Is British humor more sophisticated than American humor?
(unreleased material from Glorified Disasters)
“British humor is more sophisticated than American humor.” British people love to say this. For unknown reasons, so do the Irish. I’m willing to entertain the notion, and will happily listen to anyone who hasn’t had a wank to The Benny Hill Show, though I must recuse myself from the discussion.
The first and most reliable stage laugh I ever got was doing a hair bit in a Ray Cooney show called Funny Money at The Golden Apple Dinner Theater in Sarasota, FL. Cooney has been called “the British Neil Simon,” which is accurate to the extent that both men were prolific and successful playwrights. However, Simon wrote character-driven pieces filled with heart, wit, and meaning, whereas Cooney churned out carbon-copy sex farces by piling double-entendres, dropped trousers, and slamming doors on top of one another until he reached 60 pages.
I learned some important comedy lessons doing Funny Money, foremost being, if you are going to put the word “Funny” in the title of your show, you have to make sure the rest of the show, the whole “script” part, is actually funny. Funny Money tells the story of Henry Perkins (according to the dramatis personae, “an insignificant middle-aged, middle-class accountant”) who accidentally brings home the wrong suitcase, only to find it is filled with counterfeit currency that belongs to the mob. Sick of their humdrum lives, he and his wife Jean (“pretty”) decide to take the money and run*, but not before their nosey neighbors (Vic and Betty Johnson: “neighbor” and “also pretty,”), the police, and the mob get involved. A hilarious roller-coaster ride of wacky hi-jinks and tom-foolery ensues that will leave you breathless. Then again, a lot of our audience was on oxygen to begin with. Open flames were strictly prohibited in all Golden Apple Dinner Theater shows.
The big gag of the second act involves Jean taking too long to pack, despite Henry’s remonstrations that they can buy everything new once they’ve escaped. But the pressure overwhelms Jean, she gets drunk, and refuses to leave without her cat, which, perhaps sensing the household turmoil, has gone into hiding. The cat’s name is “Pussy.”
Drunken packing, vacillating about what to wear (read: “gradually stripping”) and tearful cries of “where’s my Pussy?” punctuate the second act, the rock steady comedy rhythm to which the plot always returns. Mr. Big, the mobster, comes in and threatens to kill everybody; Jean comes out of the bedroom with knickers on her head, “do you know where my Pussy is?” Slater, the copper, comes in and threatens to arrest everybody; Jean bursts into tears, “but I can’t find my Pussy!” Bill the cab driver comes in to complain that he can’t wait any longer, only to find Jean in her slip, searching under a chair, on hand and knees, down center, ass to the audience, imploring, “has ANYONE seen my PUSSY?”
The Golden Apple Dinner Theater was owned and operated by Bob and Roberta Turoff, who had met and fallen in love while performing in the chorus of The Golden Apple on Broadway. When Roberta got pregnant, they decided her career as a big time dancer was probably over, and they moved to Sarasota where they made a mint performing musical warhorses to generations of snowbirds, until they were snowbirds themselves. In the process, they probably had more consistent work and more satisfying lives than anyone they’d left behind on Broadway.
Their success in Sarasota, and the enduring cachet that attached to the Golden Apple Dinner Theater, derived from this long ago connection to the mythical world of Rogers and Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein, Sheldon and Harnick. Only at the Golden Apple Dinner Theater could you see plays produced, directed, and performed by real Broadway stars. This boast was also the source of the snide moniker by which their less accomplished competitors in the cut-throat world of Sarasota dinner theater referred to them: "The Flying Turoffs."
Roberta admitted to being 58, but at the same time, adorning the walls of the Golden Apple Dinner Theater, there was photographic evidence that she had been in the original Broadway production of South Pacific. A woman’s claim to fame and her modesty have an uneasy coexistence.
At any rate, Roberta was probably not who Cooney had in mind when he “created” the “character” of Jean, whose main function in the play is to get undressed and shake her ass at the audience.** Roberta was not originally cast in the role, the play, or even that season. She had been diagnosed with cancer the previous season, and had struggled to complete her performances. This was to be her first season ever without a role at the Golden Apple.
But cancer proved no match for Roberta’s desire to be back in the spotlight; she astonished her doctors with the speed of her recovery, and by the beginning of the season, she had convinced Bob that she was well enough to take on the minor role of Vicky, who had been cast as slightly older than Jean anyway. Still, “slightly” necessitated bumping the woman who had been cast as Vicky into the role of Jean, and the woman who had been cast as Jean out of the show. By the time auditions started, Roberta had read the play, decided that she preferred the role of Jean, and was really feeling much better anyway. The actress who had briefly enjoyed a promotion from Vicky to Jean was now dismissed, and a third actress, who seemed like she might have been Roberta’s contemporary, was brought in to play Vicky.***
Roberta may not have been the ideal casting for Jean, but boy did she know how to milk a knickers-on-the-head bit! With every performance, her blind fumbling for a leg hole through which to poke a groggy eye became more elaborate, her drunken wobbling more unsteady, her ad-libbed insertion of, “Puss-puss-puss-puss-pussee,” between the other actors’ lines more frequent, until finally it became the backing track to the second act, over which the rest of the dialogue had to be shouted. Everything took longer. By the end of the first week, we’d added 20 minutes to the second act alone.
Own the theater and you can do whatever the fuck you want -- there’s a comedy lesson for ya. The other actors complained bitterly behind her back, the stage manager sighed impotently every night, as he turned dejectedly in the dressing room door and headed for the parking lot, having dutifully delivered pace notes he knew would be shamelessly flouted again the next night. None of it mattered, and not because Roberta owned the place, but because she was killing.
Roberta was unquestionably the most selfish, self-indulgent, stubborn, uncooperative, and shameless performer I have ever worked with. She was also hilarious. She was a Goddamn diva, and she deserved to be, because she the filled the house every night and then proceeded to tear the roof off the place. Roberta wasn’t just signing our checks -- she was earning them, too! Earn your attitude and let everyone else complain -- that’s a good one.
Roberta taught me to love bits. Character, intention, motivation, background -- they’re all great in theory. But the reality is that most plays, even the popular ones, from the point of view of depth and meaning, are shit. They are nothing more than vehicles for bits: funny bits, action bits, sexy bits, crying bits. Bits are everything, because the rest is usually worthless. Actors who can identify the bits in a script, or the opportunity for a bit where none is written in -- they keep the lights on. Yet it is not enough to find or create a bit. A bit must be milked. Oh, yes.
What is "milking?"
There is a school of acting that claims milking a bit is based upon a connivance between actor and audience, a tacit agreement to mutually acknowledge the theatrical contrivance of the moment and shamelessly mock it; and this connivance constitutes nothing less than the breaking of the sacred fourth wall and the irrevocable shattering of the spell of suspended disbelief upon which all serious theater depends.
There is another school of acting which says, “exactly!”
Method actors and their ilk, all the humorless emotional exhibitionists who deem themselves “serious actors,” have the gall to disdain bit acting as self-indulgent and insulting; then they turn around and ask us to sit through a breakdown they should have had in session, while asking us to believe that they really believe they are not in a theater with us watching, and their behavior springs solely from their characters’ needs, not the demands of a performance. What is worse, they suppose that bit acting requires no skill, and is the metier of that sad, imaginary character who has no other choice but to pander, or the recourse of the talented but lazy actor who lacks the “dedication” which they smugly attribute to themselves.
