COMEDIANS DIE ONSTAGE EVERY NIGHT. Not literally, but if you ask one of them, he or she would probably say that a real death is preferable to the figurative kind, when the audience is an oil painting and the clinking of glasses, coughing, and the plinking drips of flop sweat are all that can be heard amid the dead silence of a failing routine.
But an actual death onstage, a real, live, heart-stopping death amid the hilarity, is something else altogether. And it often takes the audience a few minutes to get the joke—the big cosmic joke, that is. There are a few onstage comedy deaths that have made their marks in show business history.
One of the comedy death stories most told is that of dialect comedian Harry Einstein, known for his pseudo-Greek character Nick Parkyakarkus (as in “Park yer carcass! Sit down!”). Parky, as he was called by fans and friends alike, was the father of future comedians Bob Einstein and Albert Brooks (né Albert Einstein—not necessary to explain why he changed his name to “Brooks”). In the 1930s and ’40s, he appeared in films and on the Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson radio shows; for three seasons, he had his own radio program, Meet Me at Parky’s, in which Parkyakarkus was running a lunch counter.
In 1958, at fifty-four, Harry “Parky” Einstein was in poor health with heart and back problems, living off investments, and, with the exception of a role on the television anthology series Playhouse 90, limiting his appearances to dinners and roasts hosted by the Friars Club, the private show business club whose membership boasted top comedians and entertainers of the day.
A gala Friars Club event took place on Sunday night, November 23. Twelve hundred people packed into the International Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton hotel, paying up to $200 a plate to attend a testimonial dinner honoring Hollywood comedy power couple Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Art Linkletter was master of ceremonies, and the featured stars included Dean Martin, George Burns, Danny Thomas, George Murphy, Sammy Davis Jr., and Milton Berle.
Parky was the only comic on the dais who didn’t have a regular gig on the tube or in clubs, and, Linkletter recalled, “on this particular night he was making his big comeback.” When it was his turn at the podium, Parky went into a routine that poked fun at the exclusivity of the Friars Club.
Audio from the big night reveals uproarious laughter from the crowd: “These two people we are honoring tonight—Danny Arnaz and Lucille Bowles—have met every requirement of our screening committee. But you must not think that the Friars Club is an easy club to get into. Quite to the contrary, it is most difficult. Before a prospective candidate is even issued an application he must first satisfy us, beyond any question of a doubt, that he is either a resident”—that gets the laughs rolling—“or a nonresident of the state of California.” A huge wave of laughter shakes the room. “He then must be proposed by and then vouched for by at least two men . . . who are listed in the phone book.” A torrent of laughter. The Friars Club membership, he says, includes “many prominent businessmen, several fine judges, and quite a few defendants.”
Years later, Linkletter, Berle, and Friars entertainment chairman Barry Mirkin relived the evening for the Friars tribute documentary Let Me In, I Hear Laughter. “He was,” Art Linkletter recalled, “up there knocking them dead.”
“It was the most hilarious routine I have . . . ever stolen—ever heard,” said Berle. “And he actually was the hit of the show.”
“He did a monologue that lasted ten minutes [that] under normal circumstances might have lasted six minutes,” Mirkin, who’d opened the show with the Friars song “Here’s to the Friars,” remembered. “But the laughs were so great, so impossible to believe, that as a result it just stretched.”
“He got a standing ovation,” Berle recalled. “While he was standing up and bowing, he said, ‘Thank you, thank you,’ and they were cheering.”
As Parky made his way back to his seat, Linkletter asked the room, “How come anyone as funny as that isn’t on the air?”
Parky settled back next to Berle and said, “Yeah, how come?”
“And then suddenly he put his head over on Milton Berle’s lap and shut his eyes and apparently slumped down,” Linkletter said. “And everybody stopped laughing and applauding because he had apparently fainted—or worse.”
Parky’s wife, the actress Thelma Leeds, was sitting in the audience with Ed Wynn to her right. Moments earlier, she’d bragged to him that Parky wrote all his own material. Now, while all around her looked confused, she knew immediately what was wrong with her husband. She bolted onto the dais and reached into his pocket for the pillbox. She opened it and plucked out a nitroglycerin tablet that would increase blood flow through his coronary arteries. But when she tried to put the pill in his mouth and under his tongue, she couldn’t. His teeth were clenched tight.
