In interviews conducted shortly after President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration Maya Angelou described an honest and perhaps worrisome writing process.  In order to write an important poem on demand she checked into a hotel room free of a television and her home’s distractions with a bottle of booze, a pen, and some paper.  Apparently she does this often for inspiration and to avoid writer’s block.

I am the very poor man’s white Maya Angelou as I type this from an inexpensive La Quinta motel room a stone’s throw from the Turnpike exit with only a Denny’s to go cup of unsweet iced tea for company. Starbucks was closed after midnight and girl does what she has to do.  I was the only heterosexual woman in Denny’s who did not appear to be a prostitute. I had chicken wings while I discussed the Attel performance on the phone with my friend the minister who writes his sermons late on Saturday nights.  My life is weird.

My Own Personal Comedy Palooza

This weekend was my own personal comedy palooza tour.  On Thursday I saw Doug Stanhope at a small college bar in Orlando called Back Booth.  On Friday I saw John Leguizamo at the Times Union Terry Theater in Jacksonville.  On Saturday I saw Dave Attel at the West Palm Improv.  How can I do this?  Well I have not slept much and living near Orlando means I am a three hour drive from most places in Florida.  On the third day I rested and decided to stay in this La Quinta rather than driving home in the wee hours again.

Why do I do this? Who would find comedians that interesting?  Blame the blue laws in place in Arkansas 20 years ago.  I was dating an underwear model handsome recently transplanted Yankee from Indianapolis who missed hockey and being able to drink on Sundays in public. That could only be done in private clubs. His preferred private club was the comedy club in the shopping center near my apartment where he woke up most Sunday mornings.  After a leisurely morning we good times and fond memories would head off for the 2 p.m. Sunday comedy show.  I don’t remember the names of most of the comedians we saw and most often met on those Sunday afternoons note the reason we were there but there was one hilarious improv riffed off the job title of an audience member called We Don’t Give a Shit About the Traveling Oatmeal Salesman.  We also took my parents to see Pat Paulsen perform once.  Paulson seemed mortified to have fallen from Smothers Brothers fame to headlining at a Little Rock comedy club in a strip mall.  I remember my father being embarrassed for Paulson as well and think Paulson skipped town and his second billed performance the next day.

Florida – November 19^th through 21st

Stanhope, Leguizamo, and Attel have all been in the business of making people laugh and cry for a good two decades or more. They are not overnight sensations.

DOUG STANHOPE

Doug Stanhope is frequently cited as the favorite comedian or other famous comedians.  If Lewis Black and George Carlin have noted him as one of their favorite comedians then he must be doing something right.  Like the legendary Bill Hicks before him to whom he has often been compared he is not a rich man or really well-known in the entertainment mainstream.  He does not travel the comedy club circuit preferring to manage his own career marketing through social networks.  It means nothing in the bff department but he is my facebook friend.  He contracts with small bars in the towns he chooses to visit.  Methinks his shows are purposefully billed as starting an hour or so more before they actually do so the bar sells more drinks during his appearances.  Or that was the case when I saw him Thursday with a crowd of firemen, frat boys, and nerdy academic looking Ron Paul supporters -- that is me except for the Ron Paul part. However I do find Paul entertaining to listen to at times since his comments jump from common sense to racist to batshit crazy and back again.  Stanhope may be one of the more visible members of the Libertarian party.  He briefly considered running for president until he learned election rules would cut into his comedy income. 

Stanhope may be more famous in Western Europe where he delivered a well-received performance at the Edinburgh Comedy/Fringe festival shortly after 9/11/2001 during which he mocked the hero worship of police, firemen, and military personnel prevalent in the United States at the time. It is a testament to his comedic skill that he recalled this incident to appreciative applause from an audience full of firefighters.  I also met some on-duty police officers in my suburban Orlando town a few weeks ago when I was wearing a “Doug Stanhope For President” t-shirt at a local Mexican restaurant.  They gushed repeatedly over their love of Stanhope’s work.  Go figure.

PAY THE FREAK!

