the barometer of how successful a week had been was still whether or not I'd gotten laid. I remember the staff had a football pool of some kind and I made some kind of wager with a waitress with the pretense of "chicks don't know dick about football". I don't remember what the wager was exactly but I know that it was sexual in nature and I know that I made the bet in the presence of the rest of the staff, one of whom I was to find out later was her boyfriend. She'd played along with the bet at the time because they were keeping their relationship a secret. Evidently there was a club rule against interoffice romance. He wasn't really taken aback by the bet, as it was all done in a jokey-flirty manner but I still thought I might be able to fuck her.

After the last show of the week, Sunday, the three of us went to a disco night at some dance club and started in on the Goldschlager pretty heavy, so the rest of this story is told with a standing "To the best of my recollection". I do remember at one point in the evening, while boyfriend was out dancing and the girl and I were talking about road trysts, she asked me, hypothetically, if I'd respect her in the morning should she fuck me. And I'm sure that it may have been strictly hypothetical but at the time, in my booze-saturated head, it meant she was going to blow off her boyfriend and fuck me. We stumbled out at last call and they drove me back to the comedy condo, the boyfriend driving her car and me, in the back trying to focus and still somehow thinking I could still pull this off.

They dropped me in the parking lot and I said good-bye and thanks to the boy and then leaned through the window and gave the girl a big sloppy kiss goodnight, smiled and weaved my way inside. I stood in the condo laughing for a few minutes listening for the car to drive away, part of me actually thinking she might leave him with her car and come inside. I could still hear the car running after a while so I walked back out to see what was going on. Boyfriend was standing outside of the car, yelling through the open window to his lady "...no, he owes you an apology!" I went over and said that if anything, I owed him an apology but I think I said it in a way that insinuated that I didn't owe her an apology at all, since she wanted to fuck me. This seemed to rile him up even more, who'da guessed, and after a long exchange of words he grabbed me by the throat and slammed me into a car. The girl dragged him off of me (probably leading me to believe that she really wanted to fuck me) and tried to cool him down. I went back over, full of adrenaline and beer-bravado and after another few heated words, head-butted him in the mouth. This was another poor choice in a long night of them but the ensuing scuffle was brief and again, she pulled him away, sat him on the curb and tried to calm him down, while, perhaps, devising a plan to give him the slip and come fuck me.

The drink policy for comics at the Tempe Improv is that you are assigned a member of the wait staff each night and you order through them rather than going to the bar yourself. That night this guy had been assigned as my waiter and had politely refused my gratuity. Now, as he sat enraged on the sidewalk, I thought I was hilarious for walking over and saying "I guess you want that dollar now.". This set him off completely. He sprang from the curb breathing fire and chased me as I ran airplane-style around parked cars, adding in a few Curly-esque "Woo-woo-woo's" before finally running out of gas and falling down on the parking lot where he promptly began delivering a well-deserved ass beating. I've always had a problem with nervous laughter, one that's gotten me hit by any number of girlfriends in the heat of argument. The more you yell at me, the harder I laugh. I can't help it. I'd wished I could at this point because as the waiter sat on top of me punching me in the back of my head, I continued to laugh which only seemed to goad him into hitting me harder which made me laugh more, etc. And he was really beating the fuck out of me.

Finally somebody came along and tried to get him off of me, to which he replied "He tried to beat up that girl!" Now this guy chimes in with "Oh, you like to beat up chicks, huh?" I managed to squeak out, "No I didn't, go ask her." The passerby asked her, she, of course, denied it and the pummeling stopped just as the police showed up. They separated us and sent us on our way, him with the girl (who, after seeing how much punishment I could take, most certainly wanted to fuck me) and me with a broken nose, chipped tooth, various contusions and a commitment never to drink Goldschlager again. I spoke with the manager of the club the next day after he'd spoken with the other two and found out that the only punch I landed, aside from the head-butt was a nice closed-eyed roundhouse to the head of the girl when, at some point, she'd stepped in to break it up. I've never been much of a fighter and probably wouldn't have done any better sober, aside from not being in that position in the first place. The manager asked if I wanted him to take any action against the waiter and I told him no, it was certainly a beating I was asking for. In fact, when I look back at my younger days, I'm surprised that I didn't get my ass kicked a lot more often. One heavy-handed trouncing in all these years of being an asshole is pretty good odds, although I think I'll quit while I'm ahead