Meanwhile, Wynn was shouting advice in his giggly voice: “Put his head down, put his head down!”
Berle screamed shrilly, “Is there a doctor in the house?”
Audience members, caught up in the excitement, called by name the doctors they knew would be in the room. Friars roasts and banquets are traditionally benefits for hospitals (this one benefited a Burmese leper colony), so there was no shortage. Five top specialists jumped from their seats.
Linkletter recalled, “I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have a little medical accident here for the moment. We wonder if anyone happens to have any nitroglycerin—nitro tablets.’ Well, the surprise of my life, big producers, writers, stars came forward with vials. Apparently half the people in the room had heart problems.”
“Everybody was frozen in the room,” Mirkin added. “The drama is unbelievable because they knew what was happening. And I tried to get Lucy to unleash her fingers from the table to come back, and I couldn’t get her. I couldn’t move her hands.”
Amid the ruckus, Berle waved to singer Tony Martin. “‘Get up, stall, do something to get their mind off it. Do something—sing a song, sing a song!’ He says, ‘All right.’ Tony Martin, quickly, it wasn’t his fault—improv, ad lib—he got up and sang . . . ‘There’s No Tomorrow.’”
Said Linkletter: “There were probably a couple of sympathetic heart attacks when ‘There’s No Tomorrow’ rang out.”
Berle, George Burns, and others carried Parky’s carcass backstage. Within seconds, one of the doctors had sterilized a pocketknife, sliced open Parky’s chest and was holding his heart in his hand, massaging it. Another doctor yanked the cord from an electric lamp and placed the live ends against the heart muscle like a MacGyver defibrillator, shocking it into beating again.
One of the doctors said that Parky had probably died on the dais, but the hand massage brought him back to life. The five doctors took turns massaging—and got a faint beat going from the right side of the heart. The left side only fluttered. Firemen and police arrived with plasma and a pulmotor—a device to inflate the lungs and possibly get him breathing again.
As they worked behind the curtain, the show went on—for a while. The Associated Press reported that “the off-key singing of George Burns and the audience’s laughter could be heard over the pulsations of the pulmotor.” There were several announcements that Parky would be fine, but everyone on the dais knew better. When it was his turn to address the crowd, Desi Arnaz was ashen-faced and barely audible. “This is one of the moments that Lucy and I have waited a lifetime for, but it’s meaningless. They say the show must go on. But why must it? Let’s close the show now by praying for this wonderful man backstage who made a world laugh.” He took the award that Linkletter had presented him and crammed it in his pocket.
Lucy stepped to the microphone and through her tears said, “I can say nothing.”
As the proceedings were wrapped, they cued Sammy Davis Jr. for one last number. He decided not to perform.
“And then everybody just sat there,” Mirkin said. “A few people left, but there were a thousand people in the room. Everybody wanted to know what the outcome was. Parky’s wife went up to the dais and she sat at the very end and when she saw the five doctors leave with their sleeves rolled up, very glum, she knew. And, oh God, she let out a screech.”
Dr. Alfred Goldman of City of Hope hospital pronounced Parkyakarkus dead at 1:10 AM, about eighty minutes after he was stricken.
When it was over, Ed Wynn spoke to a reporter. “This is ample proof that the old saying ‘The show must go on’ is a lot of baloney,” he said. “The show doesn’t have to go on, and it does not, as you saw tonight.”
It turns out that Harry “Parkyakarkus” Einstein wasn’t the only funny-talking comic to die at a Friars Club function after slaying the crowd. Time has forgotten Al Kelly. The man born Abraham Kalish was a vaudeville and Borscht Belt comic with a fifty-year career that included stooging on The Ernie Kovacs Show and appearances on Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town. He was also a dues-paying Friar.
For years, Al Kelly had worked the same angle as Harry Einstein, often hired at events under an assumed name and title, stringing the crowd along before revealing himself to be a gagman. Whereas Einstein might have appeared at a function in the guise of a foreign dignitary and insulted the honored guest in a convincing accent (that’s how he was discovered by Eddie Cantor), Al Kelly would be introduced as an expert in a particular field and then would cause confusion—and eventually laughter—with his double-talk routine.
