I Got My Wish

Thursday June 19th, 2008 - Chicago, IL

There’s an old joke about a guy with a shriveled up chicken wing arm going up to Jesus and begging ‘Lord, please make my arm like the other one.’ Then the good one shrivels. I remember hearing that when I was a kid and feeling guilty for laughing so hard at it but it was way funny to me then. Tonight it came slinking back to haunt me all these years later.

All this week I’ve been bellyaching and sniveling about how the club wasn’t full for our Jerry’s Kidders shows at Zanies in Chicago. I wanted it nuts to butts jam packed tight as a crab’s fanny not one seat to be had anywhere full. Surprise, surprise - I got what I wanted.

Technically I did get what I wanted - a full house. There was truly not one empty seat in the whole place anywhere and I had to slink into the sound booth to watch the show. I had my elusive sellout after two previous nights of decent but not totally full houses and Jerry was pretty excited about it. The only problem is that all those people weren’t there for us.

Thursdays are Zanies telemarketing nights and these people won tickets from dropping a business card in a fish bowl. Very few if any of them listen to WLS or have a clue who Jerry’s Kidders are or Jerry Agar or probably Jerry Lewis either. They were pretty young.

I was just at Zanies as a headliner myself only a few weeks ago and found the Thursday night to be the most difficult show of the week by far and tonight was no exception. They were loud and drunk and chatty and all of us had to work to penetrate their noisy chatter.

Normally I would just plow through it and go on without issue but at the last minute it was told to us that Kipper McGee was at this show. Ugh. Of ALL the nights I didn’t want Kipper to see us it was tonight. He and I go back 20 years or more and he’s never seen me perform live. I‘ve told him for years that when he finally did come out I would be ready.

Oh, I was ready but the audience wanted to sit around and chat and check cell phones or text messages and they made it WAY harder than it needed to be for all of us. All three of us have an act that took us years to develop and it’s damn frustrating to have to fight with a bunch of idiots who don’t understand how to behave in public. This was a huge chore.

I don’t think they were bad people and the women especially were incredible. WOW. If I had to judge them on the amount of gorgeous women in the audience this would be a 10. Judging them on a politeness, listening and smartness scale I’d have to make it about -6.

Tim Slagle had a great point after the show and said how people behave in church is the same way they behave in public as a rule. If they are taught to be quiet and respectful in a church when they’re a kid then usually they are the same when they go out in public later.

He said this generation doesn’t really go to church as a rule and hence they don’t know how to behave properly anywhere and don’t think what they’re doing is wrong at all. That point blew me away and I had never thought of it until he said it. They didn’t have a clue.

And they really didn’t. Some of them were talking loud like it was a regular bar and it’s very difficult to have to work over that for a whole set. Then another few were checking a cell phone or texting something and they didn’t think that was wrong either. I was fuming but I couldn’t show it because Kipper was in the audience and Bert Haas was also there.

Bert books Zanies and Ken Sevara wanted Bert to check out his set because Bert hasn’t seen him in many years. We all wanted to have strong shows to impress Kipper and Bert. They’re the two who had faith in us to make all this happen. Nobody else really mattered.

We all got through our time without major incident and even though I got distracted by loud talking two or three times I still made it work and got a nice ovation when I got off. This was the typical one nighter mob I’ve been used to taming for all these years. It’s too many years of it actually. This one really snapped something inside. I’m SO over all this.

If this is how it is then I need to change what I’m doing because I’m flat out sick of it. If people want to talk that’s fine but why do they come to a live comedy show to do it? It’s a pain in the ass for everyone and I’ve had enough. I thought this week would be different.

I guess I’m wrong. Having to baby sit drunken twenty somethings is not why I gave my life up to earn my comedy stripes traveling across the country in crappy cars learning how to entertain a live audience. All of us on the show have done it and we’re better than this.

I see why some people turn to booze and drugs to numb the pain. I am glad I didn’t but I sure thought about starting tonight. The audience was already there. They were at home in a bar situation and loved it. Drinking is way of life to the majority of the population but it never appealed to me so I usually feel like the outsider. Tonight I felt like it even more so.

These people were from a different planet than I am. Most of them looked like they had money and were in the in crowd. They had blackberries and a Beamer and lived in a Lake Shore Drive high rise condo. The women were stunning and the guys were chasing them.

That’s fine but trying to do comedy in between their partying was futile. They weren‘t a comedy audience, they were there to be seen and hang out. The show was background for their party and I am not interested in that. I want to find people who want to see comedy.

Where the hell are they? They sure weren’t at Zanies in Chicago tonight. I hope they are planning on coming in for the weekend because this was a real patience tester. Jerry said I had a great show but I knew better. This was survival. I’m pretty good at that but it wasn’t what I came for this week. I wanted to give our WLS listeners a treat they never expected.

Hopefully we can build to that at some point and I will stop putting my expectations for the audiences this week so high. They are who they are and we will do our best to give all of them our very best show. I just don’t think it should be this much unnecessary work. It wasn’t meant to be this way but it is. The good thing is as soon as we were done they left to party somewhere else and we were forgotten about immediately. Time to do the same.