by David Spade
Sometimes when we served them dinner at night (SERVED THEM DINNER, FOLKS!) the drunkest one would decide to get little Spade up on to the two-foot-high brick fireplace and say, “Do your fucking jokes, comedian. Dance for us, you clown.” And I would get up and do some sort of shitty act and they would bitch that I did the same act last time they asked me. And I would fire back, “I’m not exactly on a yacht in the south of France writing new material. Usually I’m in the shower trying to get paprika out of my pubes.”
You might be asking yourself where my brother Andy was during this hellish process. Well, he wasn’t exactly telling his brothers to go easy on me, his actual brother. In fact, he turned on me a few times while I was a plebe. One time I was in a lineup and all the pledges were drunk and beat-up from doing push-ups and getting screamed at as the actives walked around casually sipping drinks and barking out orders. Andy, who was an active, walked by me and whispered, “How you holding up, bro?” And I said, “Not great.” He said, “You want some ice cubes?” “Yeah,” I mumbled. Casually he turned and screamed to the entire room, “THIS PUSSY WANTS ICE CUBES. FUNK #1 THINKS HE’S SPECIAL. EVERYBODY DOWN, HE THINKS HE’S BETTER THAN YOU.” So everyone did push-ups while I sat there and ate ice cubes and felt their hatred.
The other time he burned me was the one-in-a-million time at a mixer when I got to leave with the prettiest girl there . . . a five-foot-ten DG who was featured on the ASU calendar. They called her “Wheels.” For some reason Wheels was flirting with me this particular evening, and I was freaking out about it. I thought this might be my one chance to get laid that semester, and we headed back to her dorm. Her dorm was about a hundred yards away, but being a gentleman I piped up with “I’ll drive us.” So, we got in my ’72 Volvo and pulled out of the SAE parking lot shitfaced . . . and got pulled over within five seconds. I gave the copper my ID, but he didn’t even bother, just pulled me out and cuffed me. I started begging. “This is my one chance with Wheels. I don’t know why I’m going to jail . . . please just let me slide this one time . . . please, let me catch a break.” Wheels waved and started walking home. The cop told me that I had a warrant out for my arrest, which was news to me. I went in and spent the night in jail and a comic bailed me out. Turns out that Andy had a pile of speeding tickets, to which he had signed my name whenever he got pulled over. Because he didn’t want to go to jail. When I called him on it, he didn’t even really care. Thanks, bro. I slowly started to realize that my only true chance of getting laid my first semester at ASU was with Oscar.
There was something great that came out of my SAE adventures. Every year there was a big show called “Greek Sing.” It was similar to Extravaganza, but bigger and better, and you had to be in a fraternity or sorority to participate. It basically involved big song-and-dance numbers, but in between the acts there were ten-minute breaks when a solo act would come out and sing, play the piano, or do something else. I decided that I needed to be one of those acts. So I gathered up the kit I had put together for my comedy gigs, which consisted of a Tom Petty hat, a little blue suitcase, a toy xylophone (for my Jeopardy! theme bit, aka hilarious!), my Casey Kasem impression, and the rest of my shenanigans, and auditioned for it. Yes, I was sort of a prop act at the beginning. I can’t keep hiding this fact. Anyway, when I found out I made it in, I was ecstatic . . . until the nerves kicked in. As the night got closer, I kept thinking, What the fuck am I doing? I was backstage, listening to the cheers for all the songs from the three thousand people in the audience, and I almost couldn’t take it. I felt super-sick. Every pretty girl in the Greek system was in the room watching. Every guy who hazed me, every person that I would see at any party for the next three years was out there, and in the next ten minutes they were going to decide whether I was cool or not. When I found out no one had ever done a stand-up act at Greek Sing before, I nearly left the auditorium. I went in the bathroom to wipe the sweat off before I went onstage, and I made a deal with myself. I decided that if I went out there and bombed, I’d quit comedy. My life was too hard at college as it was, and I couldn’t take the physical toll of worrying about this shit anymore. If I bomb, I will stop. That was my thought, and it made me feel better because in ten minutes I would be able to quit, because I knew I was going to bomb. And then . . . they introduced me.
“From Sigma Alpha Epsilon, David Spade.”