I just friggin’ loved it when Doug Stanhope had a bar full of drunken firefighters and frat boys (and me) yelling that this evening during his stand-up performance.  I was appalled as well this past week when Oprah interviewed the woman who was attacked and disfigured by the chimpanzee convincing a blind woman to show her horrific face on camera.  My office mate at the university is a reporter for the paper and I asked her if this was truly newsworthy and justified.  She said Oprah often irritated her but, “Did the chimp really tear her eyeballs out? That makes it a story.”

As Stanhope noted this evening in the past such people could make a small living as part of freak shows allowing yokels to ogle them through knotholes in fences earning perhaps 50 cents for the humiliation. At least they got the 50 cents. Now that money goes to Oprah who turns the big reveal into a inspirational moment  scored with harpsichord music while earning money off the ratings created by seeing a woman whose face and hands were torn apart by an enraged animal.

PAY THE FREAK!

Anyway I did not see Oprah’s interview but heard it on Oprah radio on the way into work and was glad not have seen the big reveal as I found it obscene.  I had no way to voice what I felt but Stanhope did not fail me as he repeated this evening what he noted on facebook earlier this week, “I eat pussy like a chimpanzee eats your face. Who wants to be on Oprah?’

That is what Stanhope does.  He manages to combine absolute irrefutable logic with total filth.  Rarely can this be distilled to one punchline.  It is a wonder to watch.  I went to hear the logic although he bemoaned on stage that he wonders why he tries because no one listens. No one listens to the point that he was booed off the stage by environmentalist teenagers at the Leeds Music Festival who pelted him with recycables -- but he refused to leave the stage until he had stayed as many minutes as required by contract. Tough business in which to make a living.

JOHN LEGUIZAMO

John Leguizamo is not a stand-up comedian but a grew-up-poor-and-ethnic actor from Queens who studied at NYU and with Lee Strasberg.  He has appeared in venues ranging from Madonna videos and Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare festival in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to To Wong Foo .  . .

I found all this out during his one man show perhaps performance art two hour show that perhaps was meant to recall the format of his Tony nominated Freak and Sexaholic performances in years past.  An ancient slideshow projector with a wheel (I heard the click-click sounds) and two portable screens were involved.  In those previous shows he discussed his awful ethnic childhood (to paraphrase Frank McCourt) and sexual adventures/lessons learned.  In this show he presented a retrospective of his career recounting on-the-set incidents with directors and co-stars.

I will give Leguizamo this.  I found it interesting that he and the now sainted-due-to-death-from-cancer Swayze had a fistfight while dressed in drag on the set of To Wong Foo during which the crew placed bets on who would be the winner.  Swayze was wearing red high heels and Leguizamo was wearing hot pants.

It is telling that Leguizamo’s early TV and movie career was built on being the Hispanic criminal who shot leading A-list actors on screen.  One of these was as Edward Caldron Jr. who shot Sonny Crockett who then almost bought the farm in the later Miami Vice episodes.  This was after the show jumped the shark and there was an awful miniseries within a series where Crockett had amnesia and became a Godfather like Sonny Corleone Christ figure for 20 something shows.  A young Julia Roberts portrayed the elder Caldron’s girlfriend.  Add my intricate knowledge of old Miami Vice episodes to my geek quotient and your realization on “now I know why Dorinda remains single.” Another example of Leguizamo’s portrayal of murderous Hispanic criminal was as the convenience store robber who shot Harrison Ford in the head making Ford’s character a nicer person and a possible Oscar candidate for “not-full-on-retard” performance see the hilarious and politically incorrect Tropic Thunder for this reference.  He was also Tibauld SPELLING? in Romeo and Juliet who was trying to kill Romeo. If I remember correctly Romeo killed himself before being murdered by a Leguizamo’s character who was a walking oily-haired preening stereotype proficient in gunplay at gas stations. More geek points for me. I liked Moulin Rouge as well.