What is double-talk? As explained by comic legend Joey Adams in his book Here’s to the Friars, “fractured English is what it is. If you should find someone who introduces himself with something that sounds like ‘I am Charley Imglick and I’d like to javlin with my liebst. Can you get me a rabinat or a flang?’ . . . you have just been introduced to double-talk!”
Al Kelly was the king of double-talk. He was once hired to speak at a doctors’ convention, where he began by explaining a study in a technical field and spoke intelligently for a few minutes before going into a double-talk routine that left everyone stunned, too embarrassed to ask what he meant: “We’ve been able to rehabilitate patients by daily injections of triprobe into the right differenarium, which translucentizes the stoline, producing a black greel, which enables you to stame the klob.”
“One thing disturbing me,” Kelly recalled, according to the New York Times, “was when I said that—some of the doctors were agreeing with me.”
On September 6, 1966, Al Kelly was sixty-nine years old and living with his wife, Mary, in Forest Hills, Queens. After fifty-two years in show business, he was known to a new generation thanks to his occasional appearances on The Soupy Sales Show. That Tuesday evening, he and Mary were at the Friars Club at 57 East Fifty-Fifth Street for a black-tie dinner honoring and toasting comedian Joe E. Lewis.
Kelly’s grandnephew (“he was my uncle Lenny’s uncle”), comedian, actor, and Friar Bob Greenberg, grew up hearing the story. “It was held in the dining room,” Greenberg tells us. “Usually when we do a roast or a very big event, it’s at the Waldorf, so this was an in-house event. It was a toast, a tribute.”
Radio personality William B. Williams and comic Alan Gale served as emcees, and the lineup of speakers included Frank Sinatra, Buddy Hackett, Soupy Sales, Henny Youngman, Nipsey Russell, and Pat Henry. In the early hours of September 7, Al Kelly took to the podium and did his double-talk routine. According to the Associated Press, he “massacred the Gettysburg Address.” According to Joey Adams in Here’s to the Friars, he killed: “The beloved little double-talker was the hit of the night.”
Kelly returned to his seat amid gales of laughter and rose to acknowledge a standing ovation. Seconds later, he collapsed. “William B. took him in his arms,” wrote Adams, “but in the twinkling of an eye that it took Bill to cradle him, he was gone.”
“Frank, the maitre’d, saw what happened and wanted to get him out of there right away,” Greenberg says. “He got a busboy to hold him by the legs and they brought him to the Round the World Bar, which is what the Billy Crystal Bar used to be called, and laid his body on the bar.”
Amid the commotion, seventy-five-year-old vaudeville singer Blossom Seeley made her way unsteadily to the microphone. She was going to serenade Joe E. with “It Had to Be You” but announced she was feeling “a little weak.” A few bars in, she became faint. Somebody yelled that Blossom may be having a stroke.
Joey Adams wrote memorably of the scene: “The handsome silver-haired William B., who could attribute some of his gray hairs to this evening, thought it was a doubleheader for a moment.”
Blossom Seeley hadn’t suffered a stroke, after all. She made it out alive. Meanwhile, Dr. Milton Reder and Saul Meylackson, two Friars who happened to be physicians, were in the Round the World Bar, inspecting Al Kelly.
“He was pronounced dead on the bar,” Greenberg recounts. “I don’t know if they held a mirror under his nose or what, but they say he was gone.”
It was left to the guest of honor, Joe E. Lewis, to offer a toast of his own, a toast to Al Kelly. “If you have to go, that’s the way to do it,” he said. “Leave with the cheers ringing in your ears.” Even so, all agreed it was a shame that the doctors failed to triprobe Kelly’s right differenarium, translucentizing the stoline and producing a black greel that possibly could have stamed the klob.
I don’t wanna die in front of you. Hey, comics don’t like to die. That’s why we act like children. In our minds, if we stay as children, we’ll never get old and die.
—Dick Shawn
The 2nd Greatest Entertainer in the Whole Wide World
Why isn’t Dick Shawn held in the same high regard as his contemporary comedians, including Lenny Bruce, Jonathan Winters, and Dick Gregory? Why hasn’t his influence on comics like Robin Williams, Andy Kaufman, and Garry Shandling been more celebrated? Perhaps it’s because he was so versatile, so much more than a stand-up, with talents spread across so many other genres: Broadway plays and musicals, movies, and television among them. Maybe it was because of his unpredictability, or simply the circumstances of his exit, that this comedic genius is remembered mainly for the way he died.