Watching Roberta pan her ass back and forth across the audience like it was mounted on a tripod exploded my more precious notions of what good acting is. You wanna talk about skill? She timed each sweep to her chant of "puss-puss-puss-puss-pussie!" pushing and pulling the rhythm like John-goddamn-Bonham, dragging at the edges of the phrase, trotting in the middle, pausing at the end just a hair longer than you’d expect, and increasing the length of that improbable pause with every repetition, driving the audience to a frenzy of anticipation.
By the third swing the whole audience would be holding its breath during the pause, and then inhaling simultaneously with her as she launched into the next “puss-puss-puss-puss-pussie!” during which all that breath would be released in a giant, unified roar. It was Tantric.
That’s milking. You wanna talk about dedication? How about the courage to take a bit too far, until you feel the audience saying, “no!” and then staying with it until they come along, and then going even farther, until the audience feels it must follow your every move, though in reality you could lose them at any moment! A misstep could shatter the spell and leave the audience feeling used and insulted (instead of used and grateful, which is how everyone wants to feel at the end of the night). A masterful milking is the seduction and ravishing of an audience who try to resist before and feel guilty and ashamed after … but still want more!
I observed all of this without understanding any of it.**** All I knew was Roberta was shameless and got big laughs. I had a scene near the end of the show where Slater comes into the flat after being hit by the escaping Mr. Big's car, and makes a final plea for cooperation. My entrance was announced by the cab driver, so everyone knew a sight-gag was coming. I was doing my best wild-eyed, disoriented stagger, with my hair (heretofore immaculately parted in keeping with the punctilious Slater's character) messed up as though I had been hit by a car ... but no one was laughing. That's not exactly right. Worse than no laughs, there were some halting laughs mixed with nervous titters, which meant that everyone recognized it was time to laugh, but no one was actually amused. It's not that they missed the joke ... they saw me miss it.
I thought for sure there was an acting solution, so I was surprised when Bob just said, "mess your hair up some more." I was skeptical, but tried it for the next show and got my first legitimate laugh on the bit. I returned to Bob triumphant, but when I smugly asked him how he thought it went he said, "I meant REALLY mess it up." At this point it becomes difficult to record our conversation, though the text is simple enough. Embarrassment at my own stupidity makes it hard to set down the following:
Ashley: "But you don't want it to look ... unrealistic, do you?"
And paucity of descriptive powers makes it impossible to convey Bob's dismay.
Bob: "YEESSSS!"
I really didn't get it. Up to that moment, I think Bob just thought I was a little shy, not completely unaware of how farce works. I feel certain he went away and held his head in his hands somewhere out of sight. I had been cast because I had the least objectionable British accent among men my age in Sarasota who didn't come off as hopelessly queeny ... which is to say they were surprised when I walked into auditions and seemed like I could play straight. I know that now. At the time, my head was full of Stanislavskian notions, because I'd once flipped through the chapter, "Communion" in An Actor Prepares. I thought I was a real actor, and that I could address the challenges of Funny Money with character work. Bob was gracious, and probably didn't want to take on any counseling work on the side, so he didn't say anything, then or ever. But after that Bob was always very gentle and friendly with me, while keeping conversations brief.
What I did get, though, was laughs, and I was soon upset that I couldn't get my hair to mess up any more using just my hands. The stage manager suggested hair spray (another revelation) and within a week I was walking on stage looking like a cross between Alfalfa and Yahoo Serious. I was also getting one of the biggest laughs in the show.
Roberta took notice.
I was starting to understand that I could milk the dazed staggering once I'd gotten the laugh off the sight gag. The time between my entrance and the delivery of my line was expanding, or as Roberta put it in the dressing room one night after the show, "we're waiting out there for fucking ever!" She was a flower. The other actors, happy to see Roberta swallowing her own medicine, defended me. The stage manager, who'd given me the idea to use hair spray in the first place, smiled and said nothing. Bob had moved on to the next project, and I was getting laughs, so I had license. To her credit, Roberta never pulled rank on me, probably because she considered it beneath her dignity (panties on the head notwithstanding).
The next night, I got an even bigger laugh, and I was delayed returning to the dressing room because an audience member wanted to congratulate me. On my hair bit. And I was proud. And happy. They were crazy times.
When I entered the other actors gave me a cheer that was entirely for Roberta's benefit, though I was fatuous enough to take it at face value. I was about to launch into a description of what I thought had really made the bit fly that night when Roberta said, "I don't see what the big deal is anyway, it's at two-part bit, at least, a three-parter if you do it right, and you only ever do the first part, I mean, do you even know what the other two parts are?" She delivered this to the mirror as she removed her eye make-up with workman-like efficiency, a masterpiece of dismissiveness.
Anyone with wit, or whose self-esteem wasn't pinned to others' opinion of a hair bit in a Ray Cooney show would have shut up at this point. But I was so completely undone by this statement that I could only stupidly say, "no?" Which turned out to be the best thing I could have done, because Roberta couldn't resist telling me, thus reestablishing her authority on bits. This time she turned from the mirror to address me.
"The first bit is the sight gag, the second bit is composing yourself as you prepare to say your line, and the third bit -- which is really a continuation of the second bit -- is not quite holding it together as you say your line. So it's two or three bits, depending on how you look at it, but either way, it's three laughs, and you only ever get one, and you get it with hair spray." Roberta turned back to the mirror, satisfied. The dressing room had gone silent, and no doubt the stunned look on my face resembled crushing defeat. But in my mind it was like the last ten minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Comedy caveat: be careful who you share your secrets with.
Ashley Strand's Hair Bit Suite in Three Parts debuted the following night, to great acclaim. It wasn't perfectly executed, but the simple use of that magical three-part structure elevated the bit above mere mugging by giving it at least the appearance of skill. Comedy nugget: structure comforts and reassures an audience. They respond to the familiarity of something like the rule of three subconsciously, relaxing like a baby with a pacifier,***** while on a conscious level they feel like you're a professional, and they've spent their money well. This can give you license to fill that structure with pretty much whatever shit you want.
I chose hair spray, lip quiver, and high-pitched whine. Actually the lip quiver was an accident. I was just going for a classic "unable to speak because I'm trying not to cry," with the usual false starts and huffing and puffing. But one night, I was imagining that I was actually upset, and my lip began to quiver, which not only got a great laugh, but caused one of the other actors to corpse -- a first for me. In spite of my Stanislavskian pretentions, the acting significance of this event was immediately lost on me as I became obsessed with the effect and completely forgot the cause. I had to do the lip quiver every night from then on!
This is not a talent I have. I can no more make my lip quiver on command now than I can do a standing back-flip. It was only through a sheer, obsessive focus of will that I managed to artificially recreate this physical stunt each night.****** I was so focused on that lip quiver I sometimes botched the lines that followed -- but Roberta didn't give a rat's ass about the script, why should I? And the lip quiver was the jewel in that three-part bit! Sure the hair set it up and the whine was the pay-off, but the lip quiver was the "wow" factor, the part that made people think, "how'd he do that?" Everything else could be sacrificed, but the lip quiver had to happen.
