Bill Dawes - January 14, 2007

When people find out I do stand-up comedy, most of them instantly demand that I tell them a joke.

They'll say, "You're a comic!? Tell me a funny joke!"

I tell them, "I don't really have any jokes."

They laugh, thinking that I'm trying to be ironic.

I assure them that I'm completely serious and that I don't really have jokes in my act at all. I try to explain to them that I mostly tell stories or do observations on stuff.

Nine times out of ten, they look at me blankly for a moment, and then smile and say, "Come on, just ONE joke!" It's really annoying.

So I kill them. (Insert Catskills rimshot and audience laughter here.)

Okay, so sometimes I cop out on the punchline and tell a blatant lie solely for the cheap laugh. But, in general, I'm not a joke teller. "Jokes," by their very nature, are almost always complete fabrications wrapped around the tiniest kernels of Truth. The truth is, I want to be a social commentator and a storyteller. I try to express opinions and tell true stories (fine, somewhat true stories) in a humorous way.

In that vein, I try to keep the exaggerated jokiness factor I need for a crowd-pleasing punchline in the hypothetical realm. I'm not saying this is HOW one should do comedy (shit, I don't even have a TV comedy credit yet; not even on Ferguson for chrissakes!); I'm just saying that's how I try to do comedy. Many of my favorite comics just tell "jokes." I find that I'm not a good enough joke writer, so I rely on my uncanny ability to embarrass myself and piss people off to get through my 20 minutes.

Furthermore, I hate the feeling that I'm lying to the audience. I honestly feel like I'm betraying their trust. In the same way it's not fun to HAVE to lie to a woman you're trying to fuck ("That isn't herpes on my lip, it's a fever blister!"), it's also not fun to prevaricate when people huddled in a dingy comedy club are looking to honestly connect with you on some level. Hell, I have done/do/will do it all the time, but I prefer to at least make the attempt at vulnerable, chilling, bristling hair on the back of the neck honesty.

I feel like a Vegas lounge act when I do otherwise.

For example, I sometimes do a joke about picking up girls with a foreign accent. I did, in fact, get drunk in my teens and early twenties and attempt this with varying degrees of success. The last time I did this was a debacle (See "The Scottish Play.").

Since I haven't been studious enough to make a truthful standup bit about this weird party trick from my past, I instead turned the premise into a semi-trite joke where a friend tells me I should use my "Eurofag" looks to my advantage by putting on an upper-class, sophisticated accent to pick up a girl at a bar.

In the joke, I do my best Bond-like stroll up to a girl and say "Do you come here often?" with an exaggerated Indian accent.

It usually gets big laughs.

I fucking hate it.

Why? Because it's a fucking lie! I have never put on an Indian accent to pick up a girl. Who would?! It's a cop-out and it feels hacky when I do it.

I should be careful when I use that phrase, though. "Hack" is a slippery term. It's applied to everything and everyone from joke thieves to prop comics to impressionists to generally uninventive comics. It's this last group I fear of joining when I fall back on 7-Eleven accents or cookie cutter punchlines ("So I'm like ... DAD?"). I like to think I can take some solace in the fact that my bouts of "hackiness" - for lack of a better word - are the exception rather than the rule.

Even if those moments were the basis of my act, it wouldn't matter for the comics who are looking for ways to hate. These days, it seems that the word "hack" is applied is to any comic that is remotely successful. Chain-smoking, self-loathing comics love to bandy that term around about any comic who actually makes a decent living doing it and doesn't spend his or her time scouring shitty downtown Manhattan clubs every day of their life to fill the void that exists in the chamber where a soul should sit. It's a disease we "crowd-pleasing" comics like to refer to as Bill Hicks Disease, or BHD.

If you don't know Bill Hicks, he is considered by many comics to be the progenitor of the use of edgy, personal material. He railed on Republicans, hypocrisy, and non-smokers. He was a comic genius, no doubt. Then he died of cancer. Truth be told, I think THAT is pretty fucking funny. Hey, if you're going to spend years lambasting people who lead a healthy lifestyle and don't smoke, then at least have the fucking constitution to not get cancer, you fucking pussy. That's proof right there that God has a sense of humor, or at least a sense of irony.

Anyway, comics who are affected with BHD feel that unless you are suffering immensely and toiling in relative obscurity, there is no way you can have an original thought or an original approach to comedy. If you are successful and NOT 50 years old and thrice-divorced, then you are obviously stealing other people's material. I'm sure Leary, Mencia, and Dane Cook aren't stressing over the fact that a number of New York comics with faces for radio are huddled on a Greenwich Village sidewalk in the winter passing around a Marlboro Red, descrying the state of comedy as embodied by the success of "those fucking hacks!"

I'm starting to formulate my own definition of a "hack". I think a "hack" comic is pretty much any comic who thinks you're hacking their stuff. Unless it's a clear robbery of a completely original concept, premise, and punch where the line from A to B is encrypted and only one person could possibly have the combination, it's probably a coincidence. Or a misunderstanding. Or even a stock line.

That would be cheap if all of that above was just a prelude for me to tell a simple story, wouldn't it? And here it is...