More than three decades later, his son Adam Shawn has a theory of his own. “I think part of it is that he really didn’t care,” he says. “He did his own thing. He wasn’t commercial. He didn’t play the game. He went into stand-up, and he kind of killed it, but he was already off into something else. He wanted to be more diverse.”
He was born Richard Schulefand in Buffalo, New York, in 1923. Growing up, his greatest ambition was to be a major league baseball player. He tried out for the Chicago White Sox and walked away with a contract. “He was wild, but he threw hard,” Adam says, in a good description of the life to follow. Within days of the baseball offer, Richard was drafted into the US Army and sent the Philippines, where he worked in USO shows and learned he had a knack for making people laugh. After the Army, he attended the University of Miami, and left early to pursue a career as Dick Shawn, stand-up comic.
Shawn emerged from the same 1950s New York City hipster comedy and cabaret scene as Lenny Bruce. His first break on the Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts television show led to performances in nightclubs, The Ed Sullivan Show, Las Vegas, Broadway, and ultimately films, in which he was known for playing counterculture beatniks and weirdos. He was a genie in The Wizard of Baghdad, the surfing son in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and, in Mel Brooks’s The Producers, hippie actor Lorenzo St. DuBois (LSD), who’s hired to play the lead role in the Broadway show Springtime for Hitler.
It was onstage, though, in his one-man show, that Dick Shawn really shined. The 2nd Greatest Entertainer in the Whole Wide World was a collection of free-association bits, non sequiturs, singing, dancing, absurdities, drama, pantomime, gags, and stream-of-consciousness monologues—with an apocalyptic undercurrent born in the Cold War atomic era from which he sprang.
In a typical performance, the audience would enter the theater to see a bare stage with a pile of newspapers at center. When the show began, the pile would shake and Shawn, who’d been underneath all along, emerged, like a bum awakened from a period of sleeping off a hangover. Sometimes, he’d be eating a banana. It was an opening tour de force that required great concentration, discipline, and breath control. The slightest movement from the pile would have blown the surprise. Later in the first act, Shawn would talk himself into a “coma,” or collapse on his back and lie onstage throughout intermission. He’d rise for the second act, portraying that “2nd Greatest Entertainer,” a Vegas showman named Fabulously Fantastic Jr. (“Fabby Fanty Jew” for short—not too far a throw from Freddy Funky, Shawn’s old Elvis Presley parody that inspired Charles Strouse and Lee Adams to write the 1960 musical Bye, Bye Birdie.)
“It is an entertainment piece,” he told a reporter for the New York Times, “even though the thrust of the humor is serious. I’ve always taken chances with my work. In my club act, for example, I always ended up pretending to die onstage, rather than taking bows. Two guys would come in with a stretcher and carry me out. I like that. I feel life is a game of opposites.” You can see how this might not end well if Dick Shawn ever needed real medical assistance during a show.
Dick Shawn was widely regarded as brilliant, wildly entertaining, and unpredictable—wildly unpredictable. What would turn out to be his second most notorious and outrageous incident was the one on May 6, 1974, that supposedly, legendarily, got him banned from The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. The fog of pop culture history has him guest-hosting while Johnny Carson was away on vacation, but it was celebrity impersonator Rich Little behind the desk, demonstrating less of a controlling hand than Johnny might have when Shawn came out as a guest and went crazy.
“He just decided to tear the set apart,” Little told Mark Malkoff on The Carson Podcast. “And he turned the plants over, he turned the sofa over, he turned the desk over. We got in the desk and started rowing like we’re going across the Potomac. You know, like George Washington. I was out in front with the oar. And we wrecked the set, totally wrecked the set. The people were in hysterics, so Freddie de Cordova and all the staff were all just standing around, going, ‘Well this is awful. He’s ruining the set but at the same time, this is the funniest thing we’ve ever seen.’”
Little continued, “Carson wasn’t there to see the humor—’cause it was funny. All Carson saw when he came back was the set was ruined.”