Roberta was enraged. "I can't wait till this fucking thing is over. I don't give a shit anymore. I mean I just don't give a shit!" I couldn't tell if she was more disgusted with me or herself, but I enjoyed the change in tone of her post-show monologue, and in the depths of my pettiness, took it as a kind of personal victory.
"This piece of shit play! There's nothing to it, you know? Just completely empty, and you know what, it just exhausts me. I'm so exhausted." This was the cue for everyone in the dressing room to stop rolling their eyes, and the moment of relief for the poor woman playing Betty, who, because she sat next to Roberta in the dressing room, found herself pressed into service as Roberta's confidante, to whom the post-show monologue was regularly addressed. "Would you like some tea?" she'd say, and Roberta would say, "yes, thank you dear," and place her hand over her eyes while she waited for it.
The room would be silent then, and everyone would wrap up their changing pretty quickly and head for the bar. It was a strange little passage in each day's movement. On the one hand it was true that Roberta was impossible and manipulative and everyone was tired of her bullshit. But on the other it was also true that she was still recovering and pushing herself beyond her limits for a show that really was worthless. And having some arrogant PoliSci graduate -- who would never in his life even get called for the type of auditions she'd nailed when she was 20 -- having this schmendrick steal her focus to boot!
And on the one hand we resented the shots across the bow and the griping of the post-show monologue, the general purge of complaints that the rest of us, not beings owners, had to save for the bar (we modestly supposed we would disdain to indulge such complaints in the dressing room if we were owners). But on the other, we recognised the post-show monologue as part of a much larger monologue, one that probably began the moment Roberta got up, talking herself through each day's agenda. And in that sense, the monologue was not some habit we wished she'd drop, but something that amazed everyone who met her. Whether she was acting or dancing, designing her custom kitchen, or the landscaping for the Turoff estate, planning a fundraiser or a social event, discussing politics or slinging gossip, Roberta was fully engaged with everything she did and she processed it all by talking.
And all that talk had an extraordinary invocatory effect. Having seen it manifest in her life makes me laugh whenever I hear some dreamer talking about "The Law of Attraction." What The Secret doesn't talk about is the tremendous, non-stop output of energy required to shape the world to your plans, and that most people lack the capacity for it. While we went off to the bar to take advantage of the 2-for-1deal the Turoffs gave cast members, Roberta would recover from her tea-break and go home to get some work done. More than once I heard her daughter Kyle admonish her to go home and actually sleep for a change. "Working in bed is how I relax, for Christ's sake!"
Roberta exhausted everyone around her, and seeing her reach the point of exhaustion was devastating to her family and friends. And you couldn't work at The Golden Apple without being absorbed into one or both of those groups.
In the meantime, having employed a couple simple tricks I had nicked from other actors to produce a reliable lowest common denominator laugh, I decided I was the second coming of Sid Ceasar. Since I had mastered the obvious and easy bits everyone else was doing, I thought it was time to bring in some of my own ideas. And since I had proven that I could play with the big dogs (with my one laugh) I decided I had earned the right to do what only Roberta did: ad lib. I didn't think for a second the stage manager would give me permission, but I thought if I came up with a brilliant ad lib and it worked, I would be allowed to keep it.
I can't explain why, but I thought it would be hilarious if Slater, true believer that he was, sang a few bars of "Britannia Rules the Waves," to try and pull himself together after the lip quiver. "Think of the Queen" type of thing. Never mind it's not funny -- I was so clueless it didn't even occur to me that I was violating the three-part structure of the bit, destroying its rhythm, and adding a reference that, sad to say, was above the heads of many in the Sarasota audience. Sadder still, I thought it was a clever ad lib, one that gave a clue to character, and was therefore better than Roberta's "puss-puss-puss-puss-pussie!" which was nothing more than rank vulgarity.
Maybe the idea of someone so straight-laced that he soothes himself by singing patriotic tunes is funny, I don't know. But I didn't think about the joke in the context of anything around it: the other bits, the rest of the show, the audience -- nothing. I just kept imagining an audience roaring as I executed a kind of bit they'd never scene before: shameless but smart, and totally unexpected. I imagined how impressed the other actors would be, and how my success in Funny Money would lead directly to my conquest of the Sarasota dinner theater world, sending me down a path that would lead to international stardom within a few short years.
And so I sleep-walked my way through the next performance, anticipating the unveiling of my revolutionary bit, completely detached from everything in the world of the play -- enacting an ancient personal ritual where, in preparation for a real challenge I retreat deeper and deeper into fantasy. My poor performance was unnoticeable to the audience and cast alike, since I was neither good nor bad enough alter the stunning consistency of Cooney's script -- it's a masterpiece of predictability which no one who remembers his lines can ruin and Larry Oliver himself couldn't have elevated above pleasant mediocrity.*******
Until I began to sing. The little sex farce that could had been chugging happily along, right through my famous hair bit. Then I botched the lip quiver -- for some reason it wasn't happening, and the look of concentration on my face didn't really read as upset. The hair laugh died out and the audience started to get confused ... had the fellow playing Slater forgotten his line? Why wasn't he speaking? The other actors began casting sidelong glances at me.
I hadn't expected to go into the song with no momentum. But I had been psyching myself up to do it all week. I couldn't accept not doing it, couldn't accept that it might not work, that I had killed my one big laugh, and I was going to have to go back into that dressing room with nothing to gloat about. Every instinct told me to forget the bit, just say my next line and get the Hell off the stage. But of course all my instincts had been shackled from the beginning by a performance that had been constructed entirely in my head. I sang.
"Oh Britannia, Britannia rules the waves ..."
There's a special kind of quiet that descends on a room when you completely lose an audience. When you can hear the hum of the stage lights you realize you've made the audience quieter than you could if you had explicitly directed them to be as quiet as possible. You have activated in them a stillness which is not subject to conscious control, but is connected to the same survival mechanism that makes a deer freeze when it senses the approach of a predator.
And when you are looking into the white lights, the audience, at the lower periphery of your vision, seems cast in blue. If the audience is with you, this blue seems warm and full, bouyant, rising to meet you like a thermal lifting a hawk. You can't wait to look down at them. But if you've lost them, the same blue seems cold, empty, and the audience seems a deep gulf beneath the precipice of the stage, and you don't dare look down.
So there I was, staring into the lights, my line lost, feeling as though the awful silence would never end. I hoped a helpful castmate would cover me with his or her own clever ad lib. Instead, Roberta, completely breaking character and dropping her accent, moaned loudly, "Oh Jesus Wept!" This brought my eyes off the lights at least, and I found Roberta glaring at me with her hands on her hips, in a pose reminiscent of John McEnroe protesting a blown line call. The other actors looked down or away. In my only authentic moment of the run, I delivered my line directly to Roberta in a shaky half-voice and fled the stage. My action was "to apologize."
Here's a tough one: if you can't deliver, you deserve what you get. I knew I'd hear about the song, but I didn't expect to have the whole bit gutted. "No more milking, you gotta get through that entrance and exit about five times faster than you're doing it." The stage manager seemed like he'd been holding this in. But what about the lip quiver? "Just come in with the hair, act upset, say your line and leave -- we're 20 minutes over as it is. It's like Lawrence of Arabia out there!"
