Ammo Grrrll has more LESSONS FOR LIFE — FROM STANDUP (The Next Five). I wish she had shared them with me before I reached retirement age. She writes:
IN COMEDY OR IN LIFE, YOU CANNOT PLEASE EVERYONE
My whole life I have been astonished, flabbergasted, yes, and even gobsmacked by how intimidated people are by what others think of them. And how far they will go, how much they will grovel, how thoroughly they will adjust their opinions in order not to be “disapproved” of.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think it’s cute to go through life as an obnoxious, pointlessly contrarian jerk. But why the absolute terror of being “unfriended” on Facebook or hounded on Twitter? I have come to believe that lacking a solid grounding of love in the early family life is one factor. Though definitely not true for me, nobody seems to crave love like comedians. Joan Rivers said – it almost made me cry – that she only felt love when she was onstage.
Once early in my career I performed for a group of Home Health Agencies. The client shared with me copies of the eval sheets before I left the resort. There were 200 eval sheets. One hundred ninety-five rated me a 5. Four people were not quite willing to give me the highest rating and gave me 4s, and ONE person rated me a 1. At first I felt sure the lady must mistakenly think 1 was the best. But, no. She had added her own review: “I do not care for this type of humor.” My God, somebody absolutely HATED me!
I cried half of the way home from Brainerd! Where I got a severe talking-to from my husband. “You got 195 5s? Good grief, woman! If you can’t stand this little bit of ‘heat,’ you need to ‘get out of the kitchen’!” Uh, point taken! I got over it and many worse blows. Many! (And, just by the by, he was always very supportive. He just felt at that particular moment I needed my tush kicked. He was not wrong.)
It is simply impossible to appeal to everybody no matter what endeavor you undertake. I know a decorator who did a beautiful job painting and papering a house to the wealthy woman’s exact specifications and she hated her original ideas and made him do it all over again. At least he got paid twice! Looking at the absolute HATE that politicians draw convinces me that I could never run for anything. I was acquainted with several of the Twin Cities’ TV peeps and all the women said they received relentless criticism from viewers on their appearance.
NO MATTER HOW GLAMOROUS A JOB LOOKS, IT’S NOT ALL BEER AND SKITTLES
This of course, could be an entire separate column. When you are in some rowdy bar in Wisconsin, putting on your makeup in a broom closet, entertaining drunks while the blender is making drinks with names like “Sex on the Beach,” it’s easy to romanticize your old night typesetting job.
When a private client who has hired you to entertain his sales staff introduces you like this: “I’ve never heard of this gal. But her agent says she’s funny; her husband says she’s funny; and here she is – Sharon Boss!” you may question some life decisions.
When you are working in the dimly lit BASEMENT of the Anderson House in Wabasha, MN, standing on a folding chair, using a Mr. Microphone to entertain pheasant hunters, you do a mental inventory of the reasons you left a stable union job to try standup. But, oh well, that folding chair will look darn good to you when you are “up North” in a resort and the client has ignored your contract clause that requests an 18” riser. In a fit of pique at the “prima donna” who unreasonably wishes to be taller than the seated audience, the client puts you on an end table he found in a storage closet. Only after the show do you notice that it was on wheels.
When you are working the “Small Room” at the Carlton and Tom Arnold is emceeing and introduces you as “our next comic is the funniest lesbian working today…haha, I kid Susan… She’s NOT the funniest,” your audience is now thoroughly confused when you talk about your husband and kids.
But one of the most inadvertently hilarious events was for a Lutheran Nursing Home’s mostly deaf codgers. Terrible microphone. Terrible acoustics. A handful of inattentive Scandinavian geezers in wheelchairs, waiting for their afternoon tapioca pudding. Dead silence for 20 minutes. After the “show,” a sweet old gentleman comes up to me and says the following: “Dat vuss so funny, I vuss afraid I vuss going to laugh and embarrass you!” Oy.
WHO IS WISE? WHO LEARNS FROM EVERYONE
I referred in a past column to my sorrow at an interview I watched with a sweet young black woman comic who bemoaned the fact that “I wish there were more comics who ‘looked like me.’” Why? That question is never asked. It’s just ASSUMED to be important that only someone who “looks like us” can be a mentor. False! Our Talmud asks: Who is wise? And answers: Who learns from everyone.
My biggest influences for timing were Bob Newhart and Jack Benny. For good-natured, down-to-earth, clean comedy: Louie Anderson, Minnie Pearl and The Smothers Brothers. For absolute fearlessness onstage: Joan Rivers and Norm MacDonald. And for my first 100 shows at Dudley Riggs I was virtually an apprentice to five young men about a decade younger who taught me a great deal of what I know despite their best efforts to avoid helping me! And not a single one of those reluctant or unaware role models “looked like me,” although arguably, the late, great Minnie Pearl came closest, her wardrobe in particular.
THERE WILL BE HIGHS AND LOWS
In life there are abrupt ups and downs. In comedy there are awesome shows, good shows, blah shows and horrible shows, sometimes all in one weekend! You need to learn to roll with it. The first time I was on Prairie Home Companion was a real emotional high. That Thursday, I had a benefit at a beautiful vintage theater in Duluth and got my first standing ovation. Then on Sunday, fresh from those two triumphs, I was booed off the stage at an outdoor music festival at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Sometimes, God needs to keep you humble.
THERE ARE GOOD AND BAD PEOPLE. ASSOCIATE WITH THE GOOD!
Show Biz, like many other “worlds,” is rife with massive egos, jealousy, backstabbing, false friends, and, oh yeah, drugs. Forty years ago when I was getting started, it was a snake pit and it has only gotten much much worse. As Fred Allen quipped: “You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and an agent’s heart.”
One mentally ill guy from Minnesota who did not ever “make it” in Los Angeles to the level he thought he deserved, was a pretty decent impressionist. Jay Leno himself told me (on a chance flight from New York to Pittsburgh in which we found ourselves seatmates on the plane – how cool was THAT?) that this person used to call Johnny Carson’s answering machine and leave obscene and unflattering messages in Jay’s voice! People who were roommates sometimes stole their roomie’s audition requests and erased the answering machine tapes.
On the other hand, in that chance encounter with Jay, he greeted and autographed and took photos with every single person who wandered down the aisle to approach him, including the Captain! That impressed me but not as much as the following: A great comic, devout Christian, and good friend, Bill Arnold, stepped up when another comic friend named Scott was going through a year of chemo for bone cancer. He took all of Scott’s corporate bookings, did the shows, and gave Scott — married father of three — the money! That must have been at least 25 to 30 years ago. And I am happy to report that Scott is still alive and doing well, still performing. Knowing one guy like Bill makes up for a whole lot of jerks.
