Chapter Six
Why Didn’t You Tell Me You Were Funny?
We were poor. We were so poor, in my neighborhood the rainbow was in black-and-white.
Show business was my escape from life. I had to have it. It was like a fix. I needed it to survive. I had gotten out of show business when I was twenty-eight, but if you think funny, you can’t just turn it off. I was no longer performing, but when I’d see something funny, I’d write it down. I kept writing things down and throwing them in a duffel bag. After twelve years in the siding business, that bag was bursting with jokes.
I was forty years old now, and all my friends thought I was insane to get back into clubs, but I was writing compulsively, trying anything to get a job.
My first move was to go to a nightclub I had worked my first time around. It was the Miami Club in Staten Island. The club still had the same owner, Frank Santore, who had known me when I had worked there fifteen years before.
I had a drink with Frank, who knew that I had quit show business, and told him I’d like to go on that night and tell a few jokes. He said sure.
When my spot was over, Frank said, “Jack, are you taking dates?” Man, that made me feel good. For a few hours, I was able to forget about my troubles.
I was back—hell, I was flying, man—happy to be doing what I knew I wanted to do. Now all I had to do was get some more paying gigs. I went to see an agent named King Broder, who booked most of the small nightclubs on Long Island. Performers referred to these joints as “toilets,” but they were places to work, so they looked good to me.
But Broder wouldn’t book me. He said, “I don’t know you. I’d look ridiculous sending a forty-year-old nobody to a club.”
So I started working on him, making him like me—just like when I was a salesman. I said, “Okay, I see your point. I tell you what. On Saturday night, I’ll just ride around with you while you check out all your comics in the clubs. We’ll keep each other company, see what happens, all right?” He said okay.
Come Saturday night, we hit the first club, and Broder’s comic is dying. He’s up there maybe ten minutes, and I’m sitting with Broder at a table, and I say, “Jeez, let me go on after him. What can you lose?”
Broder says no. “If you go on after him, I can’t win. If you do bad, it makes it worse for me. And if you do good, then the owner will be angry at me for not booking you. You’re not going on.”
I hated to admit it, but I could see his point. So we go to the next club, still just hanging out together, riding around, doing this and that, whatever business he has to take care of. After a few hours, we eventually walked into a club, and the owner comes running over, furious, yelling at Broder, “Where the hell are they?” Turns out the dance team that Broder’d booked there hadn’t shown up.
This sounds like another showbiz story, but, again, it’s true. I say, “Let me go up. I’ll do ten minutes for you, okay?”
Broder had no alternative, so he says, “Go ahead.”
So finally I was able to get on a stage for Broder, and I killed that crowd. Even better, I got hired to work that club starting the next weekend.
And that’s how I got back into show business.
With my wife, I got no sex life. Her favorite position is back-to-back. Oh, one night we tried something wild. She tied me to the bed. Then she put her clothes on and went out.
This time around, I was desperate to write jokes and go out and tell them, and I went to extreme circumstances to do it.
I was always trying to get work in the Catskill Mountains, a resort area about ninety minutes north of New York City, even though it was really not my kind of gig. I was brought up in nightclubs, and the Catskills were mostly hotels and small resorts, so the comics who played there were more into family entertainment, but I could write material that would play there, and I was trying to get any work I could get. An agent named Hy Einhorn booked a lot of acts in the Catskills, and he would book me into the small hotels or bungalow colonies if he had no one else.
I called Hy one day and asked if there was any work for that night. He told me there was one hotel in the Catskills that might have a show. They wanted to wait to see how many guests checked in, though, so he told me to check back.
I called him an hour later. He said, “They don’t know yet.”
Another hour goes by. I’m sitting there ready to drop everything and drive an hour and a half up to the Catskills just so I can get up onstage and tell jokes.
I called him again. No word.
Finally, at about five o’clock, he said, “Nothin’ doin’. They didn’t have enough check-ins. There’s no show.”
I said to him, “Hy, do me a favor, will ya? The hotel would pay me twenty-five dollars for a show, right? I don’t want the twenty-five dollars. You’d make ten dollars commission out of that. Skip your commission, which you wouldn’t be getting anyway. So the hotel just pays for the dance team. They get fifteen dollars, right? Call the owner, tell him you’ll give him a complete show for just fifteen dollars. I get nothin’, you get nothin’. You’re doing him a favor, and you’re doing me a favor.”
He thought about it and then said, “All right.”
So my job that night was to pick up the dance team—a guy and his girlfriend who lived in a hotel downtown—and drive all of us up to the hotel.
When we finally arrived at this third-rate Catskills hotel, I went into the canteen to buy a soda. I introduced myself to the woman at the cash register. “Hi, I’m the comedian for tonight’s show,” I said.
This woman looked at me like she hoped it wasn’t true, and said, “You’re the comedian? Hy must have really been stuck.”
I found out later that she was the wife of the guy who owned the place. Within a half hour, she’d told everybody at the hotel not to expect too much from that night’s show because the comedian was a stiff.
I didn’t know this at the time, of course, so come showtime, I walk onto that stage and the audience is sitting on their hands, looking at me like I was the minister at a wake. It took me a few minutes to warm them up, but I had my act together, and I knew what I was doing. The show went great.
After the show, the boss’s wife came running up to me and said, “Why didn’t you tell me you were funny?”
I tell ya, I know I’m ugly. My proctologist stuck his finger in my mouth. Ugly! Four gay guys saw me and went straight. Halloween, I open the front door…kids give me candy.
Being divorced didn’t make me much happier, and seeing my little baby son Brian hanging on his milk bottle really got to me. Joyce was pushing for us to get back together, so finally I said yes. We got married again. A year later, my daughter Melanie was born. But the marriage was still not working, so I moved out of the house a short time later.
