Steve Young Comedy

It was Saturday night in the living room of a nice house in South Pasadena.  I set my notebook down on a table next to a bag of syringes.  I stood at the foot of a bed where a frail girl lay, hooked up to an oxygen tank, laid out by stage 4 bone cancer. Tonight was her 19th birthday.  In her e-mail she said it would be her last.   Her friend lay in bed with her, looking up solemnly.  About ten other people were in the room, gazing at me expectantly. I looked at the group and said, “Could we move all this stuff?  Maybe push back the bed and the oxygen tank because it’s kind of killing the comedy mood here.”

They laughed.  This was the bedridden girl’s birthday party, and I was the entertainment.  I’d been hired by the birthday girl herself to do a set to liven things up.  A few days prior, I saw her ad online seeking a comedian for a birthday party, and sent her a message with a link to my stuff on Youtube.  She replied and I learned I’d be the last comedian she’d ever see.  No pressure. 

She wrote: “In addition to jokes about death, drugs, sex, and cancer, you can also include jokes about religion because most of the people here are friends that I've met through Methodist churches (so I'd like to shock them!).” 

When I read that, I think I started salivating.  “I can shock the churchy types without trying,” I e-mailed her.  Then I didn’t hear from her for a couple days. 

I stood at the foot of her bed, recounting how she left me hanging.  My punchline: “My first thought was the obvious: is that bitch trying to play the C card to get me to lower my rate?”  More laughs.  Nervous ones, tentative ones… I have no idea.  I couldn’t accurately perceive what was happening.  And I couldn’t tell if I was offending the birthday girl or not, because she couldn’t muster the oxygen to laugh.  Every comedian’s dream.  I continually rotated my attention throughout the room, and each time I returned my gaze to her, I had to remind myself of her e-mails encouraging me to push the envelope and that she was physically unable to laugh.

Her e-mail the night before the gig: “if you haven't put together all your material yet, like I said - loved your more ‘shocking’ one.  And jokes about death and cancer or how much it sucks wins extra points.”

Here’s the thing: I can be crude and in-your-face when I’m talking about my own life, but I had a harder time deciding what was okay to joke about when it was the end of someone’s life.  Of course, I had to get past that because she was paying me and she’d been clear about what she wanted.

So I proceeded as requested: “God, the bullshit people must have been saying to you with all of this.  I mentioned this show to a few people and they got so morose so quickly.  They were getting a total tragedy boner,” I said, and sucked down more of my Corona.  (Although I am proud of coining the expression “tragedy boner.”)

Here’s the joke I liked but couldn’t pull the trigger on: “Everyone lionized Steve Jobs as the greatest man in the world right after he died, but now we’re hearing about how inhumane the working conditions are at the iphone factory in China.  So if I find out later that you’re running some child labor empire, I’m going to be so pissed I didn’t ask for more money.”  It talked specifically about her death.  That didn’t feel right.

I ended with a joke that generally horrifies everyone and I saw some appropriately horrified church faces.  But I also saw one of her friends doubled over with laughter in the kitchen doorway.  After I was done with my set, the birthday girl grabbed her purse from the end table, counted out some bills, and handed them to me.  I resisted the impulse to refuse her money and said “thank you.”  I went to the bathroom and wiped the sweat off my face, then stuck around for a piece of birthday cake.  Her friends were really nice, but I felt weird.

And of course, I was convinced I sucked.  And when you’re convinced of that, all the nice things people say sound like white lies.  Her caretaker walked me outside.  As I left, he hugged me and said, “You did a great job.”  I walked away, beginning to believe it was possible he was right. 

I’ve been thinking about this experience a lot since it happened last Saturday.  I also remembered what I was like when I was that age.  My first time ever being at a comedy club was when I was 21, drunk at the Comedy Store in London.  I just wanted button-pushing profanity.  I wanted to hear someone say that everything is bullshit.  I think maybe it’s possible I did a good job because she just wanted a night to have fun and horrify people and not give a fuck.  Because she’s only 19.

