It's Not Easy Bein' Me

by Rodney Dangerfield

  “I’m not high,” I said.

  He said, “Okay, why don’t you stand up?”

  I said, “I tell ya, I’m not high, man.”

  “Okay, then,” he said. “Let me see you stand up and walk.”

  I said I wasn’t going to get up, and he said, “You can’t, because you’re too high.”

  I said, “I am NOT high!” and to prove it, I stood up and walked around my chair a few times.

  That made Bobby laugh even harder. With him, you couldn’t win.

  “That proves you’re high,” he said. “If you weren’t high, you never would’ve gotten up.”

  After a few minutes I realized I must be high. I felt relaxed, peaceful, everything was okay. That night I found a new friend for the rest of my life.

  * * *

  I tell ya, I’m a bad drinker. I got loaded one night. The cops picked me up. The next morning I was in front of the judge. He said, “You’re here for drinking.” I said, “Okay, Your Honor, let’s get started.”

  * * *

  Back in those days, we used to call really good marijuana “boss pot.” The boss rarely came around, though. He was too busy. He had a lot of territory to cover. But when you did get boss pot, it was like, “Wow!”

  Going back about fifty years, I was with a friend when a guy told us, “I have a pound of boss pot.”

  Everything stopped. You didn’t hear that very often—the “boss” could be elusive—so I bought some from him.

  As soon as I got home, I smoked it, and it really was the boss. So much so that I had a problem—I was working in a nightclub called the Golden Slipper out in Glen Cove, Long Island, and I had to do my act that night. The problem was that I can’t do my act when I’m high on pot because my timing is all off.

  I smoked that boss pot at about six or seven o’clock, then got in my car, drove out to the club, and had dinner. I knew that I usually came down from a high when I ate a big meal, so I wolfed down everything on the menu, but the food didn’t dent my high at all. The show was now only a half hour away.

  I got dressed and was ready to go out onstage, but I was still stoned—whacked, in fact. I was thinking, What am I gonna do? I then remembered that I could work pretty well on a few drinks—so I decided that the best thing I could do was to counteract the high by getting drunk real fast.

  I went to the bartender and said, “Line up four shots of Scotch and a beer, will ya?”

  He said, “What’s with you?”

  “I know what I’m doing,” I said. And I knocked down the booze and the beer—bang, bang, bang—to put my head in a different place…which it did. Just not the place I was looking to go to.

  The show started, I did my act, and it was very tough for me. The pot was stronger than the booze. My timing was terrible.

  After the show I called the guy who had sold me the boss pot. I wasn’t mad at him…I wanted to buy some more.

  * * *

  I solved my drinking problem. I joined Alcoholics Anonymous. I still drink, but I use a different name. Oh, when I’m drinking, I don’t know what I’m doing. Sometimes the next day, I wake up in a strange bed, with a woman I can hardly remember and a kid with an accent playing with my feet.

  * * *

  All the stories you hear about people getting wild on marijuana are ridiculous. It’s been proven that pot does not make you violent. In fact, it makes you passive. When you’re high, the last thing you want to do is fight.

  Booze is the real culprit in our society. Booze is traffic accidents, booze is wife beating. People see a picture of a cocktail glass and they think, How dainty, how sophisticated. They oughta think about what booze leads to—you lose your wife, your home, your life. In my life I’ve seen many doctors and psychiatrists, and all of them have told me that I’m better off with pot than with booze. In fact, I now have written authorization from a California doctor that allows me to smoke pot for medicinal purposes. It’s a license to get high. What better reason to move to L.A.?

  Wish I’d had that “prescription” thirty years ago; life would have been easier. I was sitting in an airport one time, waiting for my plane. There was no one around, so I lit up a joint. I was taking a few tokes from it, but no one noticed, because it was a busy place. Everything was cool—or so I thought.

  Suddenly a cop came running toward me. I had the joint in my mouth, so I took it out of my mouth with my left hand and let it hang down by my side. When the cop said, “Hey, Rodney!” I figured I was screwed.

  But when he was standing right in front of me, he said, “Rodney, can I have your autograph?”

  I said, “Sure.”

  He had paper and a pencil with him. “Just make it out to Fred,” he said.

  I said, “No problem.”

  He gave me the pencil and paper, and with one hand—my right hand—I wrote: Fred, good luck. Rodney Dangerfield.

  As he walked away, I put the joint back in my mouth and took another hit.

  Don’t try that unless you’re in show business—and out of your mind.

  * * *

  I tell ya, my wife and I, we don’t think alike. She donates money to the homeless, and I donate money to the topless.

  * * *

  When you’re high, you become an avid reader. I remember one night I smoked some pot, then started reading the newspaper. An hour later, I said to myself, What am I doing? I was reading about fishing conditions in Anchorage. And I don’t even fish. And the paper was a month old.

  Pot does it for me, but some people want to go further. They try coke.