I think the post-show monologue became cheerier after that, but I mostly avoided it for the rest of the run by developing a new bit: getting changed and out of the theater faster than everyone else. Don't worry, I still got my drinks. I've had more occasions than I would have liked to reflect on that show in the years since. How many bombs have I suffered through, thinking, "they'd rather be watching Cooney!" Telling my jokes to the lights. Wishing I could still "just come in with the hair." Funny is what makes people laugh, and sophistication (whatever that is) rarely enters into it.
Is British humor more sophisticated than American humor?
The short answer? Four words: Lee Evans Packs Wembly.
Screw.
* I believe Take the Money and Run is also part of the Cooney oeuvre, but if I’m wrong, it would make a great title for his biography.
** This needs to be said: Bob once caught me staring at Roberta’s South Pacific picture. “That’s right!” he said, clapping me on the back, “best legs on Broadway.” He winked and continued down the hall, whistling.
*** This almost certainly marks the only time since the premiere of Funny Money that the role of Vicky has had to be cast four times ... before opening. Interestingly, through all of this, neither of the husbands was recast. What there is to be said about that depends on what you like to complain about.
**** The title to my autobiography.
***** This is why in stand-up, guitar acts are in fact cheating. And they know it. There is bedrock of comfort laid down by the 12-tone scale below which their audiences will never fall, a subterranean stream of awkwardness and pain which the guitar act will never have to navigate, a region of uncertainty, that inchoate ur-source of all man's fear, which their sets are designed to avoid 100 percent of the time. This kind of dull consistency conforms exactly to the ideal business model of, among others, liquor retailers, which is why club owners and bookers love guitar acts. Studies have shown a directly proportional relationship between sales of Freedom Rock and the popularity of guitar acts among bookers and owners. If Ray Croc had decided to mass produce comedians instead of hamburgers, he'd have created the Guitar McAct. The meal comes with a catch-phrase T-shirt and a self-produced CD. Guitar acts suck by definition, and each of them knows in his heart, that in spite of having achieved the seemingly impossible feat of making comedy a stable and reliable career, he has renounced thrilling comedy, which must always risk failure, and transcendent comedy, which must pass through despair before triumphing over it. I would rather walk a thousand rooms than be a rich and famous guitar act. If only I could book a few ....
****** Which demonstrates that with dedication almost anything can be achieved, giving us an almost unlimited potential for achievement -- a potential which is usually misused:
I can beat the final stage of Super Mario Bros with no special powers.
I can sniff out the smut district of any town within 30 minutes, on foot.
I can recite every word of The Wall, Quadrophenia, and of course, drama fag that I am, Paradise by the Dashboard Light, Bohemian Rhapsody, and The Time Warp.
juicy, jiggling, powerful, vicious Brazilian ass, the kind of ass gazelles fear, the whole herd freezing alert upon its approach -- there's plenty of pursuit in that ass, an exhaustion hunt on the deadly veldt with enough grunt left over to butcher and carry the prey home in that ass -- an ass with it's own fatal sonic signature! Yes, animals can hear it! Dogs submit when that ass walks into the room, and you can hear it, too, oh yes, silk shifts differently across and ass like that, but especially in heels on a marble floor, oh yes, an ass like that generates an aggressive, ruthless CLACK-CLACK-CLACKing that can give you a halfie and almost break your will before you even turn around to see who's captaining it -- if you dare look! Charlene's ass activated deep biological imperatives in me, respect and fear and slobbering hunger, I always became very aware of my teeth when she was around -- an ass that makes you want to CHEW! -- visions of sinking my teeth into her delicious rump cross-faded with images of mastodon carcasses by an ancient fire, washing me in a delirium of satiation, which as it faded, left me with a sense that I needed to move into a real apartment finally, you know, get my shit together, as I heard my brother caveman thinking, "I can't take that ass back to a cave!" The whole history of architectural -- nay, human! -- progress was reframed for me in the context of my desire for that ass! "Fuck this grass hut, I'm gonna build a palace on the moon for this ass -- I'll figure out the technical shit along the way, how hard can it be?" The heat of asses like that saved lives when the glaciers were encroaching! The muscle drove ploughs and churned butter, monkeys knead dough with their hands, but women push from the ass! Bathsheba seduced David, Cleopatra destroyed Marc Antony, Elizabeth turned a poet into a pirate, Marie Antoinette should have fed the rabble, Rosie the Riveter bore down on machine tools and beat the fucking Nazis with an ass like that!
she was on the slippery slope of sluttiness, and gathering speed
just thinking of her ass
“British humor is more sophisticated than American humor.” British people love to say this. For unknown reasons, so do the Irish. I’m willing to entertain the notion, and will happily listen to anyone who hasn’t had a wank to The Benny Hill Show, though I must recuse myself from the discussion.
The first and most reliable stage laugh I ever got was doing a hair bit in a Ray Cooney show called Funny Money at The Golden Apple Dinner Theater in Sarasota, FL. Cooney has been called “the British Neil Simon,” which is accurate to the extent that both men were prolific and successful playwrights. However, Simon wrote character-driven pieces filled with heart, wit, and meaning, whereas Cooney churned out carbon-copy sex farces by piling double-entendres, dropped trousers, and slamming doors on top of one another until he reached 60 pages.
I learned some important comedy lessons doing Funny Money, foremost being, if you are going to put the word “Funny” in the title of your show, you have to make sure the rest of the show, the whole “script” part, is actually funny. Funny Money tells the story of Henry Perkins (according to the dramatis personae, “an insignificant middle-aged, middle-class accountant”) who accidentally brings home the wrong suitcase, only to find it is filled with counterfeit currency that belongs to the mob. Sick of their humdrum lives, he and his wife Jean (“pretty”) decide to take the money and run*, but not before their nosey neighbors (Vic and Betty Johnson: “neighbor” and “also pretty,”), the police, and the mob get involved. A hilarious roller-coaster ride of wacky hi-jinks and tom-foolery ensues that will leave you breathless. Then again, a lot of our audience was on oxygen to begin with. Open flames were strictly prohibited in all Golden Apple Dinner Theater shows.
The big gag of the second act involves Jean taking too long to pack, despite Henry’s remonstrations that they can buy everything new once they’ve escaped. But the pressure overwhelms Jean, she gets drunk, and refuses to leave without her cat, which, perhaps sensing the household turmoil, has gone into hiding. The cat’s name is “Pussy.”
Drunken packing, vacillating about what to wear (read: “gradually stripping”) and tearful cries of “where’s my Pussy?” punctuate the second act, the rock steady comedy rhythm to which the plot always returns. Mr. Big, the mobster, comes in and threatens to kill everybody; Jean comes out of the bedroom with knickers on her head, “do you know where my Pussy is?” Slater, the copper, comes in and threatens to arrest everybody; Jean bursts into tears, “but I can’t find my Pussy!” Bill the cab driver comes in to complain that he can’t wait any longer, only to find Jean in her slip, searching under a chair, on hand and knees, down center, ass to the audience, imploring, “has ANYONE seen my PUSSY?”
The Golden Apple Dinner Theater was owned and operated by Bob and Roberta Turoff, who had met and fallen in love while performing in the chorus of The Golden Apple on Broadway. When Roberta got pregnant, they decided her career as a big time dancer was probably over, and they moved to Sarasota where they made a mint performing musical warhorses to generations of snowbirds, until they were snowbirds themselves. In the process, they probably had more consistent work and more satisfying lives than anyone they’d left behind on Broadway.
