“And Jason Derulo’s going to be there and everything. It’ll be great!”
The speaker was a Gen Z’er that I happened to work with and yeah, I was too…cool?…to ask her who Jason Derulo was. Which is why it was more important than ever to ask her who Jason Derulo was.
“Oh. You KNOW! He does that song ‘Talk Dirty to Me’?” She nodded as though her nodding would jog something loose. So I started nodding too before turning my head from side to side: no bells well rung OR shook loose.
“‘Wiggle Wiggle’?” And she shimmied her hips in a way totally unnecessary as a mnemonic device. Though, if truth be told, I remember it now.
She threw her hands up as though to say “you’re hopeless” before walking off muttering “you’re hopeless.”
But later at a stage in Central Park, Derulo and his side men dancers, shirtless, with some versions of six packs brushed by me in the VIP area and headed for the stage in a swelter of teen screams and thirsts. Synchronized dance moves and songs extolling the virtues of well-turned out strippers, complete with the chorus “wiggle wiggle” left me quite sure I had no idea who he was but the show was not without its appeal.
The comedy just never stops over here. Doesn’t really start either but since when has THAT been the point?
Or put another way: I watched the whole show, a student of audiences and audience behavior as I am. Both to enjoy it, which I genuinely did, and for whatever you might pick up if you, yourself, are a stage performer, which I am. I can’t say I picked up much and even after enjoying myself for almost an hour, after that hour, I never thought about Jason Derulo again.
Until a news event that caught my eye: Derulo, as patient of a love interest as he seemed for many, while walking through an airport recently was “mistakenly” identified as the other heartthrob, Usher. Rather than pausing to correct the speaker, or from an excess of the Boy Scout spirit of always being prepared Derulo, wasting no time or thought…ATTACKED.
Now at the time I hadn’t realized that the provocateur also called him some other choice names. All I knew was that with the one word, USHER, like the Tetragrammaton that supposedly ushered in (see what I did there?) all of existence, Derulo’s entire past, present and future folded into a singular course of action and I was nothing if not envious.
For years, obsessed with the Tetragrammaton, I’ve striven to find my one word. Either spoken BY me or spoken TO me that would simplify everything for all time, eliminate all the grays, and cast reality as it was into stark blacks and whites. Every time I write a song lyric, sing a song, write a book, or a story, do a podcast, the hope is that with many words I might get closer to that the strength of that one word.
Then this: “Hey man…I’m doing this comedy show. You have to do it. Laurie Kilmartin, from Conan and Comedy Central is headlining. I am supporting. You could open. It’s an easy lift.”
Brian Maggi and I had worked together at Apple years ago where we had both decided that everyone around us were idiots and we were, despite what any/many might have thought, the smartest people in the building. Not only just the smartest, but the handsomest, funniest and coolest.
Never having the occasion to test what we felt was true beyond mere hypothesis, it stood still, so over time our spheres, though diverging from high tech, maintained a proximity so that this was not completely crazy. But he had been asking for years and for years I had been ducking him.
Not because of a lack of respect for stand-up as an art form, which I absolutely believe it to be. Much more so than the craft of acting. But, because of my previous attendance at comedy shows, I hated the compulsion/job task of standing behind a microphone and yielding to the urge to be appealing. You don’t judge ME. I judge YOU.
Which means my interests have always trended toward those truth tellers who just happened to be funny: Bill Burr, Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce. And even some grand schtickmeisters, most famously Don Rickles. But never the glib guys with “acts”. Pretty much everyone else. Seems that they would be better suited robbing banks. Or working in them.
But how much truth telling could one man handle? Between OXBOW and BUNUEL and everything I’ve ever written including all of my books, even the novels (and A Long Slow Screw has now just been published in a third language, Italian this time) and here’s a hear-it-for-the-first-time-here tip, the memoir I am working on for Feral House, I’ve done nothing but. And maybe more specifically how much truth telling could one audience handle?
Maggi was aiming to find out. Call it due diligence.
Here is where I had planned to embed the 300-pound sex partner video. Substack doesn’t allow it. DM and I’ll send you a copy. If you LIKE “comedy”!
“So have you ever done this before? They asked if you were a comedian. I told them ‘no’, but that you were the funniest guy I know.”
Maybe he didn’t know a lot of guys though, but in any case I had, twice. One as part of alternative comedy festival in San Francisco with Salvatore Russo, and another time at a famous comedy club in San Fran called Rooster T. Feathers. The famous comedy club one I was cast as “straight man” so no crawly crowd pleasing but no real means or methods to get close to Tetragrammaton time either.
The alternative comedy one? Well…
“Yes…”
“How’d it go?”
I started laughing. Which, if you know me well, is usually only a good sign for a random few.
“It was great. We introduced a video we had made about having 300-pound sex partners.”
“Um…”
“And then I remember talking about MAGA and punctuating it with a plea to the Republican Party to use more honest labeling like ‘Hey! We really LIKE kikes!’…and…”
“That might not fly with this audience and…”
“Oh. It didn't fly with THAT audience,” I offered. “I mean we’ve never been invited back.” But I explained I could come up with a new “comedy” routine. One that would…tear down the house. Which is how I ended up blinking in the setting sun on the back of a flatbed truck in a field in Livermore, California in front of an audience sipping wine whose median age was about 60. I would show the world that I’m good for more than punching audience members in the face and choking people.
“My name is Eugene…and I am a SEX ADDICT! And if you’ve ever been part of the ‘program’ you know now you’re supposed to say, ‘HI EUGENE!’” And they did, I laughed and we were off. Filthy stories about bathroom sex, McDonalds sex, group sex…all of it…hilarious. To me.
And to a certain degree, to the audience. Right up until it seemed they realized that I was, in fact, NOT joking. A realization that we both had at the same time and which filled me with an uncontrollable glee. My mother, knowing me better than any/many on this planet had previously advised, “please don’t tell the heroin ‘jokes’,” and thusly made her way into the routine.
“My mother said to not say anything about the other addictions I’ve tried on for size,” I said gathering steam. “She specifically said, ‘don’t talk about the heroin!’”
“So,” obligatory pause for effect, “about all of that heroin…” This to a part of the state probably hit very hard by the opioid problem. Then my bit about food addiction, some post-modern fat joke schtick and a finale that involved me introducing to the audience my sex addiction sponsor, Kasia Meow who, for the occasion had dressed up like a hooker.
I don’t know is this sounds hilarious to YOU, but it absolutely slayed me.
So I did have my Tetragrammaton moment in the end after all since I am transformed. Transformed AND open for business. Add that to the multi hyphenate string of shit I will do for the slightest of provocations: stand-up comedian. You’ll only book him ONCE but you’ll only need to.
Thanks folks…here all week, every week, of every year, forever. Until I die. From a heroin overdose.
OHHHH! The comedy just never stops over here. Doesn’t really start either but since when has THAT been the point?