Despite my troubles at home, I was focused on my act. In fact, I eventually worked up a complete set of material just for the Catskills, forty minutes of dynamite stuff. It was so good, I made a deal with a comedian named Stan Irwin, who could get booked in the Catskills where I couldn’t get a job. I rented him my act for the summer for two hundred dollars.
That deal worked out pretty well for both of us. Years later, Stan was the producer of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show for a while, and when Stan told Carson about renting my act, Johnny got a big kick out of it.
Another time I hustled my way into a job at the Club Safari on Long Island. I went out there with my friend Joe E. Ross, who was a pretty big comic at that time—he was even starring in a TV show. Some of you older readers might remember him from the Sergeant Bilko series and Car 54, Where Are You?
The way it worked at the Club Safari, the emcee would introduce Joe E., who was sitting at a table, having a drink. Joe E. would stand up and take a bow, then do a few minutes. I told him, “When you finish your bit, introduce me before you sign off.”
So Joe E. told a few jokes, and then I got up, did my act, and again my plan worked—I busted up the joint, and got booked there for the following weekend.
After I came offstage, I went back to my table and sat with Joe E. and a lady friend I’d brought along. The band started playing, and she wanted to dance. I told her, “Sorry, honey. I’m a bad dancer. Dancing is not my thing.”
Joe E. said, “Come on, baby, I’ll dance with ya.” So off they go.
After a while she came back to our table and Joe E. went to the men’s room. When she sat down, she told me that while they were dancing, Joe E. had said, “Baby, I’m doing better than he is. Pack your bag and come home with me.”
I tell ya, I know I’m ugly. I stuck my head out the window—I got arrested for mooning.
Note that “bag” was singular. In most of Joe E.’s relationships, the girl only needed one bag. It wasn’t going to be a long “trip.”
As you might have figured out by now, Joe E. was a rogue. He also had a habit of marrying hookers. When he had an argument with one of them, he’d say, “Go fuck somebody!”
Once Joe E. was working a nightclub with an act called the Dancing Paceys. Both Joe E. and I were friendly with Jimmy Pacey, a wild, wild guy.
One night a sea captain and his wife came to the club. They drank and had a great time, so the sea captain invited Joe E. and Jimmy to his house for a nightcap. The two thespians said, “Okay!”
Before they left, Pacey fucked the captain’s wife, and Joe E. stole the captain’s overcoat. The moral of this story: Never invite a comic and half a dance team to your house.
Joe E. had a thing about coats. One day he and I were walking in New York. We came upon a huge men’s clothing store called Howard’s. Joe E. said, “C’mon. I need an overcoat.”
When we were inside, Joe E. waved off the salesman. “I’m just lookin’,” he said.
I sat down and watched Joe E. try on overcoats. When he put on one that he really liked, he got that look in his eye that I knew meant trouble. He said, “Let’s go. I’m walkin’.”
I didn’t want to get caught stealing a coat, so I said, “You’re walkin’ alone.” I went out about twenty feet behind him…
That maniac got away with it—he stole that overcoat.
We walked over to Joe E.’s hotel to tell his hooker wife the good news. While Joe E. was telling her the story, he farted. At that, his wife yelled at him, “Joe! You ate and you didn’t bring me anything?”
I figured out I’m bisexual. I have sex twice a year.
At that time, there was another famous comedian called Joe E. This guy, Joe E. Lewis, was really big—much bigger than my friend—and he had a special song written for him called “The Groom Couldn’t Get In.” It was one of his best numbers, and he used to close his act with it. Joe E. Ross liked that song so much that he stole it, and started using it in his act.
I was playing Upstairs at the Duplex in Greenwich Village. I had been drinking and was feeling pretty loose. I used to end my act with “That’s my story.” That night, I said to the audience, “Forget the applause, all right, when I walk off, just give me one of these”—and I formed a circle with thumb and forefinger. It became my signature exit line. If you like the book, give me “one of these.”
Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.
One night the two Joe E.s ran into each other in a restaurant. Lewis said to Ross, “What you did was very low. You stole my number.”
Ross said to Lewis, “I’ll make a deal with you. Let me keep doing the number, and you can keep fucking my wife.”
I never got girls when I was a kid. One girl told me, “Come on over, there’s nobody home.” I went over. There was nobody home.
One night Joe E. and his hooker lady friend decided to try to live like a normal couple. The idea was that she’d stop turning tricks and he’d stop chasing everything in a skirt.
The next afternoon, Joe E. was sitting in the lobby of the club he was working at, across from the boss’s office. Suddenly the boss’s door opens and out walks a midget. About two minutes later, Joe E.’s lady friend walks out of the office. It was obvious what had just taken place.
Joe E. grabbed his girl’s arm and said, “I thought you were going to straighten out—no more turning tricks!”
She said, “Joey, he’s a midget.” She smiled and snapped her fingers. “He came like that.”
I heard that the circus had a problem with a midget. The midget walked over to the fat lady and said, “I wanna screw you.” She said, “If you do, and I find out about it, you’re in big trouble.”
One night Joe E. and I were drinking in the bar of the Havana Madrid nightclub in New York. Joe E. was loaded, and I wasn’t far behind. A girl walked over to him and said, “Hey, Joey, how are you?”
Joe E. put his arm around her and said, “Yeah, baby, come here. Tonight it’s you and me.”
She said, “Joey, I’m your sister!”
Joe E. was slightly embarrassed…but he also looked disappointed.
I tell ya, yesterday was a tough day. I found some guy’s wallet. Inside was a picture of my two kids.