Their success in Sarasota, and the enduring cachet that attached to the Golden Apple Dinner Theater, derived from this long ago connection to the mythical world of Rogers and Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein, Sheldon and Harnick. Only at the Golden Apple Dinner Theater could you see plays produced, directed, and performed by real Broadway stars. This boast was also the source of the snide moniker by which their less accomplished competitors in the cut-throat world of Sarasota dinner theater referred to them: "The Flying Turoffs."
Roberta admitted to being 58, but at the same time, adorning the walls of the Golden Apple Dinner Theater, there was photographic evidence that she had been in the original Broadway production of South Pacific. A woman’s claim to fame and her modesty have an uneasy coexistence.
At any rate, Roberta was probably not who Cooney had in mind when he “created” the “character” of Jean, whose main function in the play is to get undressed and shake her ass at the audience.** Roberta was not originally cast in the role, the play, or even that season. She had been diagnosed with cancer the previous season, and had struggled to complete her performances. This was to be her first season ever without a role at the Golden Apple.
But cancer proved no match for Roberta’s desire to be back in the spotlight; she astonished her doctors with the speed of her recovery, and by the beginning of the season, she had convinced Bob that she was well enough to take on the minor role of Vicky, who had been cast as slightly older than Jean anyway. Still, “slightly” necessitated bumping the woman who had been cast as Vicky into the role of Jean, and the woman who had been cast as Jean out of the show. By the time auditions started, Roberta had read the play, decided that she preferred the role of Jean, and was really feeling much better anyway. The actress who had briefly enjoyed a promotion from Vicky to Jean was now dismissed, and a third actress, who seemed like she might have been Roberta’s contemporary, was brought in to play Vicky.***
Roberta may not have been the ideal casting for Jean, but boy did she know how to milk a knickers-on-the-head bit! With every performance, her blind fumbling for a leg hole through which to poke a groggy eye became more elaborate, her drunken wobbling more unsteady, her ad-libbed insertion of, “Puss-puss-puss-puss-pussee,” between the other actors’ lines more frequent, until finally it became the backing track to the second act, over which the rest of the dialogue had to be shouted. Everything took longer. By the end of the first week, we’d added 20 minutes to the second act alone.
Own the theater and you can do whatever the fuck you want -- there’s a comedy lesson for ya. The other actors complained bitterly behind her back, the stage manager sighed impotently every night, as he turned dejectedly in the dressing room door and headed for the parking lot, having dutifully delivered pace notes he knew would be shamelessly flouted again the next night. None of it mattered, and not because Roberta owned the place, but because she was killing.
Roberta was unquestionably the most selfish, self-indulgent, stubborn, uncooperative, and shameless performer I have ever worked with. She was also hilarious. She was a Goddamn diva, and she deserved to be, because she the filled the house every night and then proceeded to tear the roof off the place. Roberta wasn’t just signing our checks -- she was earning them, too! Earn your attitude and let everyone else complain -- that’s a good one.
Roberta taught me to love bits. Character, intention, motivation, background -- they’re all great in theory. But the reality is that most plays, even the popular ones, from the point of view of depth and meaning, are shit. They are nothing more than vehicles for bits: funny bits, action bits, sexy bits, crying bits. Bits are everything, because the rest is usually worthless. Actors who can identify the bits in a script, or the opportunity for a bit where none is written in -- they keep the lights on. Yet it is not enough to find or create a bit. A bit must be milked. Oh, yes.
What is "milking?"
There is a school of acting that claims milking a bit is based upon a connivance between actor and audience, a tacit agreement to mutually acknowledge the theatrical contrivance of the moment and shamelessly mock it; and this connivance constitutes nothing less than the breaking of the sacred fourth wall and the irrevocable shattering of the spell of suspended disbelief upon which all serious theater depends.
There is another school of acting which says, “exactly!”
Method actors and their ilk, all the humorless emotional exhibitionists who deem themselves “serious actors,” have the gall to disdain bit acting as self-indulgent and insulting; then they turn around and ask us to sit through a breakdown they should have had in session, while asking us to believe that they really believe they are not in a theater with us watching, and their behavior springs solely from their characters’ needs, not the demands of a performance. What is worse, they suppose that bit acting requires no skill, and is the metier of that sad, imaginary character who has no other choice but to pander, or the recourse of the talented but lazy actor who lacks the “dedication” which they smugly attribute to themselves.
Watching Roberta pan her ass back and forth across the audience like it was mounted on a tripod exploded my more precious notions of what good acting is. You wanna talk about skill? She timed each sweep to her chant of "puss-puss-puss-puss-pussie!" pushing and pulling the rhythm like John-goddamn-Bonham, dragging at the edges of the phrase, trotting in the middle, pausing at the end just a hair longer than you’d expect, and increasing the length of that improbable pause with every repetition, driving the audience to a frenzy of anticipation.
By the third swing the whole audience would be holding its breath during the pause, and then inhaling simultaneously with her as she launched into the next “puss-puss-puss-puss-pussie!” during which all that breath would be released in a giant, unified roar. It was Tantric.
That’s milking. You wanna talk about dedication? How about the courage to take a bit too far, until you feel the audience saying, “no!” and then staying with it until they come along, and then going even farther, until the audience feels it must follow your every move, though in reality you could lose them at any moment! A misstep could shatter the spell and leave the audience feeling used and insulted (instead of used and grateful, which is how everyone wants to feel at the end of the night). A masterful milking is the seduction and ravishing of an audience who try to resist before and feel guilty and ashamed after … but still want more!
I observed all of this without understanding any of it.**** All I knew was Roberta was shameless and got big laughs. I had a scene near the end of the show where Slater comes into the flat after being hit by the escaping Mr. Big's car, and makes a final plea for cooperation. My entrance was announced by the cab driver, so everyone knew a sight-gag was coming. I was doing my best wild-eyed, disoriented stagger, with my hair (heretofore immaculately parted in keeping with the punctilious Slater's character) messed up as though I had been hit by a car ... but no one was laughing. That's not exactly right. Worse than no laughs, there were some halting laughs mixed with nervous titters, which meant that everyone recognized it was time to laugh, but no one was actually amused. It's not that they missed the joke ... they saw me miss it.
I thought for sure there was an acting solution, so I was surprised when Bob just said, "mess your hair up some more." I was skeptical, but tried it for the next show and got my first legitimate laugh on the bit. I returned to Bob triumphant, but when I smugly asked him how he thought it went he said, "I meant REALLY mess it up." At this point it becomes difficult to record our conversation, though the text is simple enough. Embarrassment at my own stupidity makes it hard to set down the following:
Ashley: "But you don't want it to look ... unrealistic, do you?"
And paucity of descriptive powers makes it impossible to convey Bob's dismay.
Bob: "YEESSSS!"
I really didn't get it. Up to that moment, I think Bob just thought I was a little shy, not completely unaware of how farce works. I feel certain he went away and held his head in his hands somewhere out of sight. I had been cast because I had the least objectionable British accent among men my age in Sarasota who didn't come off as hopelessly queeny ... which is to say they were surprised when I walked into auditions and seemed like I could play straight. I know that now. At the time, my head was full of Stanislavskian notions, because I'd once flipped through the chapter, "Communion" in An Actor Prepares. I thought I was a real actor, and that I could address the challenges of Funny Money with character work. Bob was gracious, and probably didn't want to take on any counseling work on the side, so he didn't say anything, then or ever. But after that Bob was always very gentle and friendly with me, while keeping conversations brief.