It was a dark and stormy night. I was onstage riffing with a young gay Asian guy (a "gaysian") in the audience.

I said to him, "You must get a lot of cock. I would say 'ass,' but aren't Asians usually the bottoms? Come on, I saw M Butterfly!"

Three NYU theatre students in the audience laughed at that groaner as the gaysian shifted in his chair and folded his arms.

I said, "Wait, what are you doing? Put your hands where I can see 'em. I don't want you taking out a pink ninja star and throwing it into my skull! (I then broke into a terrible Asian accent) Oh, dat not throwing star! Dat Pokemon trading card!... DAT I USE AS THROWING STAR!"

(I was riffing, I can't be held responsible for the quality of riff material, people!)

I could tell that I was losing this guy as an audience member. I kind of got quiet and said, in all sincerity, "It must be fun being gay in New York."

"It is," he said, brightening up.

"Kind of like being a pig in shit... no pun intended."

Fuck! I lost him again!

So, I tried to connect with a true story and said, "The other night I saw a gay man walk out of a gay bar at 4am... by himself. It was the saddest thing I'd ever seen in my life. I mean, seriously, what's sadder than that?"

It got really quiet. People were really listening and curious to know where I was going with it.

I was curious about where the fuck I was going with it, too.

It was a premise sans punch, so I went to a hack/stock/standby line that comics use when they aren't smart enough to write an original punchline and are simultaneously perfectly fine with lying in their act.

I said: "He looked so sad. And that made me feel really sad, too.... so I killed him. I mean, I didn't want my night ruined because of his miserable, lonely existence! Who's gonna miss that guy anyway?"

Since it's an obvious hack "surprise" reversal, it got a laugh and allowed me to punch out of the observation without complete silence. I felt a little guilty saying it, but I was in riff mode. I didn't even think about it afterwards. Needless to say, a comic with BHD accused me of stealing the punchline from him.

Are you kidding me!?

Here's a guy who preaches the importance of originality, trying to stamp a trademark on a notoriously canned punchline. Hell, they used it on "Friends!" 10 years ago! (One of the bitches: "Where's Joey?" Chandler: "Joey stole my gum. So I killed him. Is that wrong?")

I told him I was riffing and it's a bullshit, hacky way to dig out of a joke that hasn't been thought out well enough. I then opined, "The ending 'SO I KILLED/ STABBED/ SHOT HIM' has gotta be one of the most pat lines in all of comedy."

Since this guy is a loudmouth who throws his weight around like he's in the mafia and suffers from a severe case of BHD simplex 2, I think he was a little gobsmacked by my response. Despite my hairless chest and baby fuzz facial growth, I'm no shrinking violet. It's probably going to get my ass kicked, but I can't help it. I watched my passive, "turn the other cheek" Christian father get treated poorly and talked down to as a lowly government worker my whole life until he developed chronic ulcers as a result. Fuck me if I'm going to let some comic make me "sir yes sir" him just because he named his dog after Lenny Bruce.

I find that it's always the unoriginal, hacky comics who think they are re-inventing comedy. They are also the ones who scream "hack" and are convinced that people are stealing their jokes. It's one of life's great ironies - like the prudish-looking bespectacled special needs schoolteacher who likes being cornhole-fisted and has more sexual fetishes than the Google search result for "how to make your dick bigger." (1,700,435)

He can keep his "so I killed him" ending and try to patent it for all I care. It's a classic cop-out escape route used in case of emergency when creativity fails.

What's more, it's a lie. I mean, it is!

This comic isn't trolling around dive comedy clubs with his 16 ounce bottle of fucking Poland Springs water 7 nights a week to cover for his other life as a mass murderer. You aren't fucking "Dexter," you ponce! YOU'RE A FUCKING COMIC!

The tough guy routine in comics makes me laugh. I don't know how any of them get away with it. We're not roughnecks covered in muscle. We're vulnerable people covered in labia. We're all pussies, and we're all deluded about the fact that we're anything other than that. Myself included.

That being said, I wouldn't fuck with Joe Rogan.

Anyway, I don't like to lie onstage. I embellish, I riff, I stereotype, I overact, I theorize, but I try not to lie. I DID throw off my jacket to fight and chapstick really did fall out of my jacket. I DID get potentially blown by a shim in a wig (no, fuck that, it was a girl with cancer!). I DID have a girl tell me I looked like Ellen Degeneris. I WAS ordered to spoon every night for 4 years by my spooning-obsessed ex-girlfriend. I will probably propose to my future wife with the query "So... are you going to keep it?" or some variation thereof. And I have also taken some enormous dumps that have subsequently made me suffer existential angst.

I have never, however, KILLED somebody. I don't know a comic who has.

On that note, here is my attempt at a cute joke that is 100 percent a lie:

I had a date with an Eskimo. It was an awkward first date. We went clubbing. That's right. We went clubbing baby seals.* We Eskimo kissed when I took her back to her igloo after our date. We actually Eski-made out. She got so WET... on the inside of her nose.

I ended up getting to third base with her. I know that sounds like a pretty good first date, but actually, THIS is third base for an Eskimo:

It wasn't much fun... so I killed her!

Posted by Bill Dawes at 10:55 AM