I've been ignoring this blog so I thought I'd do a fast and lazy post to get my mojo back.  I don't really follow football - despite my famous name-alike - but I like Superbowl Sunday.  It's like Thanksgiving but with white trash happy hour food instead of turkey.  And being grateful for expensive ads instead of health and family.  Anyway, today being Superbowl Sunday and all, I thought I'd post this ad, which debuted on Superbowl Sunday in 1973.  

For more Superbowl ads, check out this retrospective in the LA Times.

I cherish my bad gigs:  the one at the barber shop; the one at the laundromat; the myriad ones I've done for unsuspecting people eating dinner at weird restaurants.  They're making me who I am and shaping me to become more relaxed onstage.  Also, they're easy material in actual time.  I did a show tonight at a dive bar where I had to, needed to, make fun of the dream catcher over the bar.  "That things not working 'cause I'm still here!"

I'm very grateful when a good gig comes along, as is the case with a show I'm doing this coming Wednesday night, September 7th, at the Hollywood Improv at 8.  (Message me for free tickets.)  I love performing there because pretty much every big name has performed there and it's a fun night out.

As for the show, one of the other comics is a lass named Amy Schumer who, in addition to being a finalist on "Last Comic Standing," has performed at a hunger strike.  That's right: she did standup at a hunger strike.  I have to admit I'm jealous.  I've grown accustomed to the slow-motion, routine awfulness of a half-empty empty bar in Northridge on a school night, but standup at a hunger strike is awfulness with some pop and pizazz.  Want to see her set?

Of course you do:

Over the past few weeks, before bed each night, I've been reading Joan Didion's book The White Album and finally finished it last night.  Its name is obviously derived from the eponymous 1968 Beatles album that became referred to as such because its cover was, well, white.  (I totally over-explained that, but if a tween happens to stumble across this site and hasn't had their attention span so shattered by texting and technology that they could read this far, I guess it was worth mentioning.)

The White Album blew my mind when I first heard it at 17, and this book blew my mind too.  Like the album, the book is strange, eclectic, and a word I typically infer as "bad" when critics use it - although here it isn't - "challenging."    It surveys a wide spectrum of its era - the 60s and 70s - and depicts California, especially Southern California, in a way that is sharp, almost cutting, but still objective.  It's a look at the state for what it is, as opposed to the way most writers will depict it: as a negative comparison to where they're from, with the subtext usually being "how dare this not be New York."  She talks about the utter lack of surprise the Manson murders elicited in LA; watching RFK's funeral on a TV on the patio of the Royal Hawaiian hotel; the lives of career lifeguards in Malibu; the path water takes from the Owens Valley to our taps; the bureaucrats who design and maintain our freeways; and one of my personal favorites, a defense of the Getty Villa museum on Pacific Coast Highway.  The PCH Getty, if you haven't been, evokes the set of Spartacus.  Getty painstakingly modeled it after a first-century Roman villa and the effect is pretty gaudy.  Didion's conclusion: these were gaudy buildings in their time.  They've been rendered tasteful by the fading (literally and figuratively) of history.  Sorry if you haven't gotten that and want every museum to evoke history as you think it ought to be and not as it really was.  I know, right?  Anyway, read it if you live in California.

Reading it made me daydream about writing my own White Album for this era and the California I've come to know these past 15 years, except I'll update the reference and call it The Black Album.  I'd do what she did: talk about my experiences and LA's idiosyncrasies minus the "cell phone in the jacuzzi" cliches.   

Like the time I was a limo driver and had to drive a guy from LAX to Thousand Oaks, his new home, while the city was engulfed in flames, the sky pitch black at 3:30 in the afternoon.  Welcome, sir!  It's why our sunsets are so beautiful!

Like talking to Dominick Dunne, coincidentally Didion's brother-in-law, while I was waiting for my car at Chateau Marmont.  He told me about his run-in with Phil Spector while he was covering his murder trial.   (OK, that was pretty "cell phone in the jacuzzi" I have to admit.)

Like the time I got lost hiking for five hours in Topanga Canyon, not realizing my friends who knew the area had decided to "explore."  (They're now former friends.)  Toward the end of hour 5, I thought: "Am I going to be one of those assholes on the news who gets lost and then rescued?"  

