how i got in comedy...part II

(a continuation of previous post)

so, there i am. a jobless wannabe comic at age 40. no idea of how to write a joke, no idea of just how to get started. even if i did come up with an act miraculously there was no place to work at comedy in late 1982. was i discouraged? hell no, i was more excited than i had been in years and years if not my entire life.

i probably didn't get a laugh for the first three months but i went up every night, sunday through thursday, at the COMEDY WORKSHOP and some nights i would do an early set there and then drive 20 miles north and do a late set at THE GOOD HUMOR BAR.

every sunday, the WORKSHOP would post a list of "regulars" on the bulletin board in the green room and if you weren't on that list you had to "write yourself in" and hope that you got a decent spot. months went by and my name was never on the list of "regulars" even though i was there every night. i took to writing under the list of regulars..."PUT MY NAME ON THE LIST, I AM NOT GOING AWAY!"

i taped each and every show that i did and then went home and listened and charted the laughs (what few there were) so that i could develop an act that had a "flow" to it. i tried out new material every week, most of which i soon discarded because....well...they just weren't funny.

one of the great advantages i had was that i was at the COMEDY WORKSHOP and the acts that were there were so incredibly good that it inspired me to try new and different things. it is amazing just how many of us went on to make a living in the entertainment business. bill hicks, sam kinison, brett butler, t. shawn shannon, jimmy pineapple, steve epstein, riley barber, jack mayberry, fred greenlee, rashawn mcdonald, danny martinez, cheryl holliday, jeanne garafolo and andy huggins just to name a few were regulars when i was there. some of those names you won't recognize but they went on to huge careers as writers and producers. every one of them was original, no hacks, no guitars, no props....pure stand-up. the years between 82 and 87 were the best of my life in oh so many ways.

i got my first paid gig in june of 1983 when i opened at the WORKSHOP. my first road gig was with bill hicks and bill silva when we went on the ill fated trip to louisiana to play red neck discos and biker titty bars. "no business like show business...like no business i know...."

by late 85 i was headlining at "A" clubs in the Midwest, chicago, indy, louisville, lexington, detroit, cleveland, dangerfields in new york, etc.

next post i will spend more time in how i went about writing the jokes and refining them.

from there to here with here being a comic.

in 1972 i met a man who started me on a path of re-evaluation and self realization which led me, ultimately, to comedy and the life i have today. who he was and what he taught me are not important here because a. it is way too detailed a subject to take on in a short piece of writing and b. it took me ten years to master it myself so i don't think a short explanation would do you or i or him any credit. basically,it is a way to find that "thing" that i was created to do but first i had to rid my mind of all my plans, goals, dreams and the things that i thought i wanted to do. i found that my goals were not of "doing" but of "rewards for doing", ie to get rich or to have x or y or z. i had to find that something that i, in my heart of hearts and soul of souls, wanted to do, needed to do, was created to do. to do this, i had to say to God (the universe), "i don't know...show me the way." christians call this "turning your life over to God" but i don't think many of them really do that. i did.

by 1980 i had rid myself of many of the trappings of my previous life in "business" and, thanks to my wife, heather, was able to basically quit work and spend my time reading and meditating and waiting for the "sign" that i knew would be forth-coming. she had a very good job at a large insurance company and made enough money for me to not work and for us to still live comfortably. she had faith in me that i would find that thing that i was looking for. (even though, i was not really "looking" but more so "waiting" for it to manifest in my life.

in 1982, i enrolled in the fall semester at the university of houston; not to get any kind of degree but to broaden my horizons, to learn some new things, to stimulate my mind. i took three courses, history of revolution, senior level logic's and introduction to theater. i have always been a student of history so the revolution class was up my alley and logic's is a tough subject especially at the senior level so i knew it would be a challenge. (i ended up embarrassing my logic's prof by proving him wrong in front of the class one day...but that is another story). i knew nothing at all about theater and so that one fell into the "learning new things" category.