  I did coke for a while. What a mistake that was. Coke is easy to start, and hard to stop. If a group of guys are hanging around and one guy is doing coke, he’ll say, “Take a hit. You’ll feel like a new man.” He’s right; the problem is that once you feel like a new man, that new man wants a hit so that he can feel like a new man. And that goes on and on until the coke runs out, and you’re broke.

  When you’re on coke, things can be going bad and you think you’re doing great. I remember one night I was playing dice in Vegas, high on coke. I had lost $3,000—but on coke, I thought, Man, I’m doing great! I’m still here!

  Coke makes you do stupid things. One night I was home alone and decided to snort some coke, then watch TV. So I took a shower, then sat down on the edge of my bed and poured out two lines of coke. I snorted them, then sat back on the bed, put my feet up, and turned the TV on.

  A couple of minutes later, I spotted some coke down by my feet, at the end of the bed.

  I thought, How did I miss that?

  So I grabbed my straw, sniffed it up, and sat back to watch some TV.

  I was sitting there for a while, my feet on the bed, and I saw some more coke that I’d missed.

  Now I was thinking, What the hell’s going on?

  Then I realized what was going on—I had powdered my feet after my shower. I had been snorting foot powder.

  I wish I could say that was the stupidest thing I ever did on coke.

  * * *

  With my wife I could never have a good time. The other night I was drinking. She said, “I want you to stop. You’re drunk enough for me.” I told her, “I’m never drunk enough for you.”

  * * *

  You do things on coke you wouldn’t normally do, and you say things you wouldn’t ordinarily say, like, “Honey, I love you. It’s you and me against the world forever.”

  The next morning, you’re beat, your heart’s racing, you can’t breathe, and you feel terrible. You want out, and you hate everything—especially her.

  One night I was with a chick, and we snorted coke all night. The next day we took a walk on the beach. As we were walking along, she said, “Rodney, did you mean all those things you said to me last night?”

  I looked at her. I said, “Who are you?”

  * * *

  I’m not a sexy guy. I went to a hooker. I dropped my pants. She dropped her price.

  * * *

  Chapter Nine

&nbs
p; Can I Have Your Autograph…and More Butter?

  Same thing with my wife, no respect. I took her to a drive-in movie. I spent the whole night trying to find out what car she was in.

  People often ask me how I came up with my “no respect” line. When I got back into show business in 1961, I felt—for obvious reasons—that nothing in my life went right, and I realized that millions of people felt the same way. So when I first came back my catch phrase was “nothing goes right.” Early on, that was my setup for a lot of jokes.

  It worked pretty well, but a few years later, the book The Godfather came out and it was a bestseller and then the movie came out, which was even bigger. Because of The Godfather, suddenly all anybody would talk about was “respect.” You’ve gotta show me some respect…If she’s with me, you show her respect…It’s all about respect…”

  I realized that fit pretty well with the image I was now working with onstage, so I decided to come up with a joke that had the word “respect” in it. The first one I wrote was: “I get no respect. When I was a kid, I played hide-and-seek. They wouldn’t even look for me.”

  I was working a place in Greenwich Village, Upstairs at the Duplex, when I first did that joke, and the crowd loved it. After the show, people came up to me and said things like, “Hey, Rodney, me, too—no respect.”

  So I kept writing jokes off that line—“I don’t get no respect”—and it caught on more and more. Now I have probably written over five hundred “no respect” jokes. Here are a few of my early ones:

  With my old man, I never got respect. I asked him if I could go ice-skating on the lake. He told me to wait till it gets warmer.

  And the first time he put me on the roller coaster, he told me to stand up straight.

  With girls, I don’t get no respect. I went out with a belly dancer. She told me I turned her stomach.

  When I was a kid, my yo-yo, it never came back.

  People also ask me, “What was your big break in show business?” For me it didn’t happen like that. Elvis Presley did one song on The Ed Sullivan Show and the country went crazy. I had no big break. It was a combination of a lot of things: sixteen Ed Sullivan Shows, seventy times on The Tonight Show, forty-five Merv Griffin Shows, twenty Lite Beer commercials, and owning a successful nightclub. Then twenty-five years ago, I did Caddyshack, which got me into movies.

  Mine was not an easy road.

  My image has its problems. People watch a guy degrade himself for an hour onstage, they get carried away and start to believe that it’s really me up there. And with my image of “no respect,” many people have treated me that way. One night I was doing a show at my club, and as I was about to walk onstage, a man sitting close by said, “Hey, Rodney, before you go on, do me a favor, will ya? Let me have your autograph—and more butter?”

  One day I was taking a walk in Manhattan. A pretty girl recognized me and said hello. We got to talking, and she told me that she wanted to be a singer.

  I didn’t want her to have unrealistic dreams. “Show business is tough,” I told her, “even for talented people. It’s hard for anyone to make it.”

  And she said, “Well, you made it.”

  I guess she figured that if I’d made it, anybody could make it.

  One day I was with some people in the coffee shop at the Riviera Hotel in Vegas. The waiter told me that a couple at another table said they’d buy me a drink if I’d sit with them.

  I told the waiter, “Find out how long I have to sit with them to get a steak.”