What I did get, though, was laughs, and I was soon upset that I couldn't get my hair to mess up any more using just my hands. The stage manager suggested hair spray (another revelation) and within a week I was walking on stage looking like a cross between Alfalfa and Yahoo Serious. I was also getting one of the biggest laughs in the show.
Roberta took notice.
I was starting to understand that I could milk the dazed staggering once I'd gotten the laugh off the sight gag. The time between my entrance and the delivery of my line was expanding, or as Roberta put it in the dressing room one night after the show, "we're waiting out there for fucking ever!" She was a flower. The other actors, happy to see Roberta swallowing her own medicine, defended me. The stage manager, who'd given me the idea to use hair spray in the first place, smiled and said nothing. Bob had moved on to the next project, and I was getting laughs, so I had license. To her credit, Roberta never pulled rank on me, probably because she considered it beneath her dignity (panties on the head notwithstanding).
The next night, I got an even bigger laugh, and I was delayed returning to the dressing room because an audience member wanted to congratulate me. On my hair bit. And I was proud. And happy. They were crazy times.
When I entered the other actors gave me a cheer that was entirely for Roberta's benefit, though I was fatuous enough to take it at face value. I was about to launch into a description of what I thought had really made the bit fly that night when Roberta said, "I don't see what the big deal is anyway, it's at two-part bit, at least, a three-parter if you do it right, and you only ever do the first part, I mean, do you even know what the other two parts are?" She delivered this to the mirror as she removed her eye make-up with workman-like efficiency, a masterpiece of dismissiveness.
Anyone with wit, or whose self-esteem wasn't pinned to others' opinion of a hair bit in a Ray Cooney show would have shut up at this point. But I was so completely undone by this statement that I could only stupidly say, "no?" Which turned out to be the best thing I could have done, because Roberta couldn't resist telling me, thus reestablishing her authority on bits. This time she turned from the mirror to address me.
"The first bit is the sight gag, the second bit is composing yourself as you prepare to say your line, and the third bit -- which is really a continuation of the second bit -- is not quite holding it together as you say your line. So it's two or three bits, depending on how you look at it, but either way, it's three laughs, and you only ever get one, and you get it with hair spray." Roberta turned back to the mirror, satisfied. The dressing room had gone silent, and no doubt the stunned look on my face resembled crushing defeat. But in my mind it was like the last ten minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Comedy caveat: be careful who you share your secrets with.
Ashley Strand's Hair Bit Suite in Three Parts debuted the following night, to great acclaim. It wasn't perfectly executed, but the simple use of that magical three-part structure elevated the bit above mere mugging by giving it at least the appearance of skill. Comedy nugget: structure comforts and reassures an audience. They respond to the familiarity of something like the rule of three subconsciously, relaxing like a baby with a pacifier,***** while on a conscious level they feel like you're a professional, and they've spent their money well. This can give you license to fill that structure with pretty much whatever shit you want.
I chose hair spray, lip quiver, and high-pitched whine. Actually the lip quiver was an accident. I was just going for a classic "unable to speak because I'm trying not to cry," with the usual false starts and huffing and puffing. But one night, I was imagining that I was actually upset, and my lip began to quiver, which not only got a great laugh, but caused one of the other actors to corpse -- a first for me. In spite of my Stanislavskian pretentions, the acting significance of this event was immediately lost on me as I became obsessed with the effect and completely forgot the cause. I had to do the lip quiver every night from then on!
This is not a talent I have. I can no more make my lip quiver on command now than I can do a standing back-flip. It was only through a sheer, obsessive focus of will that I managed to artificially recreate this physical stunt each night.****** I was so focused on that lip quiver I sometimes botched the lines that followed -- but Roberta didn't give a rat's ass about the script, why should I? And the lip quiver was the jewel in that three-part bit! Sure the hair set it up and the whine was the pay-off, but the lip quiver was the "wow" factor, the part that made people think, "how'd he do that?" Everything else could be sacrificed, but the lip quiver had to happen.
Roberta was enraged. "I can't wait till this fucking thing is over. I don't give a shit anymore. I mean I just don't give a shit!" I couldn't tell if she was more disgusted with me or herself, but I enjoyed the change in tone of her post-show monologue, and in the depths of my pettiness, took it as a kind of personal victory.
"This piece of shit play! There's nothing to it, you know? Just completely empty, and you know what, it just exhausts me. I'm so exhausted." This was the cue for everyone in the dressing room to stop rolling their eyes, and the moment of relief for the poor woman playing Betty, who, because she sat next to Roberta in the dressing room, found herself pressed into service as Roberta's confidante, to whom the post-show monologue was regularly addressed. "Would you like some tea?" she'd say, and Roberta would say, "yes, thank you dear," and place her hand over her eyes while she waited for it.
The room would be silent then, and everyone would wrap up their changing pretty quickly and head for the bar. It was a strange little passage in each day's movement. On the one hand it was true that Roberta was impossible and manipulative and everyone was tired of her bullshit. But on the other it was also true that she was still recovering and pushing herself beyond her limits for a show that really was worthless. And having some arrogant PoliSci graduate -- who would never in his life even get called for the type of auditions she'd nailed when she was 20 -- having this schmendrick steal her focus to boot!
And on the one hand we resented the shots across the bow and the griping of the post-show monologue, the general purge of complaints that the rest of us, not beings owners, had to save for the bar (we modestly supposed we would disdain to indulge such complaints in the dressing room if we were owners). But on the other, we recognised the post-show monologue as part of a much larger monologue, one that probably began the moment Roberta got up, talking herself through each day's agenda. And in that sense, the monologue was not some habit we wished she'd drop, but something that amazed everyone who met her. Whether she was acting or dancing, designing her custom kitchen, or the landscaping for the Turoff estate, planning a fundraiser or a social event, discussing politics or slinging gossip, Roberta was fully engaged with everything she did and she processed it all by talking.
And all that talk had an extraordinary invocatory effect. Having seen it manifest in her life makes me laugh whenever I hear some dreamer talking about "The Law of Attraction." What The Secret doesn't talk about is the tremendous, non-stop output of energy required to shape the world to your plans, and that most people lack the capacity for it. While we went off to the bar to take advantage of the 2-for-1deal the Turoffs gave cast members, Roberta would recover from her tea-break and go home to get some work done. More than once I heard her daughter Kyle admonish her to go home and actually sleep for a change. "Working in bed is how I relax, for Christ's sake!"
Roberta exhausted everyone around her, and seeing her reach the point of exhaustion was devastating to her family and friends. And you couldn't work at The Golden Apple without being absorbed into one or both of those groups.
In the meantime, having employed a couple simple tricks I had nicked from other actors to produce a reliable lowest common denominator laugh, I decided I was the second coming of Sid Ceasar. Since I had mastered the obvious and easy bits everyone else was doing, I thought it was time to bring in some of my own ideas. And since I had proven that I could play with the big dogs (with my one laugh) I decided I had earned the right to do what only Roberta did: ad lib. I didn't think for a second the stage manager would give me permission, but I thought if I came up with a brilliant ad lib and it worked, I would be allowed to keep it.