so there i was, unemployed, supported by my wife, no plans, no goals and now a part time student and i was going to turn 40 in october. perfect.

in november, right before the thanksgiving break, 26 years ago, in the theater course, another man walked into my life and brought the sign that i had been waiting for. his name was hayden roarke and he was the actor who played col. bellows on I DREAM OF JEANNE. that fateful day, the students were required to perform a skit that they themselves had written. it could be anything, a little drama, or story, or song etc etc. i did a little piece about how i walk like a duck with my feet out. (feats don't fail me now) hayden roarke thought it was funny and after class took me aside and we went and had something to eat. over lunch, he asked what i was doing in college at my age and i told him pretty much what i have just told you. during my little discourse i made him laugh out loud several times and out of the clear blue sky he says, "you ought to be a stand up comic." the sentence that changed my life. through his mouth, God's words were spoken.

he tells me about the COMEDY WORKSHOP there in houston and how i can go and sign up for amateur night. now understand, brothers and sisters, i had never even been in a comedy club and the only comic i had ever seen was buddy hackett in a dinner theater up in denver in the 70's. didn't own a comedy album. wasn't a fan. oh, i had listened to comedy albums when i was young, my dad being a comedy fan. brother dave gardner, bob newhart, bill cosby, the two black crows and some others that i don't remember now.

so, on a tuesday night the week after thanksgiving i went to the comedy workshop to see a show. when i walked into that little dingy club there in the montrose district of houston it was as though a light shone down on me and said "this is what you are supposed to do." on sunday night i went up and did 5 minutes at the end of the show and bombed horribly and, from that day on, i have never done anything else other than stand-up. (well, there is poker but that is not a "job")

i, in a way that i care not to explain, made a "deal" with God. i would do this only for the sake of doing it. i would never do anything with comedy just for the money. the art and the art alone would be my mistress. i don't do commercials and have been offered them. i don't do corporate shows if there is ANY restrictions on what i can do (and there always is, so no corporate for me and besides i detest most corporate people anyway) i did do two cruises but won't do another. i won't work at any club that censors me in any way.

i kept my end of the bargain and God kept it's side. (not "his" side, God is not human and therefore is not a man...God is.) i have never wanted for money, have kept a roof over my head and a set of wheels under my ass so that i can get to the next gig. even when i was taking care of ellen during those horrible years in the late 90's i never asked anyone for money and yet thousands of people sent me money. clubs did benefits for us and raised tens of thousands of dollars. i did the right thing, for the right reason (love) and God or the Universe, if you can't come to grips with the God concept, took care of me. just like Jesus and Buddha said would happen.

every day (well almost every day) i give thanks for life i am allowed to live. i also must give credit to three women, heather, ellen and rhonda who added so much to my life, gave me encouragement and support and love. each of them, i loved and each of them loved me. i have been truly blessed by these women. (i would also have to give credit to rusty, sharon and kathy all of whom i loved and all of whom added to my life but many years ago.) as a side note, i keep in touch with sharon, kathy and heather. rusty passed a couple of years ago.

so, 26 years ago, i was born again....as a comic. and there you go.

you heard it here first, folks....UNLV is going to be a powerhouse this year! this is an impressive team and will go ten deep with real power coming off the bench. when you have a 7 footer and a 6-10 player plus not one but two real hot shot guards as reserves then you have the makings of a team to be reckoned with.....

i have laid out my schedule so that i am here for most of basketball season including our conference championship tournament which is held here at the thomas and mack so i am quite excited. rhonda and i have season tickets right smack dab in the middle of the court but up in the second level. great seats, would like to be downstairs but the only ones we could get were at one end of the court or the other and i would rather be in the middle even if it is upstairs. oh well, go rebels.

surely some of you out there are college basketball fans; write and tell me about your teams. there are always some teams out there under the radar that are really good...let us know about yours....

i'll tell you what; the democrats are going much easier on liebermann than i would have... obama is a real pragmatic man and we need that right now and if he feels that j.l. can be of help in his position then so be it.....but i would have cut his legs off.

