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'I Killed: True Stories of the Road From America's Top
Comics'
Routine, but funny, hazards.
Bestseller list
2006 Festival of Books
By Marc Weingarten, Special to The Times
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I Killed: True Stories of the Road From America's Top Comics Compiled by Ritch
Shydner and Mark Schiff (Crown: 266 pp., $23.95)
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Words & Ideas
It's not normal, this business of comedy. Countless are the depravations and humiliations that
come with the gig; it's hard to fathom why so many try to succeed at it. Few ever make it
beyond the open-mike stage, and this is one of those diabolical occupations in which its
practitioners find new ways to bomb on a nightly basis. And for the aspiring stand-up, there
are few things worse than the dreaded seedy nightclub tour. Right now, there are countless
comics holed up in cheap motels all across America, desperately clinging to their sanity while
working dingy beer-stink rooms for gas money.
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Mark Schiff, the co-editor (along
with fellow comic Ritch Shydner) of
this very funny anthology of road
stories from professional comics,
gives us some idea of just how
deep into Dante's circles of hell
most comics find themselves when
performing. If you want to pay
homage to the folks in the book,
writes Schiff, "get a bottle of cheap
wine (but pay $75 for it), deep-fry a
pound of mold-tinged mozzarella,
place thirty lighted cigarettes next
to your chair and, with the windows
shut tight, sit back and enjoy these
frequently hilarious glimpses into
how hard it is to keep smiling while
trying to make others laugh."
S
17
24
31
7
M
18
25
1
8
T
19
26
2
9
W
20
27
3
10
T
21
28
4
11
F
22
29
5
12
S
23
30
6
13
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A sharp pair of Scissors
There's no place like hell for
"I Killed" comes at a propitious
the holidays
moment. In the annals of groanworthy bombs, Michael Richards' flameout at the Laugh Factory will probably go down as the 'Letters From Iwo Jima'
mother of them all. Fortunately, this very funny book is more interested in more benign subject
> more e-mailed stories
matter: crooked promoters, sexed-up waitresses, that kind of thing. There's racism and bigotry
aplenty, but it's all hecklers, and the vituperation never escalates into a full-blown diatribe from the comics. All of them
have the presence of mind to disengage from any nastiness with a few cutting bons mots.
In order to quell a multi-pronged attack from a number of audience members, Peter J. Fogel asks if they can "all huddle
and come up with one thought." When someone in Carol Leifer's audience takes offense to a joke about gays and the
pope, Leifer asks, "Who do you think designs all his outfits?"
For the aspiring masochist, there are a number of solid lessons to be learned from this book. For one, avoid the South
whenever possible. There are lots of cringe-inducing stories in "I Killed" about various klansmen and other benighted souls
taking offense to gay comics or making lewd gestures to female stand-ups. Openly gay comic Ant tells one anecdote
about being verbally harassed by an Arkansas crowd that thought it was getting Antler, an off-color comic. Fortunately, his
safety was assured when a man named Bubba ("it was tattooed on his left arm") picked him up and spirited him away in
his pickup.
But that's the great thing about America: There's abuse and humiliation to be found everywhere. Richard Lewis finds it as
an opening act for Sonny and Cher. One day at a Pennsylvania fairground, Lewis has to tell jokes to a crowd "a quarter of
a mile away from me" with a giant roller coaster behind him. "I had to time my punch lines … with the screams from the
people with their arms lifted." Kathy Griffin bombs horribly at a corporate gig but has to work the entire allotted hour to get
paid. The crowd thought they were going to see "Saturday Night Live" alumna Cheri Oteri, apparently. "The experience
was so horrible that I had actual flop sweat," says Griffin. "The clock seemed to be going backwards."
No one except a comedian (or maybe a politician) can turn a crowd into a lynch mob with one tasteless barb. Bob
Goldthwait had a tough time at a gig opening for the band Nirvana, and a rotten joke about Michael Jordan's deceased
father at a Chicago show created "a tsunami of primitive verbal rage. Clear voices yelling 'Kill him!' popped out at me from
this wall of fury." Goldthwait needed a security escort to get out of there.
Of course, verbal and physical abuse is the mother's milk of comedy. You can almost sense the relish with which these
comics recount their trials by hellfire. These are the endurance rituals of the battle-tough warriors. If they can survive
wayward gunshots, beer showers and the like, they will be ready for anything.
It's good material, after all.
*
Marc Weingarten is the author of "The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion and the New
Journalism Revolution."
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