Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian (2 page)

So yeah, my writing and thinking are not very linear. Polyp. Neither is my life in general. Barium. I’m going to pop back and forth in time a lot in this book. I’ll try to not get too
Cloud Atlas
’y on your ass, but just stick with me. Events happen to us every day that jolt us back to an earlier time, to a nightmarish moment from high school or a poignant memory of our parents.

When I started in stand-up at a very young age, I was even more into free association and random word combos. My material at the time was often dark and came from the fact that I moved a lot as a kid. The first ten minutes of material I wrote, when I was seventeen—which I also used on my first talk-show appearances, such as
The Merv Griffin Show
—started like this: “I have no friends and I have no life and I live in a moped. My mother is Gumby and my father is Pokey and I’m Mr. Potato Head.”

Comedians’ first ten minutes usually stay with them the first several years of their career. It’s their mission statement. Their disclaimer that lets people know who they are. Or were. It’s also a good time to make fun of your name if you have a funny or strange one. My last name rhymed with some obvious words. Woohoo. In a way, it’s a good thing for a comedian to just have the worst last name possible: “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome . . . Jimmy Uterus.” You would never have to ask him where he’s from.

When I see or hear my stuff from back then, I can’t believe how manic my style was. Always irreverent and fast-paced. Too fast, like I was running from something. Which I was. My childhood. [
Sound effects: record screech
]

So I guess that’s where I should begin this book, with a few moments from my childhood that seemed to form the comedy person I eventually became. It was a long time ago but I sometimes still feel like a kid, even though I know all too well I’m not one anymore. I know this because I’ll occasionally wake up in the middle of the night and find one of my toes has broken off under the sheets in the corner of the bed. Age does things to a man’s body parts. Sometimes I’ll put a couple of my broken-off toes on ice with Bacardi, lie back in my Barcalounger, and watch
So You Think You Can Dance
. (Shouldn’t that show have put a question mark at the end of the title?)

When I was a kid, my mother told me, “When you grow up, not everyone is going to like you.” And I told her, “I need names.” Well, I have them now. I have a list. But I can’t use all of the people’s real names in this book because they will come after me and castrate me. And I need my balls because I am still a relatively young man. In my head, a very young man.

In fact, this may be overly personal, but one of my testicles is younger than the other. I came out right ball first and it dragged the second one out minutes later. My left ball is always posturing to my right ball because he knows he’s younger, so he likes to rub it in my right ball’s face. Sometimes, and this may be superstitious on my part, they rub against each other, and it brings me luck. A few times, I’ve come into money this way.

All balls aside, rethinking it, perhaps it is okay for me to mention some of the names of people in this book if they are now deceased, as long as I attempt to speak of them respectfully. My intention is only to bring up people who seemed to like me. Shorter list. I’ve met so many remarkable people so far, coming up through stand-up all these years, who just aren’t alive anymore. Because they are dead. Some really great people who helped change my life and career, people like Richard Pryor, Sam Kinison, Rodney Dangerfield, Johnny Carson.

And those are just some iconic comedy names I’m dropping. In my personal life, I’ve lost some of my true heroes, my closest people: my two sisters, four uncles, my dad, many friends, and a goat my father bought for two
zuzim,
which translates into half a
shekel,
an unheard-of good deal for a goat those days. My father bought that goat for the family but it proved to like my mother better than him, always headbutting my dad’s ass and yelling, “Maahaaa.”

In this day and age, if a person in a civilized place were to go to the market and buy a live goat and take it home, they might not be taking it home to
eat it,
if you know what I mean. That’s right, there are some sick goat fuckers out there. You read about it every day. Well, probably not
every
day. But I guess you could read about it every day if you set your Google alert to “sick goat fuckers.” But I wouldn’t suggest doing that if you aren’t one.

Richard Bach, author of
Jonathan Livingston Seagull,
once wrote, “If you love someone, set them free; if they come back, they’re yours, if they don’t, they never were.” But what if you’re one of those people who set their Google Alert to “sick goat fuckers”? What then? Sure, you may be all by yourself in the yard crying out loud, “But I love Daisy so much, why did I listen to Richard Bach? I miss my Daisy!” Shame on you, on your knees, weeping like a little girl all alone in a field over a
goat
! If that’s you, I’m here to tell you: Stop it! That’s one of God’s creatures. Let it be with its own kind. You go and get yourself some cheap therapy at a nearby clinic and start looking for someone more like yourself—a human. Something without cloven hooves.

Sorry about that digression. See what I mean? That’s a typical demon of mine. Not a bad demon, if there’s such a distinction, just a fallback to deal with hurt. As soon as I go into a dark subject, like discussing the people I’ve loved and lost, I off-road into absurdist comedy perversion. It’s both a means of protection and a kind of denial, a blessing and a curse. Wait, it’s not a blessing at all. I guess it would be a bad habit and a curse. Some people spout clichés for no reason, just because it’s how we’re trained by society. “Look for the silver lining,” a lovely and hopeful cliché. But some things don’t have a silver lining.