Johnny Carson was offended that his set, desk, and plants had been violated, but in fact, perhaps because of his affection for the comedian, Dick Shawn was invited back to The Tonight Show many times over the next dozen years—though he appeared only with guest hosts like David Brenner. Carson eventually reconciled with the comic in 1985, and Shawn made two appearances with him that year. When Carson introduced Shawn on the show in November 1986, he said, “He can be very brilliant.”
That all led to Good Friday, April 17, 1987. Dick Shawn had two films in the can. He had been appearing on network television in guest roles on shows like St. Elsewhere and Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, and he was featured in Disney theme parks around the world as Michael Jackson’s boss, Commander Bog, in Francis Ford Coppola’s new 3D short film, Captain EO. His real joy was his one-man show. The 2nd Greatest Entertainer in the Whole Wide World, which he’d been touring on and off for the past decade, had wrapped a long run—close to three hundred performances—at the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills.
On this Friday afternoon, twenty-eight-year-old Adam Shawn, the show’s stage manager and technical director, drove his father from his home in Santa Monica to a performance at the University of California San Diego’s Mandeville Auditorium. Shawn was going to try out some new material, with plans to take the show to the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.
The performer carried reel-to-reel tapes containing music and audio tracks that Adam would cue up and play during the show. “He doesn’t want to lose them, so he shoves them under his seat in the car,” Adam says. “We get there three hours later, now it’s five o’clock, six o’clock. It’s getting close to when they’re going to let the people in. You’ve got to have a run-through with the crew. You’ve got a whole crew there.
“So we get there, and he can’t find his tapes. He forgot he put them under the seat. So everybody’s looking for the tapes, all over the theater, all over the car—he was almost resolved to just doing his stand-up without the data. Finally, he finds his tapes under the seat, where he hid them so he wouldn’t lose them—typical.
“We do a quick run-through with the crew and then half an hour before the show starts, I always got this from my dad: ‘I need some time to get my head together,’ which was his way of saying, I need to be alone before I go on. He gave me a plate of fruit that they had for him because ‘he’s a big star.’
“‘I’ll see you after the show.’ That was it.”
Dick Shawn took the stage shortly after 8:00 PM—part of him did, at least—as a disembodied head appearing out of a table. “It was a very funny comedy routine about how you don’t have to be a stand-up comic,” Adam recalls. “He was a ‘heads-up comic.’ You don’t need your body or to be physical to be a comic. It just takes ideas to be funny.”
After that bit, in which another actor came out and carried on as if he was eating dinner at the table, the stage lights went dark. Shawn reappeared for a vignette in which he was “out of rhythm to some dance music,” Tim Wartelle, who was in the audience, told the Los Angeles Times. “He was obviously moving around and didn’t seem to be having any trouble.”
About twenty-five minutes in, Shawn put aside his microphone and asked if he could be heard without it. Satisfied with the audience response, he began talking about the end of the world. He imagined a nuclear war in which nobody would survive—nobody, he said, except the five hundred people in this theater! He shouted, “And I would be your leader!”
He fell forward.
As he’d done for close to three hundred shows, Adam Shawn was running audio and lighting cues from the booth at the rear of the auditorium, and communicating via headset with a stagehand at the side of the stage. “He starts talking about what would happen if everybody else in the world were destroyed by a nuclear bomb, and they were the only ones left. And he would be their leader,” Adam tells us. “I honestly believe that’s when he went down. There was this move, and it wasn’t a move I’d ever seen before, and it looked like it hurt. He went down on a knee, and then fell forward, on his face—and a little bit hard.”
Dick Shawn remained motionless, prone on the stage.
Of course, the audience thought the face-plant was part of the act. Not only was it seamless with the routine, it had been part of Dick Shawn’s act for decades. So many times he showed off that impressive breath control, remaining stock-still under the pile of newspapers. So many times he’d worked himself into a frenzy and dropped to the stage. But face first? Maybe it was a signal that intermission had begun. The crew knew not to interfere or interrupt him should he wind up sprawled out. One never knew if a routine would take him there.
The audience laughed. There was some applause. Someone yelled out, “Take his wallet!” There was more laughter—uncomfortable laughter now. Everyone waited.
“So we’re waiting, and a minute goes by, maybe longer,” Adam recalls. “I tell the guy on the headset to go out and see if he’s OK. So he goes out. He checks on him, he kinda shakes him, and he comes back onto the headset. I’m like, ‘Well, what did he say?’ He’s like, ‘He didn’t say anything. He just kinda grunted, you know? He didn’t say anything.’ So I said, ‘Well, go back out and get a response! Make sure he’s OK!’ So he went back out, came back to the headset, said there was no response. That’s when the chaos started.”
