A Patience Test

Tuesday September 23rd, 2008 - Chicago, IL

Every day seems to bring another test of my patience. I was in a great mood after Zanies last night and I stayed up late writing down ideas and reading and deciding what I wanted to do today. I’m in a pretty good space in my head and have been making good decisions.

My test was an email I received from one of my former students saying he sent an email to my ex business partner asking when intermediate classes were and was told ‘Dobie has decided to take a break from teaching for a while.’ I have? When was that decision made?

This ugly situation just will not go away. I wrote back to the student and explained it all and copied Mr. Embezzler and his two henchmen on it. I told straight up what went down and didn’t pull any punches. I also said I’ll out work, out class and out hustle them all and I plan on doing exactly that. They are being nothing short of evil with all this and I hate it.

I’m not the only one to have this kind of problem I’m sure and now I need to solve it in a way that is both professional but also does the job. What exactly that is I am not sure of right now. I don’t want to have to resort to their brand of dirty pool but it’s getting closer.

A few years ago I did a corporate show for Whirlpool. The guy in charge was very nice and we hit it off right away. He was telling me how a Korean company came along with a direct copy of the Whirlpool dishwasher and sold it for WAY less than Whirlpool could. I asked him how they did that and he said they bought a real one and reverse engineered it.

Was it fair? No. Was it right? Not in my estimation. But was it reality? Absolutely YES and Whirlpool had to figure out a plan how to recover from it. I never found out what was decided on but I never forgot that story. It seems like an all too similar scenario to mine.

I’m not the first person to ever teach a comedy class. Quite frankly there are several that have been at it longer than I have. Judy Carter wrote her book in the ‘80s. Good for her. It is very well done. Neil Leiberman has taught in San Francisco for years. He usually has a one on one relationship with a student but he’s done seminars too. That’s not a problem.

There’s Steve North and Greg Dean in L.A., Jeff Justice in Atlanta and my friend Joey Callahan teaches in Philadelphia. What I have a problem with is Chicago was my territory and like old wrestling promoters in the past once a person has a territory it’s hands OFF.

The same thing should happen here too, especially since the people who are trying to do this were TRAINED BY ME in the first place. They are being vindictive and nasty and to sit back and just take it is not my nature. I have always pushed back to playground bullies my entire life and even though I’ve gotten bloodied up many times I just can’t back down.

An honorable thing for all three of them to do would be just go away and do something else somewhere else. I have established a successful relationship with both Zanies and my students for fifteen years now. They don’t respect that. I was here first - just GO AWAY.

This is not going to be the case with this particular situation and I’m going to have to be careful how I handle it or I could find myself in a number of bad places - prison being one of them. If I focus on what they’re doing I’ll end up using a six iron to enhance my point.

That’s not smart but a lot of people in prisons across the world have done things that are not what could be called ‘career planning’. In a split second the mind can make a decision that affects a lifetime and I don’t want to put myself in a position to have that temptation.

I know there is an anger and a rage inside me that is a sleeping giant. Maybe we all have it to a certain degree but mine has been poked at for as long as I can remember. I have had a lot of issues with anger over the years and it’s caused countless outbursts even if a lot of them were very funny…to the outside observer. To me it’s the culmination of frustration.

Drunken hecklers in comedy clubs have long been the target of my wrath. I have a very well earned reputation of not being one to mess with but idiot after idiot tries it anyway. It gets very old after a while and this whole situation is starting to tire me too. Just go away and leave me alone. I don’t want to waste one second having to deal with this. It’s boring.

I’ve been really working on my anger over the years and it’s getting much better. I very much want to be known as a kind person and a giver and a teddy bear - not some evil ogre who is a 24 hour nonstop tirade machine. Many other people who would have lived what I lived would have snapped a long time ago and even I’m surprised I haven’t done it yet.

Having this situation being stuck in my face doesn’t make it any easier. They’re poking a tiger and they’re laughing about it behind my back. They think it’s cute and funny and it makes them think they’re putting one over on me by taking my passion and pissing on it.

I feel like Carrie and it’s about to be prom night. I don’t want to be in that position and I am doing everything I can to avoid it but I know that at least some of that anger is floating around somewhere and even though it’s not up top on the surface it still exists down deep inside my tank. I don’t drink or do drugs because that would be just asking for trouble.

It’s not like Jekyll and Hyde. Dave Thomas from Wendy’s is a guy I would have loved to have met because he had this anger too. He was adopted and it bothered him his whole life even though he got rich and famous. He dealt with his anger in many ways. Drinking was one unfortunately but being charitable was another. I want to choose the high road.

That’s not always an easy decision especially when I have situations like this one. It’s a speck on the grand scale of life but it’s a speck on MY life so it feels bigger. I’ll bet there are people in the financial business that would gladly trade places with me right now and their billion dollar collapse means nothing to me either. I need to put this in perspective.

The happy ending to all this would be for those knobs to have motivated me so much I create THE best, most popular and highest money generating comedy course in recorded history and helps make this cosmic pebble of insanity a lot funnier. We could all use that.