Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian Read online

“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.

  One year later, I lost my uncle Manny to a double heart attack.

  Apparently, he had two different heart attacks—one brought on by his business, the other just by pressure in general. His wife, my aunt Millie, loved him more than anything, but she was young and a bit of a hottie—and with that comes complexity. Yes, I just typed that my late aunt was a “hottie.” I’d like to believe she’d have smiled at that one.

  Manny was found after his double heart attack on the couch in the living room; he was later diagnosed as having had a front and back heart attack (to use clinical-speak). As for my aunt Millie, may she rest in peace and God bless her—as we say before we dish someone—she was known to have complained to him constantly about the state of their lives, before, during, and I’m guessing after the heart attacks. She meant well though. I’m still close to her daughter, my cousin Sandra. Life can certainly be complex. This is true for most people if you get to live long enough. I feel for anyone reading this who presently knows of no sadness or stress—you may be in for a shock. Jesus, I hope I’m not the one to break it to you with this book.

  You look at someone as amazing as Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest minds of our time, and as I write pieces of my family’s history I think about what he’s been through. Just imagine, he’s never had the privilege of saying what drunken guys say to each other in bars all the time: “I wouldn’t kick her out of bed.” Because he couldn’t. Has this book been pulled out of the display windows in airports yet?

  Getting back to my family, the death toll kept rising. A couple years after we lost Manny, even more tragically, Manny and Millie’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, Bonnie, succumbed to cancer.

  Then, six years later, when I was fifteen, my dad’s youngest brother, thirty-seven-year-old Sammy, died of a heart attack while playing tennis. I guess if you were to pick which one of all these heart attacks you’d want to have, you’d choose the one during tennis. At least you’re all in white, teed up for the great U.S. Open in heaven. God was just watching Sammy play tennis that day, trying to keep score, and said to himself, “Thirty–love-to-have-him-up-here-in-heaven.” It was what it was. Sucked.

  Just for clarification, when I mention God watching Sammy play tennis, I’m using poetic license, not referring to the Carlin-esque version of an almighty being with a long white beard, pulling numbers out of a hat, deciding who shall live and who shall die. That’s far from my view of religion. I’m more of a spiritual believer. It doesn’t make sense that an all-powerful wise old man would just make a decision on a whim and take my handsome thirty-seven-year-old uncle from this earth.

  It does make sense, however, that an all-powerful old woman would make that happen. I don’t know why we never picture God as an old woman. That’s right, I’m suggesting that my innocent, handsome uncle was playing tennis and an old lady with a white beard looked down upon him and said with a Betty White–ish cackle, “Look at that young piece of tail prance around on that tennis court; I think I’ll add him to my collection.” And in an instant he was gone.

  I don’t believe that either, of course. I don’t see God as a man or a woman but as a giant transgender Jabba the Hutt creature with striped faux fur. Maybe God looks like Rick Ross.

  It was this demented pseudocreative mind of mine and my father’s that helped us deal with losing my uncles at such young ages. All these men were my childhood heroes. Sammy especially. He wanted to go into show business. He could sing, he was handsome, and he was the baby of five brothers and a sister, so he believed he could do anything. He also had the first PhotoGray transitional lenses I’d ever seen. He was the coolest.

  He and my aunt Barbara lived on the Main Line in Philly. She was also cool, equally talented, and she still is. She’s alive and is still “the shit”—in the nicest possible definition of that term. She and my uncle Sammy loved their upper-class hippie ways. Just looking at photos of them back in the day makes me want to put on a double-breasted suit and tinted glasses and smoke hemp.

  After Sammy died, Barbara married Lee, whom on occasion she has smoked pot with for over forty years. I don’t know if that’s totally true, but they assured me they wouldn’t sue me if I printed that. I’m also very close with Barbara’s daughter, my first cousin Allison. She’s one of my dearest friends and has always, since her father’s death, wanted to get the most out of life. I want to go on record that I’m not saying she’s a smoker of the weed. I’m typing it.

  Pot doesn’t really agree with me, but it always did with many of my relatives and friends. Rodney Dangerfield swore by it. And on it.

  Here I go bouncing back and forth again. Sometimes there’s been a thin line between my blood family and my comedy family. I started to feel related to comedians as I got older—it’s like we share some sort of comedic DNA—but before that it was all about my uncles.

  My uncle Joe, the one who didn’t die young, was cool too
. He lived longer than my dad’s three other brothers, but he did lose one testicle due to cancer. And in retrospect, due to divorce. She metaphorically got one of his balls in the settlement. I also got divorced once, but I was fortunate, I had a good lawyer—got to keep both of my balls. Thank you, Universe.

  Still, my balls have been the source of many lifelong issues. You’d think that the problems men have, when they stray or act out of sexual impulsivity, are caused by their dawg-like quality of following the divining rod that is their penis. But no, it is my belief that the root of the problem lies at the root of the penis—the balls. They fill with fluid, which must find a way to leave the body and enter the atmosphere.

  Fundamentalists would say it’s for procreation, but the physical act of the expulsion of the male fluids usually doesn’t involve another human being. I have a doctor who says ejaculating once a day can improve cardiovascular health. But so does walking up stairs. I do both. I ejaculate as I walk up stairs. That can be dangerous if on the way back down you slip on your own semen and tumble to your death. That definitely isn’t something you want to hear on the news after the coroner’s report.

  But severe leakage can also save your life, if you are kidnapped and they are able to find you by the long trail of leakage you leave from, say, your backyard to the kidnapper’s hideout.

  Sorry, that was cheesy to bring up. As are my testicles right now, because, truth be known, I am still typing this on my laptop, and when you have a computer on your lap, the fan in it has no ventilation; it’s smothered by your crotch. If I had the choice, that’s the way I’d like to leave this world, smothered by your crotch. And I don’t even know you. My crotch is so smothered right now that I have decided to name my testicles—the Smothers Brothers. Okay, I will not.