I can't explain why, but I thought it would be hilarious if Slater, true believer that he was, sang a few bars of "Britannia Rules the Waves," to try and pull himself together after the lip quiver. "Think of the Queen" type of thing. Never mind it's not funny -- I was so clueless it didn't even occur to me that I was violating the three-part structure of the bit, destroying its rhythm, and adding a reference that, sad to say, was above the heads of many in the Sarasota audience. Sadder still, I thought it was a clever ad lib, one that gave a clue to character, and was therefore better than Roberta's "puss-puss-puss-puss-pussie!" which was nothing more than rank vulgarity.
Maybe the idea of someone so straight-laced that he soothes himself by singing patriotic tunes is funny, I don't know. But I didn't think about the joke in the context of anything around it: the other bits, the rest of the show, the audience -- nothing. I just kept imagining an audience roaring as I executed a kind of bit they'd never scene before: shameless but smart, and totally unexpected. I imagined how impressed the other actors would be, and how my success in Funny Money would lead directly to my conquest of the Sarasota dinner theater world, sending me down a path that would lead to international stardom within a few short years.
And so I sleep-walked my way through the next performance, anticipating the unveiling of my revolutionary bit, completely detached from everything in the world of the play -- enacting an ancient personal ritual where, in preparation for a real challenge I retreat deeper and deeper into fantasy. My poor performance was unnoticeable to the audience and cast alike, since I was neither good nor bad enough alter the stunning consistency of Cooney's script -- it's a masterpiece of predictability which no one who remembers his lines can ruin and Larry Oliver himself couldn't have elevated above pleasant mediocrity.*******
Until I began to sing. The little sex farce that could had been chugging happily along, right through my famous hair bit. Then I botched the lip quiver -- for some reason it wasn't happening, and the look of concentration on my face didn't really read as upset. The hair laugh died out and the audience started to get confused ... had the fellow playing Slater forgotten his line? Why wasn't he speaking? The other actors began casting sidelong glances at me.
I hadn't expected to go into the song with no momentum. But I had been psyching myself up to do it all week. I couldn't accept not doing it, couldn't accept that it might not work, that I had killed my one big laugh, and I was going to have to go back into that dressing room with nothing to gloat about. Every instinct told me to forget the bit, just say my next line and get the Hell off the stage. But of course all my instincts had been shackled from the beginning by a performance that had been constructed entirely in my head. I sang.
"Oh Britannia, Britannia rules the waves ..."
There's a special kind of quiet that descends on a room when you completely lose an audience. When you can hear the hum of the stage lights you realize you've made the audience quieter than you could if you had explicitly directed them to be as quiet as possible. You have activated in them a stillness which is not subject to conscious control, but is connected to the same survival mechanism that makes a deer freeze when it senses the approach of a predator.
And when you are looking into the white lights, the audience, at the lower periphery of your vision, seems cast in blue. If the audience is with you, this blue seems warm and full, bouyant, rising to meet you like a thermal lifting a hawk. You can't wait to look down at them. But if you've lost them, the same blue seems cold, empty, and the audience seems a deep gulf beneath the precipice of the stage, and you don't dare look down.
So there I was, staring into the lights, my line lost, feeling as though the awful silence would never end. I hoped a helpful castmate would cover me with his or her own clever ad lib. Instead, Roberta, completely breaking character and dropping her accent, moaned loudly, "Oh Jesus Wept!" This brought my eyes off the lights at least, and I found Roberta glaring at me with her hands on her hips, in a pose reminiscent of John McEnroe protesting a blown line call. The other actors looked down or away. In my only authentic moment of the run, I delivered my line directly to Roberta in a shaky half-voice and fled the stage. My action was "to apologize."
Here's a tough one: if you can't deliver, you deserve what you get. I knew I'd hear about the song, but I didn't expect to have the whole bit gutted. "No more milking, you gotta get through that entrance and exit about five times faster than you're doing it." The stage manager seemed like he'd been holding this in. But what about the lip quiver? "Just come in with the hair, act upset, say your line and leave -- we're 20 minutes over as it is. It's like Lawrence of Arabia out there!"
I think the post-show monologue became cheerier after that, but I mostly avoided it for the rest of the run by developing a new bit: getting changed and out of the theater faster than everyone else. Don't worry, I still got my drinks. I've had more occasions than I would have liked to reflect on that show in the years since. How many bombs have I suffered through, thinking, "they'd rather be watching Cooney!" Telling my jokes to the lights. Wishing I could still "just come in with the hair." Funny is what makes people laugh, and sophistication (whatever that is) rarely enters into it.
Is British humor more sophisticated than American humor?
The short answer? Four words: Lee Evans Packs Wembly.
Screw.
* I believe Take the Money and Run is also part of the Cooney oeuvre, but if I’m wrong, it would make a great title for his biography.
** This needs to be said: Bob once caught me staring at Roberta’s South Pacific picture. “That’s right!” he said, clapping me on the back, “best legs on Broadway.” He winked and continued down the hall, whistling.
*** This almost certainly marks the only time since the premiere of Funny Money that the role of Vicky has had to be cast four times ... before opening. Interestingly, through all of this, neither of the husbands was recast. What there is to be said about that depends on what you like to complain about.
**** The title to my autobiography.
***** This is why in stand-up, guitar acts are in fact cheating. And they know it. There is bedrock of comfort laid down by the 12-tone scale below which their audiences will never fall, a subterranean stream of awkwardness and pain which the guitar act will never have to navigate, a region of uncertainty, that inchoate ur-source of all man's fear, which their sets are designed to avoid 100 percent of the time. This kind of dull consistency conforms exactly to the ideal business model of, among others, liquor retailers, which is why club owners and bookers love guitar acts. Studies have shown a directly proportional relationship between sales of Freedom Rock and the popularity of guitar acts among bookers and owners. If Ray Croc had decided to mass produce comedians instead of hamburgers, he'd have created the Guitar McAct. The meal comes with a catch-phrase T-shirt and a self-produced CD. Guitar acts suck by definition, and each of them knows in his heart, that in spite of having achieved the seemingly impossible feat of making comedy a stable and reliable career, he has renounced thrilling comedy, which must always risk failure, and transcendent comedy, which must pass through despair before triumphing over it. I would rather walk a thousand rooms than be a rich and famous guitar act. If only I could book a few ....
****** Which demonstrates that with dedication almost anything can be achieved, giving us an almost unlimited potential for achievement -- a potential which is usually misused:
I can beat the final stage of Super Mario Bros with no special powers.
I can sniff out the smut district of any town within 30 minutes, on foot.