I got a polite smattering. The applause stopped before I got to the microphone. Bad sign. I think I used the old “How’s everybody doing?” to get things rolling. I heard one guy say, “Bad.” Strike one. Then I took the mic off the stand and said, “Can you hear me?” I hadn’t done a sound check and I didn’t realize that the crowd was absorbing most of the sound. I heard “No.” Shit. Already off to a rocky start.
I mentioned something about going to the DMV, how much I hate it, and some people laughed so I relaxed a little bit. I did my second joke and more people laughed and realized I was doing stand-up and the crowd decided to give me a chance. People stopped talking. The third joke killed and I was off and running. I probably did eight minutes that day, and they were the most memorable eight minutes of my life, because that was when I decided that I would do comedy forever. I got offstage and I was on cloud ten. I couldn’t believe how excited I was. I felt exactly 180 degrees opposite of before I went on. It was fucking great. I did something right.
From then on, everyone around town knew I was a comedian. People on campus started coming to shows to see me. Guys walking by me at school would give me a nod. That night was the single best thing that I got out of the Greek system. I see people now on the street who have read that I was in SAE, and it’s always funny because they like to stick their hand in from a crowd of people and slip me the secret handshake and give me the wink as if I’m going to let them and their ten friends backstage. They think it is the handshake that separates them from the rest of the crowd, and it usually does because I do give those guys a little extra time out of nostalgia; some guys are really, really into being an SAE brother. And some are actually very cool. Everyone gets something different out of the Greek system but it just didn’t resonate that much with me because once I went active they said, “You’ve made it through the hardest part; now you get to do it to the next guys.” And I thought, I don’t want to do it to the next guys, it’s too fucking mean. That was tough mentally and physically to get through—a job and school and pledging (I didn’t have money like the rest of them) so it wasn’t just a party. I had to get something out of school. I had nothing to fall back on and I didn’t have a dad and the family biz to fall into once I graduated. I wouldn’t do it to the next guys. I actually wound up dropping out of all of it right after that, and doing stand-up full-time. I have some fun memories of my time with that crew, but ultimately Greek Sing was the thing that meant the most and changed the direction of my life more than college itself.
So now I was a “comedian.”
CHAPTER SIX
GETTING SOME HEAT
I had been doing stand-up, kicking around the clubs for about seven years, when I got my first and only appearance on The Tonight Show. With Johnny Carson. I somehow snaked on two months before he retired. In my business you hear a lot of stories about the lucky or big break that launches someone’s career. And those do happen. But for me, the whole thing was a lot more gradual, and this helped keep me sane. I hated the pace of my career at the time, because I’m super fucking impatient, but fast fame would be hard to handle. My slow, incremental rise to medium fame was easier to deal with mentally. I feel like people who get famous very quickly can’t deal with the plethora (is that a word?) of shit that comes their way. Money, how everyone treats you differently in public, how your friends and family act, etc. etc. etc. I’m not sure people like the Kardashians would be more normal if they hadn’t been on TV at a young age but they couldn’t be any more nuts so I’m guessing fame affected them. Also, if you are using a talent you have focused on your whole life you at least feel like it paid off and you deserve
the success in a tiny way or at least some attention for your work. But when you’re on a show where the talent is arguing in the kitchen with your family, I’m guessing you feel like, Why the fuck am I a big deal? You have nothing to point to (except selfies). Now back to my story. I can’t pinpoint the one break that made the most change for me. I’m sure most people would point to Saturday Night Live. That’s obvious. But I wouldn’t have gotten to SNL without a lot of smaller things going right for me along the way. So, each of those mini breaks was very important at the time. And at the time of each one it was the greatest thing ever to happen to me in my life. So they all seemed huge.