As it happened, Scripps Memorial Hospital was on the UC San Diego campus. Several doctors and their wives were seated in the first few rows when the stagehand asked, “Is there a doctor in the house?”
“A doctor came from back of the wings, felt for his pulse, and realized something had happened,” audience member Wartelle said. “He flipped him over. The audience reaction by then was, ‘Boy, this is out of taste.’”
Meanwhile, Adam Shawn was making a dash from the booth. He scrambled down the stairs and was heading through the lobby when he was stopped dead in his tracks. “Standing in the lobby was my dad’s second cousin, with his wife and infant. They couldn’t get a babysitter, so they brought the child, and they were standing there. Mind you, this is about half an hour into the show. They’re standing in the lobby. And he’s a heart surgeon.
“I tell him what’s happening, and he runs down the aisle in the middle of the house, onto the stage. By then, some other doctors were already tending to him. They were giving the CPR. I don’t even know his name—‘Dr. Cousin’ continued it for like twenty, thirty minutes or whatever it was, until the paramedics came. There was a defibrillator. The defibrillator was out of power. It wasn’t charged.
“And the whole time he’s lying there, the audience is still there. So there’s that interaction between the audience. They might be hurling something, and then there are people on the stage, asking everybody to leave: ‘This isn’t part of the show.’ And there were people that wanted their money back. It was a ten-dollar ticket. My dad’s working for a ten-dollar ticket. And they didn’t get their money’s worth. They came to see a comedy show.”
Adam Shawn could only watch. “One of the doctors’ wives was telling me, one, he can still hear you. Two, he’s gonna be OK. She kept telling me that, so I kept yelling. Oh, my God. I just kept yelling, ‘Come on, Dad! Come on, Dad!’”
When the paramedics finally arrived, one of them mentioned they’d had four or five calls that evening. It was a busy night. As Adam Shawn remembered, they gave up on his father in the ambulance.
Dick Shawn was pronounced dead at 9:55 PM. His second cousin the heart surgeon signed the death certificate. There would be no autopsy. “I didn’t want an autopsy,” Adam says. “It didn’t really matter to me. I didn’t care if I knew what he had or what he didn’t. Everybody thinks it’s a stroke or a heart attack, and we just kind of left it at that.”
Adam Shawn remained in the hospital until 3:00 AM, after all the reporters had gone. “Then a few of us went back to the lifeless, dark theater before our drive back to Los Angeles without my best friend and father. For me, it truly was the night the comedy died.”
Dick Shawn did manage to get one last laugh on the world—and an extra six years of life—that Saturday, when the Los Angeles Times reported that he’d died onstage at fifty-seven. Dick Shawn was actually sixty-three.
“Someone once told me to like put it down on paper, and I eventually started,” says Adam. “It started off like this: ‘Good Friday, a funny day for a Jew to die.’” Decades later, Adam Shawn is still trying make sense of what happened that Easter weekend: “He’d been to the cardiologist only about a week or two before. The doctor was shocked because he really thought everything was fine there. Our family was shocked. After it happened, trying to make sense of what went down, I called some of his supposed close friends. To me, they seemed tight-lipped and even agitated that I called—as if they were privy to something, and I didn’t want to go there.
“But you never know,” he says. “If somebody takes something that speeds his heart up a little bit—nicotine from his cigarettes with no filters, caffeine from coffee, maybe something that might have been illicit back in the day—if he’s working hard . . . we’ll just never know.”
Adam says he takes cold comfort knowing his father died doing what he loved. “As cliché as it sounds, he didn’t necessarily want to go onstage, doing what he loved. He wanted to be able to do what he loved forever until he went—but he didn’t want to be infirm.
“What was really sad is that he was so happy and so happy about the way he was working. And that was really his main thing, his work. Doing what he loved? It’s so overshadowed by the place he was at and what he was aspiring to do. He’d finally worked all those years, and he took all the knocks and paid his dues, and he was finally making it again. So there’s this ironic twist, where even though you’re doing what you love, it’s like, man, he still had a lot in him and a lot to do.”