  I was in another Vegas coffee shop having lunch with a few friends when I noticed that almost everyone in the place was staring at me. I was fairly popular then, but not that popular. I felt very ill at ease. I didn’t know what to do. I decided to wave every once in a while. After I’d paid the check and got up to leave, I found out why everybody had been “staring at me”—I’d been sitting under a huge keno board.

  * * *

  I was in a bar the other day, having a few shots, and they told me to get out. They wanted to start the happy hour.

  * * *

  My father’s funeral was one of the loneliest moments of my life. He was seventy-eight when he died.

  I flew down to Florida for the funeral, and I was the only person there—my mother had died a few years earlier. Just as the guys with the ropes were lowering my father’s casket into the grave, a guy came up to me and said, “Hey, Rodney, can I have your autograph?”

  When I decided to get back into show business, all my friends—and my father—told me I was nuts. He told me to get a regular job and forget show business. I’m glad that before he died he was able to see that I was successful.

  A few years before, I was working in a nightclub called the Valley Stream Park Inn out on Long Island, and I asked my father to come along. This was way before I’d made it on Sullivan and The Tonight Show.

  We walk into the club and see that they had a big party of four hundred people in the room. Only problem was that they were all Chinese. I said to my old man, “Look at this, will ya? All Chinese. What can I do here?” Of all nights to bring him, I pick this one. I knew I had a good act at that point, and I was really looking to impress my old man, but having four hundred Chinese people stare at me wasn’t going to do it.

  The nightclub manager could see that I was disappointed, so he said, “Don’t worry. They are all college graduates and they all speak English. They’ll understand everything you say.”

  He turned out to be right. They were a great audience and the show went great. I was so relieved that my father got to see me kill an audience.

  Driving home, my old man said to me, “I think you’ve got something.”

  * * *

  My ol’ man was tough. He allowed no drinking in the house. I had two brothers who died of thirst.

  * * *

  It’s not just me. Everyone—at one time or another—gets no respect. The movie Fargo got no respect. A few years back, it was up for Best Picture with The English Patient.

  I saw Fargo, and like most people, I thought it was great. I saw The English Patient and thought it needed a doctor. Like a lot of people I spoke to, I didn’t like the movie.

  The Motion Picture Academy named The English Patient best movie of the year.

  Now how could anyone who’d seen both those movies choose The English Patient over Fargo? I know how—it seems more sophisticated to like The English Patient. The name’s so classy—whatever it means—and the story’s so serious—whatever it was supposed to be about.

  From day one, comedians got no respect from the Academy. Actors and actresses know that comedy is the toughest thing to do in show business…unless it’s birdcalls. Many comedians are great actors, but few actors can do comedy. But comedy never gets respect. Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, Jack Benny, Jackie Gleason, Bob Hope—none of these legends ever won a regular Academy Award.

  Yet when the Academy has their awards show every year, they get a comedian to host it.

  * * *

  I told my landlord I want to live in a more expensive apartment. He raised my rent.

  * * *

  About ten years ago, AT&T was trying to lure back customers who’d switched to other phone services. Their big ad campaign said, “Call AT&T and we’ll take you back.” All you heard was “Call us, we’ll take you back.”

  So I wrote a joke about it. “I get no respect. I called up AT&T. They won’t take me back.” I did it on The Tonight Show, and it got a good laugh.

  That gave me an idea for an AT&T commercial, so I got in touch with some big shot there and told her my idea. She said, “I like it. Let me think about it for a week.” A week later, she said, “Let’s do it.”

  AT&T changed its mind four or five times over the next six months. I found out they took many surveys about whether people liked me, and asked them if they thought I would be good to do commercials for AT&T.

  Finally, they called me and said, “Okay, it’s definite. We’re
doing the commercial. We’ll start right away.”

  But I had a problem. I couldn’t start right away. I had to check into the hospital. I had an abdominal aortic aneurysm, which forced me to have a very distasteful operation. They cut my gut open, took all my intestines out, and put them on the table while they fixed my aorta. When they were finished, they stuffed all my intestines back in and stitched me up. For the next three or four months, I was in constant pain while my intestines shifted around, trying to settle.

  One day, I was out on my balcony in L.A., and I saw my new neighbor, Shaquille O’Neal, on his balcony. We gave each other a wave. The next day, he sent his calling card: one of his size 22EEE shoes, inscribed To Rodney, I gets no respect—Shaq.

  Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.

  I called the woman at AT&T and told her I had another “project” I was working on and had to finish it. I figured it would take about four weeks. She told me to call her as soon as I was free.

  As soon as I was feeling myself again, I called AT&T and said, “Let’s get going.”

  They flew a fellow from their New York advertising agency out to L.A., and he and I wrote two commercials in two days.

  We liked them, AT&T liked them, we were set. I shot both commercials in one day.

  A few weeks later, AT&T ran the commercials on TV, and they were a huge success. AT&T then got full-page ads with me in all the major newspapers, and radio, too. Almost immediately, the business started coming in. Everybody was happy, happy, happy.