i see where rush limbaugh is already calling it the "obama recession". amazing. the man has no shame. but then again, he is an entertainer. that is what he calls himself. (and he has many more fans than i do..so there you go.)

oh well, still looking for inspiration for something worthwhile to write about. i am just playing with words instead of my dick over these last few blogs. bear with me...surely i will come up with something.

peace to us all

is all enough?

las vegas, be it ever so humble, there is no place like home. am so glad to be back, weather is beautiful, dogs are playful, rhonda is playful, i am playful and basketball season is upon us. we are going to game tonight, unlv vs. little sisters of the poor (texas pan american) which we should win handily. both the ap and usa today have unlv at number 26 in their polls. we beat a pretty good san diego team, though they were missing some key players, while i was gone and have some big name teams coming up; louisville and arizona to name two. we start 3 seniors and two freshman and have a 7 footer coming off the bench. lon kruger is a great coach and if our young guys mature properly we could very easily be a top 15 team this year. i was here in 90 and 91 when jerry tarkinian's team went to the final four two years in a row and won it all once. i was in houston for phi slamma jamma and in l.a. for the 97 ucla championship team so i have seen some great college basketball teams and kruger is building a program that will produce a final four team before it is all over. go rebels!

i do truly hope that president-elect obama is devoting this time to figuring out what steps to take as soon as he steps into office to help jump start the economy. every day, or so it seems, more bad news comes....jobs are being lost at way beyond what we can afford, companies who have been around for a century are closing their doors, the car makers are on their last legs, the stock market is tanking and no end in sight. there is much talk about "bailing out" the car companies but if no one is working no one will buy cars anyway. duh. putting people back to work would be the best course of action. (in my opinion)

supply side, trickle down economics should for once and for all be put in the grave of "things that do not work" and never to be raised again. if we recuperate from this then we need to look at some 21st century ideas and though i know it will cause great angst among some, the government(s) must take a larger role. left to their own accords the masters of the universe will continue to rape and pillage and the peons like you and me will be the ones who get raped. the robber barons of the 19th century became the m.o.t.u.'s of the 20th and their goal is to get it all. not part of it, all of it. and the "it" is our national wealth. they don't want the nation to own it, they want to own it. how much of our national wealth was transferred during the bush years? how much has haliburton made? if a stock was bought at 300 dollars and it went down to 10 dollars was 290 dollars lost? fuck no. it was transferred. somebody has that money. there are people on wall street who have been pushing the markets down by short selling and they are making millions on the misery of others. masters of the universe. up against the wall, motherfuckers.

if this collapses we will see revolution in the streets and it won't be pretty.

arm the homeless.

arm yourself....you may be the homeless in the near future.


oh well, i am going to a basketball game.



my schedule is starting to fill up for next year and i am already booked through may. i even have next new year's eve booked. cool. i will be posting the 09 schedule soon.

last day of the road trip

the first show here, i was informed just before i go on stage that the audience was a large christian group in on a fund raiser. they were non denominational and turned out to be a very good audience. i closed with oral roberts and his 900 foot jesus and made them like it. the owner of the club, colleen, came up to me the next day and told me that she was so pleased at how i had handled the whole thing. lol.

i was one of the very first comics ever to grace this stage way back in the 80's. it is owned by bruce and colleen brashop and bruce is one of the richest men in texas. he built this club for colleen because she was and is a huge comedy fan. over the years i have come to know them both and they are just great people. the staff has been with them forever, some from the very beginning. bruce pays his people well and they are extremely loyal to him. they bring in people whom they think are funny not just because someone is "hot" at any given time. bruce hardly ever comes to shows anymore but always shows up for one of mine. the club is in the rivercenter mall right on the riverwalk and because of it being downtown it does not draw well from the locals and is mostly a tourist type crowd. they are thinking of opening another one out on the loop for the locals.