At least that one’s better than “It was meant to be.” That’s what someone says after something terrible happens, as a way of rationalizing or making themselves feel better. That crane fell off that forty-story building and landed on Aunt Betty because it was “meant to be.” So it was preordained the day Aunt Betty was born, from their point of view, that at some time in her life a giant crane would fall off the roof and crush her flat? And that’s okay, because it was meant to be? I don’t look at life that way. I think things just happen to people. That’s healthier, I feel, than believing there’s some grand scheme where your story is already inscribed in the Book of Life. Books get rewritten. This one definitely got rewritten and this is
still
what I wound up with. I’m looking up at this moment, making sure there are no cranes in sight.

George Carlin was so eloquent in pointing out clichés . . . “He’s out walkin’ the streets. You hear this when a murderer gets paroled from prison. Guy’ll say: ‘Now, instead of being in prison, this guy is out walkin’ the streets.’ How do we know? Maybe he’s home watching TV.”

George was very kind to me when I moved to L.A. in 1978 when I was twenty-two. Always asked me how it was going, asked me if I “saw the light at the end of the tunnel.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but it’s connected to a train headed straight for me.” I was so depressed for so many years over trying to become a working comedian that my sense of self-worth would plummet . . . I’d go from being the kid with the dream, positive he was going to be the biggest comedy star ever, to a young man who feared
he
was going to wind up that guy paroled from prison “out walkin’ the streets.”

George knew the journey of show business, and he knew about following your own voice, no matter what the cost—but more significantly, he knew that the life of a comedian is about survival. Succeeding as a comic isn’t just about writing some funny stuff, or having a good comedic persona, or getting lucky and winding up with a TV or movie career. It’s about being a survivor. Going into it for the long haul. George was more prolific than just about anyone I’ve ever seen. Much like Chris Rock and Louis C.K., who follow in his path (metaphorically) with their hard-core work ethic of writing and developing fresh material. They’re part of the new Mount Rushmore of Comedy.

At the time that I am writing this, my newest stand-up television special is behind me, my first in five years—and I found the experience profoundly rewarding. But that significantly pales in comparison to George, who did
fourteen
HBO specials starting in 1977 until his death in 2008.

He was a philosopher. And if you listen to his “stuff,” it’s the highest level of the form. He had a lot to say. And he said it. I wish he’d had a chance to say more. After I appeared in
The Aristocrats,
in which George was the Obi-Wan Kenobi, I reached out to him to go to lunch. I’d been paid high compliments by a couple people he was close to about how he dug my stuff. He knew how hard it was to reinvent oneself—from family TV to the kind of adult humor that made me laugh, then back to family TV, while continuing to spin what I found funny in my stand-up.

Anyway, the end of the George story is obviously sad. He passed away shortly after we were trying to schedule lunch. I think he wanted to avoid having lunch with me so badly that he chose death. My narcissistically self-deprecating cap to the loss of one of the many great people I knew briefly (in his case, very briefly) in my life whose end came too soon.

There were many others. My family saw so much death and drama over the years it was like we were always waiting for the next tragedy to arrive. As soon as the first of my young uncles died, the other ones got paranoid—as some Philadelphia people of the Jewish persuasion do—that they were “next.” And unfortunately, they were.

I always found it a paradox that when I was growing up in Norfolk, Virginia—this was before moving back to Philadelphia, where I was born—people would occasionally ask my family, “Are you of the Jewish persuasion?” That is a statement of redundancy. If you are Jewish, odds are it is within your nature to be persuasive. Better, I guess, than if the expression had been “Are you of the pushy Jewish variety?”

But my theory is this: Pushy people became that way because they were afraid they’d get left behind. Because when they were kids and all the food was put out, they were the last ones to get to the buffet, so they didn’t get any. And as they got older, they could relate more to their parents’ lives—in essence, always running from the guard at the border. This was all the more reason for them to charge ahead and get some roast beef brisket before missing the opportunity of nabbing the juiciest slices. It all comes down to survival. And a good piece of meat. But we’ll get to that.

Rodney Dangerfield used to tell me his whole life was like the Jewish man trying to escape Europe during the war, and he had to give the Nazi border guard his best six minutes so the guard wouldn’t shoot him dead. That’s how Rodney looked at life. You’re only as good as your last six minutes. It’s not just a
set
—it’s a choice between life and death. Comedy is serious business.

Whenever you talk to people about your survival, it makes them want to share their own losses with you. It’s like comparing battle scars. Makes me think of that scene in
Jaws—
which I just watched for maybe the tenth time—with the great Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, and Roy Scheider, where they compare their wounds at sea.

A shark attack is similar to my sweet aunt Ruthie grabbing my face and kissing me so hard she sucks blood to my cheek. In fact, her ex-husband, my dad’s brother, my uncle Joe, resembled Roy Scheider . . .

And not unlike Robert Shaw in
Jaws,
he was also bitten in half—except by his ex-wife. Uh, okay, Bob. And by the way, I love my Aunt Ruthie, which means more slams to come.

Uncle Joe survived but I lost three childhood heroes to heart attacks; all were funny, handsome overachievers with high cholesterol, and all died between the ages of thirty-seven and forty-one. First, when I was eight, I lost my uncle Ozzie, one of my dad’s three younger brothers. He was only forty. He had a heart attack while running down the street chasing a couple kids who had stolen his tire. Nice, right? They tell me I look the most like him.