The first break I got was when I tried to get in to the Los Angeles comedy club scene. This was after doing stand-up for about two years in Arizona. In Arizona, my big break had come when I got a slot in a bar called Anderson’s Fifth Estate when I was only nineteen. They had a comedy night every Tuesday, and I eventually became a regular. My friends would often come out and see me. I also won third place in a comedy contest at ASU one year. (I know. Third place. Where are those other guys, you ask? NOT making Hollywood films or sleeping with hot chicks!) I got a little whiff of micro-fame after my bronze finish. When I was packing up my Tom Petty hat and xylophone, a smoking ASU babe who was clearly out of my league was digging that I placed in this half-assed contest. She came home with me and boned me for no apparent reason. I don’t know if it was my UPS joke or my DMV bit that got her soaked but I do know that the downside was that this was also the first time I smelled a rank beaver. So brutal. I won’t elaborate but it was like a bug bomb went off in my room. It was super-uncool. Naturally, I never mentioned it to her, because I’m immature, and besides there’s really no way to break that news without devastating a woman. Hallmark hasn’t really cracked the code on this subject. Believe me, I scoured the aisles for the perfect card to deliver that news.
When school wrapped up that year I decided to head to L.A. for the summer, because I thought I might be ready for the comedy scene out there. My mom had gone to California to work for some multilevel marketing company. She was a writer for their magazine and got me a job there. While the whole thing felt like a big scam to me, I needed the dough. So from eight to five I spent my time filing stupid shit and plotting my comedy career. The only drug I could afford to numb my boredom with was Dexatrim. (For those of you under forty, Dexatrim was an over-the-counter medication marketed for weight loss. It was more like speed. Think of it as the Adderall of the Eighties.) Just so I could stay awake during boring filing. I know filing sounds glamorous but it’s actually shitty. Showbiz had to wait . . . at least from 8 to 5 P.M.
I was aware of a few comedy clubs in town. The Improv and the Comedy Store were the most famous. There were some other places, but these were the biggies, the seven-nights-a-week places that I wanted desperately to crack in to. They each had an amateur night, too, and I decided the Improv was my best shot. I drove down to the club one night with my crummy little shoe box of props. (Yes, I was still using the props. I used them for my first two years as a full-time comedian, but at this point I had whittled the kit down from my mom’s old honeymoon suitcase to a shoe box.) I had decided that if I passed the audition, I could try to get maybe two or three spots a week and then I could afford to move out to Los Angeles permanently. I put my stupid name in a stupid hat, and waited. I sat in the back of the club, in my stupid outfit. (An old Batman sweatshirt, tight jeans, and Reebok high-tops. Batman signals comedy, I guess?) The booker would pull seven names at a time, and each time a name was called my stomach would tighten and I would sweat a little more, in panic that I would get chosen next. I sat there like a dope, waiting from eight to midnight, watching the crowd dissipate, and never got called, and then I had to leave because of the dogshit 8 A.M. filing job. My first trip to the Improv was a total bust. I realized pro showbiz would have to wait a little bit longer.
I went back home with my tail neatly placed between my legs and did stand-up in Arizona again, and then hit the road for another few years to get better. That Improv disaster scared me off L.A. a bit. Then a comedian I had met named Fred Wolf got me a show at the San Diego Improv, opening for a comedy team called the Funny Boys with Jonathan Schmock and Jim Vallely. Fred was a comedian who was cool to me when he saw me go on in Arizona. He was a traveling road comic and threw me a bone because he liked my act. (We stayed friends. Later he worked on SNL and we wrote Dickie Roberts and Joe Dirt together.) The Funny Boys were great. Super-cool and hilar. They told me I needed to come back to Los Angeles ASAP and audition at the Improv. I listened to them because they were a great comedy team that had been on TV shows and even worked as writers on some (also; trivia alert: Jonathan famously played the maître d’ in Ferris Bueller). Jim even said I could crash on his couch for a while. My response? “Fuck yes.”
I drove out west in my crummy red ’72 Volvo a week later. I somehow ran into Louie Anderson soon after I arrived, and he told me he could get me an audition at the Comedy Store. Louie was an even bigger deal. He was a regular at the Comedy Store and had been on Carson as well as many other shows. So I was sitting pretty this go-round in the big city. I had three legit comedians vouching for me and all I needed was one of these places to say yes. Either one would have been a major step for me in terms of becoming a pro comedian. Since there was such a rivalry between these clubs, you didn’t get to play both unless you were a major pro. I wasn’t gunning for anything like that. One would have been just great, thanks.