the last day of the last week of any given road trip is always soooooooooo long. the time just drags by. my heart is already at home but my body is stuck in san antonio. back when i drove most places and sometimes would be gone 4 or 5 weeks at a time, when the last show was over i would get in my truck and head home even if it was thousands of miles away. now that i fly, i end up not sleeping the night before, tossing and turning, awaiting the dawn. blah, blah, blah.

last week of the year other than the week before christmas when i go to san francisco for the punch line...one of the best comedy clubs, if not THE best, of all times. i am always their week before christmas act which is great because of a. they have their bill graham presents christmas party that week and b. the city itself is, of course, all decked out for the christmas season complete with choirs singing in the downtown parks. just great. rhonda is going with me this year, the punch line always puts me up in some cool little boutique hotel right there in the heart of things. i will take my camera this year and post some pictures of that club and the city.

oh well, rock and roll and peace be to us all

meandering thoughts on a saturday afternoon

i wrote so much during the presidential campaign that i seem to have run out of words and no other subjects interest me. the economy seems to be coming apart at the seams and washington runs hither and dither and thither and yon with nary a solution in sight.

they told us that unless the bailout was approved on that very day that civilization as we know it would end at sunset; that plagues and pestilence would overwhelm the land and all would be lost. so they passed it, all 770 billion of it and now they say that "well, our first plan was not the right plan and so we are going to do something else." paulson has released 290 billion but we don't know who got the money. we do know it wasn't us.

now they are talking about bailing out general motors because they create so many jobs. ford seems to be in a better position and i don't know about chrysler but they haven't been mentioned in the latest rumors. it seems to me that our auto companies have been married to the next quarter bottom line and have not thought about the future. they did not react to the success of the Asian car makers which came about by giving the people smaller, more fuel efficient, more reliable cars. while i would love to buy american, i have 3 honda's, a 91 civic, an 03 accord and a 07 element. the 91 is getting a little long in tooth but still runs like a top and with 500 dollars worth of work will run another ten years, the accord has 120,000 on it and i have never had a lick of trouble with it and the element is, for all purposes, brand new with less than 10k on it. when america makes a car as good as a honda i will buy it but so far i haven't seen one.

oh well. the shows here have been good and the crowds fairly large so comedy still is bringing them in. every club that i work is doing well and some of them are having record years. that fits in with the history of bad times....entertainment does well because people want a relief from the gloom and doom.

rhonda will always be gainfully employed (we hope) and so we should be able to get through the next couple of years okay until the economy comes back around...assuming that it does come back around and that the whole world doesn't just collapse under the weight of the capitalistic system gone amok. obama has his work cut out for him.

time to start getting ready for the shows. will be glad to get home and play some poker.

peace to us all.

good week in reno

last day of what has been a really good week here in reno. the shows have been just great, though the week day crowds were fairly small, c.d. sales went well and made over a grand at the poker tables. dat's a good week!

about two months ago i went through a very discouraging losing streak and i had to re-evulate my game and, as a result, i went back to SUPER tight and it has paid off quite handsomely. i had become too tricky, too loose, too willing to draw and it cost me. my theory of hold-em has always been (though i didn't always follow it....because i am an idiot...but that is another story) play tight and aggressive and when you have the hand bet it big and let the fools pay you off. now this probably wouldn't work at some of the larger no limit games but at the 1-2 it is, as far as i am concerned, the way to make money on a regular basis. i have had people tell me that if i am too tight then when i do come into a hand with a raise that everyone will fold. wrong. the good players will get out of my way but i am not really trying to beat the good players, i am trying to get the fool at the table to pay me off...and they will....and do.

for example: i am on the big blind and there are 5 callers before it gets to the button who raises to 15 dollars which was a fairly big raise at this table. i look down to find two red aces and i take the bet up to 55 dollars hoping to either a. take the 28 dollars already in the pot or isolate the button so it is just he and i. surprisingly one of the early callers does just that; call. the button folds. the flop comes ace of spades and the 9-ten of clubs. i bet 120 dollars into the pot which puts the other guy all in if he calls...which he does. i don't know what he had since he never showed and threw his cards into the muck. i did everything except show my cards...how could he have not known i had aces?