Leguizamo did not always kill people onscreen and co-starred in the uber turkey Mario Brothers movie to get earn enough money for a New York City brownstone that apparenty he lost in his first divorce.  He is going through his second divorce now, has filed for bankruptcy due to the failure of a film production company most likely bankrolled by his ER money and he said nada about ER, is being sued by his lifelong best friend, and his family won’t talk to him. That was the last information Leguizamo revealed before he walked off the stage.

Are you horrified yet?  I certainly was.  I described this performance to Cartouche yesterday.  We had teriyaki and dumplings at an Asian restaurant while I was on the way down to West Palm. Yes. She is fine and fabulous and doing a lot of writing although she misses you all.  Cartouche’s on-the-spot comparison was to Burt Reynold’s reminiscences at his Jupiter dinner theater.  Yes. It was just like that.  And it depressed the hell out of me.   So much so that I walked over to the Jacksonville landing for some caffeinated iced tea and a late night view of the river, city lights, and bridges before the long drive home.  I was trying to save the evening with a pretty and inspiring image.  Damned if Leguizamo did not spoil that.  On the way back to my parked car I passed by the theater’s well lit windows and saw Leguizamo sitting behind a fold out table stacked high with unsold copies of his autobiography.  I stood in the dark shadows outside and watched him converse with theater workers and a few stragglers from the very small audience in the hallway.  None of them had books in their hands.

DAVE ATTEL

Dave Attel sold out four shows in two nights at the West Palm Beach Improv which seats 800 and curiously employs only two bartenders.  That’s what the waitress told us anyway.  His opening acts were two middle school teachers turned comedians who did not know each other. I am not making that up. What are we doing to our nation’s educators that makes them flee that occupation and become fascinated with stand-up comedy?

Dave Attel’s set ran for more than two hours and he is still skinny Dave but not frighteningly so as in his last special.  I read last week that he is dating Sarah Silverman. He gives the audience its money’s worth and did not seem weary until late in the set after dealing with a drunken female fan in the front row for thirty minutes.  His obsession with midgets continues.  His misogyny is much toned down. 

Attel thanked the audience for choosing to see him over the first night showing of the second Twilight installment which had drawn a huge crowd to Citywalk.  He wondered aloud that if the Twilight movies are not soft core gay porn then he does not really understand the genre. 

Attel hits many pop culture references at the beginning of his set.  I have never seen one single episode of Jon and Kate but much appreciated Attel’s description of them as a pairing of a Filipino Lady Boy and a bull dyke.  He also noted that Oprah’s recent retirement meant she could openly live her life as Tyler Perry since he thinks they are one and the same. 

For some reason I thought it was hilarious when Attel explained that a Koala is not a bear but a small nervous Jewish dog.  That one must have been due to the wine but I wrote it down like it was important.  There were other jokes I found worthy of writing down but certainly not all of them since I don’t know shorthand.  Attel is awesome and just rattles off funny references at a rapid pace.  Of course he had a Starbucks reference since he hits pop culture hard and said it is what the University of Phoenix would look like if they actually had a campus.  He said he went to the Kentucky Derby and it is really NASCAR for the Amish.  The way to frighten the Irish is to throw a toothbrush and some sun on them. This is a sampling of say 100 that were available.

I went to the Holocaust museum in D.C. last summer as has Attel.  He says he now knows the Holocaust really happened since he has a receipt and he found the idea of a gift shop at such a themed museum to be inappropriate.

Attel was on the top of his game and seems to be reaping the rewards of a long career.  After seeing Stanhope and Leguizamo the previous two nights I was happy to see that.  Somebody is finally living their dream. 

I have loved Attel’s work ever since his Insomniac series that was on Comedy Central a few years ago for which he made mini documentaries of the cities he visited on his stand-up tour.  Attel inspired me to want to shoot a swamp rat in New Orleans during that series when he rode along with sheriff’s deputies one night as they undertook rodent extermination.  I actually made a request to do that on a date with a friend in New Orleans a few years back and his response was “well Dorinda I had been thinking about dinner and an intimate evening at a small jazz club . . . but we can do that too.”  Let me tell you.  I shot one big ass rat from a jeep while wearing an evening gown and heels.

My life is weird.