  When I set out to write this book, I was concerned I would fill it with too many dick jokes. That is no longer my concern. I can now note that it is full of testicle anecdotes. That’s the only indication that I am a more mature man now than I used to be. Penis references become outweighed by testicle references. Gravity creates maturity.

  Anyway, back to my uncle Joe and his balls. I loved him a lot. My aunt got only half his balls, not half his heart. The last days I got to spend with him, he was lying in hospice and watching Tiger Woods win the U.S. Open in 2008. He was so happy to watch Tiger’s comeback. That’s what my whole family of that generation was based on—an unrelenting work ethic and comebacks.

  According to people I’ve talked to who have interviewed me, I’ve had many comebacks myself. I prefer to call them do-overs. Or redefinings. Or I say what a lot of people with long careers that change over time say about themselves when asked, “Where have you been?”: “I never left.”

  I suppose I got that . . . whatever you want to call it—survival instinct, elasticity?—from my elders. Some of them are still around. Besides my interesting and incredibly strong brick house of a loving mother, Dolly—whom I’ll talk more about in the next chapter—I am also fortunate to have still living my aunt Thelma, who is also my godmother. I always called her “Aunt Temi.”

  She’s very sweet and always wore beautiful glasses. Then she had Lasik. I miss those glasses. Hers were the kind you want your aunt to have—the ones that appear to be upside down, made of platinum and glass that is not from this world but rather from the mesmerizing prisms of Planet Krypton.

  Her husband, my uncle Jonah, whom I also love immensely, has giant glasses himself that frame his face with a statement for all: “I’m ready for welding.” I saw him once without his glasses and it scared me. It was like seeing Peter Parker without his Spider-Man suit. Although Peter Parker didn’t look any more macho in his Spider-Man suit. By the way, I wore one of those Spider-Man suits on TV once and it really accentuates the peanut.

  My dad—whom you’ll meet in the next chapter—had a similar head-accoutrements situation. He was also blinged out in huge glasses and had a large nose (yes, I got a direct hit of that gene) and a strange, Zorro-like pencil-thin mustache that started just under his nose and ended abruptly above the top of his two wafer-thin lips. I never saw my dad without the mustache, but I did also see him once without his glasses.

  I was about sixteen, and when I walked into my parents’ bedroom (not something you ever want to do) my dad turned over and his glasses were off. I could have sworn his nose and mustache had been erased. He looked like one of those aliens from Mars Attacks!, without the glass helmet to protect his sensitive nonfeatures. I even recall a quick glance to his nightstand, where I thought I saw the entire set of facial features lying there as one unit—glasses, nose, mustache, even eyebrows attached.

  At that instant I was fearful my own father was the actual Mr. Potato Head. The first thing that went through my mind was “And he didn’t make a penny off all that merchandising.”

  Ironically, years later, it was my dear friend Don Rickles who said that line. He’s kind of a father to me now that my dad’s been gone for several years—and Don is the actual voice of Mr. Potato Head in the Toy Story movies. All right, that last line was not so much ironic as just name-dropper-y at a time when I had nowhere else to go with this story. Point is, my dad’s face was diminished without his huge glasses resting on his gigantic nose, and I was scared to see him without his headgear at two in the morning.

  The only other time I was thrown like that was when I walked in on my mom one day and she was dressed as Gimli from The Lord of the Rings.

  Deep apologies to my mom; of course that never happened. She never wore a helmet. Once, in a television stand-up appearance on HBO, I mentioned that my mother used to wear a Viking helmet and culottes. That didn’t make her happy. So as I mention it here, in this book that will be in print, I’d like to apologize to my mother for saying she used to wear a Viking helmet and culottes. I might have also mentioned “tit plates” at one time on some show, and for that I apologize to my mother as well.

  And so this book has begun. Tales of tit plates, tales of comedy, tales of loss, tales of tail . . . that are not spoken of. Okay, for those of who you are waiting for me to talk dirt or tell out-of-school stories, I’m planning to, once I clean my emotional plate, in like seventy or eighty more pages . . . Wait, I can’t do that, there are people’s lives at stake here, and sharing personal secrets about them serves no purpose. Except for this one time when I met this girl . . . No, I’m not going to do it. And anyway, she was a “woman.” Least that’s what I told the judge. And she was in big-girl pants and everything.

  For now, dear reader, I hope you are curling up in bed with someone you enjoy reading with—because you’ve been together so long there’s just nothing more to say to each other—and if this book is working for you on any level—occasionally one of you is laughing out loud, so the person next to you may actually speak to you and say, “What are you laughing at?” And you may say, “Well, it’s in reference to Bob’s penis when the light hits it just right.”

  And with that, I am now going to roll up my sleeves as well as my pant legs, put an ice pack on my lap, and move on. Now may be a good time to get a beverage.

  Chapter 2

  DEATH AND COMEDY ARE CLOSELY RELATED

  It sucks when funny people die. It sucks when unfunny people die too, but not as much. As you now know, many of my relatives died young. Many of them were funny. But none was as funny as my dad, who passed away in 2006. Of all my childhood heroes, biggest of all was my father. Well, there was this other guy, a UPS driver who picked me up after school one day and took me to the cornfield. No, that didn’t happen. He was a FedEx guy. Reset.

  My dad, Ben, was a huge influence on my doing what I do: hitting on young women . . . last deflection, I promise, what I meant to say was . . . working in comedy. The only young woman my dad ever hit on was my mother, whom he started dating when she was sixteen. He was seven years older than her. And ironically seven inches taller than her. On his back. (Don’t worry, I have it all figured out: when I give my mom a copy of this book, I will just white out a ton of shit.)