But what occurred to me tonight is something that literally reappeared to me tonight.  It all started in Hollywood, one hot Sunday morning in the summer of '96.  I was eating at Denny's on Sunset Boulevard because I like the finer things in life.  I noticed a weird Unabomber-looking guy at the register, saying "John Lennon died for our sins, man.  John Lennon died for our sins."  The middle-aged Korean waitress, whose only English was "you pay at register" and "Moons over My Hammy," didn't engage with him for some strange reason.

I finished my breakfast a few minutes later and went outside, where I  saw a van.  His van.  Painted on the side it read: "STEPHEN KING MURDERED JOHN LENNON AND THE U.S. GOVERNMENT IS TRYING TO COVER IT UP."  I have to say, for lunacy, the central thesis is a little lacking in gusto.  I guess because Stephen King kind of looks like Mark Chapman in a generic "white guys with glasses who don't exercise" kind of way.   It reminds me of the time I temped at an office and always got the two tech support guys mixed up.  Now if he'd said Sandy Duncan in a Tinkerbell costume murdered John Lennon and flew away from Central Park after she did it, that would be some craziness with juice.  But content aside, the execution (no pun intended!) took it to the next level.  If Van Guy were only a little less insane, he'd be one of those people on LinkedIn who specialize in "branding" and "messaging."  He didn't just share his ramblings about John Lennon and Stephen King with a trusted electro-shock therapist, he turned his vehicle into a moving billboard advertising his own insanity.  Kudos, sir!  He also painted an upside down flag on it as well as a blood-stained hammer and sickle.  Touché, you magnificent bastard!  Now you're cooking with gas!  I seem to recall there were documents taped to the windows and pasted to the vehicle, because he was all about backing it up with evidence too.

So tonight, I was driving home from Ralphs where I'd picked up my Peet's French Roast Coffee for tomorrow morning, because I still like the finer things in life.  And what do I see?  My man from Denny's!  Yes, he's still up to his old tricks fifteen years later.  The vehicle is different because he's keeping with the times while still keeping up with his insanity.  And he's got a website now!  (Do we dare?  We do.)  I have to say though, I'm a bit disappointed with the minimalism of this tour de crazy.   The other one had more pizazz, a more artisan quality.   This is like a slightly edgy airport shuttle.  Even the whole "It's true or he'd sue" thing just seems like something an asshole lawyer for TMZ would say.

But you know what I'm grateful for?  My cameraphone to snap this picture.  And my blog to share this improbable coincidence of the exceptionally vocal conspiracy theorist.   Because otherwise, like most things we observe behind the wheel in LA, they are solitary moments we process.  We have our emotion about it and usually move on and forget to tell anyone, and it just slips away like it didn't happen.

Oooh... Oooh... see what I did there?  

Even Google can tell.

That's right kids.  "Jamz" with a "z."  

When  last we spoke - wait, we spoke, right? - I told you about my affinity for this song.  But tonight I thought I'd share some non-trainwreck summer music with all y'all.  I was inspired by KCRW's guest DJ project and the three Mexican beers coursing through my veins.  The Guest DJ Project is a show where celebrities and prominent LA locals share and talk about their favorite songs.  The most recent guest DJ is Lakers forward Ron Artest.  (I don't even follow basketball but I think he's awesome.  He thanked his psychiatrist on TV when the Lakers won the championship lat year and is now legally changing his name to Metta World Peace.  Express yourself, Metta!)

Anyway, I saw my friend the hilarious Dave Holmes' playlist and got insanely super jealous.   After coming down from my toxic envy I asked him how to make my choices downloadable to you.  Thanks to him, I was able to figure out how to make them available here.

Music addict that I am, it was hard to put together a list but I think I've done good, although not by any hipster standards.  I decided to reveal what I actually listen to, guilty pleasures and all.   There's some slight (okay, total) cheese on this list but after all, summer is for slurpees, barbecues and flip-flops, not anything substantial.   And sometimes depth is just plain overrated.  So join me in the pool while I crank Blondie on the boombox and practice my cannonballs.