that particular scenerio happened a couple of times over the course of this week; i would raise big with big pairs and would be called and then i would hit and bet big and was called over and over. i had one of those weeks where i got good cards, good flops and got paid off. three of the days i was more or less card dead and won small amounts each day but the other three days have been where the big profit came.

this has been happening for me as well in vegas at the mgm grand poker room. i usually play at mandalay bay but it was there that i had the losing streak and so i changed rooms.

as i have said over and over again, i am no expert at no limit hold-em but i am a winning player and that can only be said by less than 10% of all the poker players according to what i have read and i would say that is true by watching thousands of games over the last 18 years. most players at the levels i play are not very good. they gamble way too much and make bad calls over and over. even the people whom i see play all of the time at the rooms in vegas are, for the most part, too loose. loose will get cha if you hang around long enough. a good number of these people are retirees and poker is their vice or hobby as the case may be. but here, once again, i am a bottom feeder, i play 1-2 no limit with a 200 dollar buy in; i am not grazing in the fields where the lions lay in wait...nor do i ever want to go play the big boys since i am sure they would beat my brains out. i am not looking to make a living, i am looking to supplement my living.

oh well, had to write something about anything other than politics.

see some of you in san antonio next week. come on out and we will rock and roll.

greetings from reno

almost every comic is liberal and for the last 48 hours i have been receiving phone calls from all across the nation from my fellow laughmasters. the most poignant was from carl falkenberry whose father, a white methodist minister, marched with dr. martin luther king, jr. all across the south. his father has passed but i told carl that his father, who surely is in heaven, must be very proud and very happy today. carl and i cried together.

come january, president obama (ain't that a great couple of words?) will be facing some staggering problems. i am sure in my heart that he will indeed reach across the aisle and engage the republicans to help resolve them. we are in this together and only together will we get out from under this avalanche of bad news.

i am in reno working at catch a rising star and everywhere i go people are just estatic about the election. there is a new mood in america and a new enthusiasm that "yes we can".

i don't really have a lot to say today but thank all of you who participated in this election and went out and voted; whether it was for obama or for mc cain or for any of the other candidates. 62.5% of the electorate voted which is still not nearly enough (we need everyone to vote) but much better than it has been recently. it is our country and it requires our participation. only fools and defeatists think that voting isn't important. the only thing that keeps us from facism is the ballot box...use it and use it wisely.

thank you, scotty, we fought the good fight together. thank you, yvonne. thank you, mike. (mike is one of my republican friends and all of our discussions and arguments have been civil as they should be in a democracy) thank you seth, and j.t. and even joe and liz. thank all of you who read this and comment on it.

i am going to lay off politics as i decompress from this election and will move on to other subjects, one of which has been requested and that is the real and full story of how i went from corporate to comedy and maybe a little texas hold-em poker thrown in as well.

a great day in america

in the early fall of 1957 i was a student at subiaco monastery in arkansas and two friends of mine and i went to little rock to carry signs saying ALL PEOPLE ARE EQUAL and EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL to central high where 9 little black girls were being escorted by national guard troops so they could attend school. we were cursed and threatened and rocks were thrown at us.

fifty one years later, i was able to put up a sign in my front yard promoting an african american man for president. i worked for that man, canvassed for that man, caucused for that man, phoned people for that man, sent money to that man and then, last night, watched that man become president of the united states of america.

i have lived through and participated in history.

we, as a nation, have grown up and have seen the world for what it is: a multi-racial, multi-cultural place. we have reclaimed the moral high ground and reaffirmed our claim to be the land of real opportunity and equality for all.

this election has motivated the world and shown the world that we, as a people, are not the racist warmongers that they had come to think we were.

as a side note, i do not believe that God ever becomes involved in human affairs but if i am wrong then God's timing of the economic meltdown on wall street was impeccable.

it's a great day in america.