So, this time I headed to the Comedy Store, a hallowed place famous for launching the career of Richard Pryor and so many others before me. The woman in charge there is named Mitzi Shore, and she is notoriously tough. Plus she’s Pauly Shore’s mom, but that’s beside the point. I thought I had a tight six minutes to showcase for Mitzi. I wasn’t as crazy nervous as I had been that time at the Improv a few years back. I had finally ditched the props (thank God). I was ready. Louie came up and told me that I was on in twenty, so I hit the bar to have a drink and get my set together in my head. Only now, the stress was starting to get to me and my head started pounding. I threw back two Anacin tablets (or something equally dated, maybe Bufferin). Now here’s where it gets interesting.
This situation was so stupid, yet I remember every detail. I had only about an inch left in my Greyhound (vodka and grapefruit juice) when I tried to chase down my dry old-school aspirins. Well, they didn’t go down. And I choked. Then I ran to get water. Then I tried to hawk it up because one was now stuck in my throat. That didn’t work, either. Then, somehow, the aspirin moved up into my sinuses and was burning. I sniffed and hawked and after a few minutes it came flying loose in a massive loogie. So disgusting, and such a project. Now I was exhausted and my heart was beating from fear of dying and my headache was twenty times worse. All of a sudden . . . I got called to the stage. For the first five minutes of my adult life I hadn’t been thinking about comedy. I was just trying not to die. Now I realize I lived through this fucked-up sitch, but at the time I had to change gears really fast and do the most important audition of my life.
You can probably guess how this story ends.
I did my dopey little act for Mitzi Shore before a modest crowd of forty or so and then scampered out front on Sunset to wait. Louie came out a few minutes later.
“She’s passing. Sorry.”
“Holy shit.” What a horrible feeling in my gut. Could I be way off? Do I suck? “I thought I did pretty good. No major fuckups.”
“She liked your stage presence, but she doesn’t think you’re ready. Sorry.”
Silence. I just stared. Then I said, “Cool. Cool. Okay . . . um . . . ya, well, thanks for setting it up, sorry it didn’t work.” (Trying to sound undevastated.)
I drove home in a daze. Holy fuck, one of the key puppeteers of my career just said no. What the hell was I going to do?
Turns out I didn’t have too long to figure it out. I had to go to the Improv. This was my second and last hope.
&nbs
p; The Funny Boys had set up an audition so this time around I didn’t have to wait in line on amateur night with my props in a shoe box and my name in a hat. That meant I had to be ready to perform, because if they passed I couldn’t audition again for another six months. And when I did, I would already have a stink on me from getting passed over. I was staying on Jim Vallely’s couch, and every night I was quietly freaking out as my audition crept closer. I am overthinking my act completely. I couldn’t really practice because no one will put me on. So I said it out loud in the bathroom, in the mirror, and I can safely say, it wasn’t killing.
The night of my audition, we all headed down to the club. I was twenty years old, not quite twenty-one. I looked fifteen. The chalkboard outside the club included the name of the evening’s performers, and for the first time, my name was up there. I had gone there so many times to hang out, to have a drink and try to catch a glimpse of the great comedians I had seen on television so many times—people like Jay Leno, Paul Reiser, Jerry Seinfeld, Kevin Nealon, and Dennis Miller. All on the lineup. They all seemed to be about thirty-five, which to me was the oldest age I could think of at that time. I thought my only chance was that I was twenty with long white-blond hair and a lot of my jokes were about looking young. That would set me apart because Reiser, Seinfeld, and Leno all had a sort of similar “comedian” look, in my eyes. So I tried to use my different “Arizona” look to help me stand out.
I think that night I opened up with “Hi, I’m David Spade and I’m ten.” That would usually get a laugh. Then I held up ten fingers and said, “That’s this many. My mom just dropped me off. She’s at Safeway. She’ll be back to pick me up at nine.” The set went well, and I went back into the bar super-adrenalized because I thought I had a chance of getting a weekly spot there. We sat at a big table and then one of the Funny Boys got word I passed, so we ordered a round of shots. Bruce Willis happened to be there that night and knew the guys so they invited him to join us. I was shitting my pants then because I was sitting with Bruce Willis. I almost forgot about making the Improv, until the waiter came back with the booze.