I can recite every word of The Wall, Quadrophenia, and of course, drama fag that I am, Paradise by the Dashboard Light, Bohemian Rhapsody, and The Time Warp.
juicy, jiggling, powerful, vicious Brazilian ass, the kind of ass gazelles fear, the whole herd freezing alert upon its approach -- there's plenty of pursuit in that ass, an exhaustion hunt on the deadly veldt with enough grunt left over to butcher and carry the prey home in that ass -- an ass with it's own fatal sonic signature! Yes, animals can hear it! Dogs submit when that ass walks into the room, and you can hear it, too, oh yes, silk shifts differently across and ass like that, but especially in heels on a marble floor, oh yes, an ass like that generates an aggressive, ruthless CLACK-CLACK-CLACKing that can give you a halfie and almost break your will before you even turn around to see who's captaining it -- if you dare look! Charlene's ass activated deep biological imperatives in me, respect and fear and slobbering hunger, I always became very aware of my teeth when she was around -- an ass that makes you want to CHEW! -- visions of sinking my teeth into her delicious rump cross-faded with images of mastodon carcasses by an ancient fire, washing me in a delirium of satiation, which as it faded, left me with a sense that I needed to move into a real apartment finally, you know, get my shit together, as I heard my brother caveman thinking, "I can't take that ass back to a cave!" The whole history of architectural -- nay, human! -- progress was reframed for me in the context of my desire for that ass! "Fuck this grass hut, I'm gonna build a palace on the moon for this ass -- I'll figure out the technical shit along the way, how hard can it be?" The heat of asses like that saved lives when the glaciers were encroaching! The muscle drove ploughs and churned butter, monkeys knead dough with their hands, but women push from the ass! Bathsheba seduced David, Cleopatra destroyed Marc Antony, Elizabeth turned a poet into a pirate, Marie Antoinette should have fed the rabble, Rosie the Riveter bore down on machine tools and beat the fucking Nazis with an ass like that!
she was on the slippery slope of sluttiness, and gathering speed
just thinking of her ass
Being Right Doesn't Count for Shit: how winning every argument every time makes you an asshole no one can ever really love.
Book -- 364 pages. Comes with big rock and shackles.
The TV announcer at the cocktail party who just got a big promotion keeps referring to himself and his wife as "her and I," regardless of whether he and his wife are the subjects or objects of whatever sentence comes out of his mouth. It drives you crazy, and you think, "what an asshole this guys is!"
But you're wrong. You're the asshole. Wanna know how I know? Look at his apartment, his car, his wife. His girlfriend. His kids. Look at yours. Who's the asshole? You don't even have an apartment or a girlfriend -- and you're kidding yourself if you think anyone's ever gonna breed with you. What's the point?
How's that big brain treating you now? Here's a question for it: what's more important -- good grammar or being evolutionarily relevant? Nobody likes a know-it-all -- how fuckin' long is it going to take you to figure that out? Let's see now, taking an inordinate amount of time to learn basic lessons, is that an indicator of being smart ... or profoundly stupid? And thinking you're better than people who are actually measurably superior to you in every way -- that makes you an asshole, right? Wait, listen, he's talking about his charity foundation now -- where's your charity foundation Captain Superior? Oh that's right, you can't get your shit together enough to handle your own life, much less help anyone else with theirs. But you got something big planned, right? Gonna show everyone someday? Yeah, right! Tick, tick, tick ...!
In this powerful follow-up to his acclaimed and controversial, Brutal Love: When Tough Love Just Doesn't Cut It, Ashley Strand calls you on your bullshit and offers the losers of the slacker generation this stunning ultimatum: stop being a loser or end it already!
Think nice guys finish last? Jocks, popular people, celebrities, and politicians are stupid? That intellectualism suffers unfair discrimination? Liberals care? Women are impressed by sensitivity? Size doesn't matter? The pen is mightier than the sword? Violence is "wrong"? Ashley shows you how every opinion, attitude, and theory you've had is wrong.
Think you've been cheated by circumstance, genetics, timing, "a pathological society?" Ashley teaches you that you're where you are for one reason and one reason only: you've fucked up the vast majority of all decisions, big and small, in your life, and have completely failed to learn from any of your mistakes.
Ashley doesn't believe you can actually apply any of the lessons in this book, which is why he's sending you a 50lb rock with shackles screwed into it. You're gonna have to find the bridge on your own -- if you can drop your pud and get off the couch for once.
The TV announcer at the cocktail party who just got a big promotion keeps referring to himself and his wife as "her and I," regardless of whether he and his wife are the subjects or objects of whatever sentence comes out of his mouth. It drives you crazy, and you think, "what an asshole this guys is!"
But you're wrong. You're the asshole. Wanna know how I know? Look at his apartment, his car, his wife. His girlfriend. His kids. Look at yours. Who's the asshole? You don't even have an apartment or a girlfriend -- and you're kidding yourself if you think anyone's ever gonna breed with you. What's the point?
How's that big brain treating you now? Here's a question for it: what's more important -- good grammar or being evolutionarily relevant? Nobody likes a know-it-all -- how fuckin' long is it going to take you to figure that out? Let's see now, taking an inordinate amount of time to learn basic lessons, is that an indicator of being smart ... or profoundly stupid? And thinking you're better than people who are actually measurably superior to you in every way -- that makes you an asshole, right? Wait, listen, he's talking about his charity foundation now -- where's your charity foundation Captain Superior? Oh that's right, you can't get your shit together enough to handle your own life, much less help anyone else with theirs. But you got something big planned, right? Gonna show everyone someday? Yeah, right! Tick, tick, tick ...!
In this powerful follow-up to his acclaimed and controversial, Brutal Love: When Tough Love Just Doesn't Cut It, Ashley Strand calls you on your bullshit and offers the losers of the slacker generation this stunning ultimatum: stop being a loser or end it already!
Think nice guys finish last? Jocks, popular people, celebrities, and politicians are stupid? That intellectualism suffers unfair discrimination? Liberals care? Women are impressed by sensitivity? Size doesn't matter? The pen is mightier than the sword? Violence is "wrong"? Ashley shows you how every opinion, attitude, and theory you've had is wrong.
Think you've been cheated by circumstance, genetics, timing, "a pathological society?" Ashley teaches you that you're where you are for one reason and one reason only: you've fucked up the vast majority of all decisions, big and small, in your life, and have completely failed to learn from any of your mistakes.
Ashley doesn't believe you can actually apply any of the lessons in this book, which is why he's sending you a 50lb rock with shackles screwed into it. You're gonna have to find the bridge on your own -- if you can drop your pud and get off the couch for once.
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Quedgy -
Adj.: describing a piece of pop art, entertainment, advertising, mass or personal fashion choice, which in a cynical attempt to be quirky or edgy for the sake of quirkiness or edginess (as reified notions) fails to achieve either owing to a critical lack of authenticity or heart (see also hearthenticity).
The full Sizemore -
Subst.: an epic binge of compulsive/addictive behavior representing a total backslide on all previous sworn-off indulgences (see also all anal and brie). To be categorized as a full Sizemore, no fewer than 5 8-balls may be consumed, and you must be unable to perform in your own home-made, self-released, hotel hooker sextape.
patton oswalt is country western singer-songwriter celebrity sibling rufus sizemore
patton oswalt is country western singer-songwriter celebrity sibling rufus sizemore
Cockmaster of the Convention: Bang all the boat-show models, infomercial actresses, Macy's sample girls and Santa's helpers you can handle
Book - 467 pages: profession-specific seduction instructional manual.
Remember the bikini models from the unforgettable power boat scene in Tom Vu's ground-breaking, zero-money down real estate riches infomerical? I fucked 'em. ALL SIX. Ready to learn from me?
Remember the bikini models from the unforgettable power boat scene in Tom Vu's ground-breaking, zero-money down real estate riches infomerical? I fucked 'em. ALL SIX. Ready to learn from me?
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When I Had Hair ... All My Ridonkulous Sex Exploits Before I Became a Bald Pariah
Book - 1,200 pages: compendium of FACTS, muthafucka, FACTS!
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