by Todd Glass
To say that the night left an impression on me would be an understatement. I felt so exhilarated I couldn’t contain it. I went back the following Friday. This time, Gilbert Gottfried was the headliner. His act was kind of a riff on comedic conventions, making fun of the generic routines that some stand-ups do. I felt like most of the audience didn’t get it, but I did. I laughed so hard I almost hyperventilated.
I wasn’t just hooked—I became obsessed with Comedy Works. I’d start talking about it every Monday morning at school: “Who wants to go to the Comedy Works? Who wants to go to the Comedy Works?”
Keep in mind that this was 1981. Comedy clubs were something that happened in New York or L.A. I couldn’t believe that a place like this existed in Philadelphia. For five dollars, I got to see young, relatively unknown comics like Eddie Murphy, Steven Wright, Richard Lewis, Roseanne Barr, and Tim Allen, not to mention up-and-coming stars like Jay Leno, Paul Reiser, and Jerry Seinfeld.
I wanted to be in the front row at the first show every Friday night. After school I’d grab any friends I could find and barrel eighty miles an hour down the Schuylkill Expressway to beat the traffic. If, after the first show ended, I happened to run into some more friends who were on line for the late show, I would shell out another five dollars to join them. One night, Steve Young pulled me aside—he’d noticed me moving back in line for a second show and let me in for free. I couldn’t believe that the club’s owner knew who I was. I was so happy that I nearly had a nervous breakdown.
At almost every show, Steve would make an announcement: “Hey, if you think you’re funny, Wednesday night is our open mike night. Why not try your hand at comedy?” After about five months of weekly visits to the club, I decided I was ready. I dragged all my friends to the show . . .
. . . and chickened out.
A week later, I got up the nerve to try again. This time I made it onto the stage. “I hate how they put the car horn so close to the windshield wipers,” I said. “You go to honk at someone and you end up washing your windshield. It would be scarier to throw yarn out your window.”
I may have been a sixteen-year-old spraying whipped cream at my brothers in the crowd and telling jokes about The Brady Bunch, but on that night, I killed.
Flush with success I decided to go back for more a week later. This time I invited everyone I could—and I bombed. I’ve talked to plenty of other comedians who have had the same experience, acing their first time onstage and flailing the next. I don’t know why it happens—maybe your first time out, you have a certain sense of vulnerability that the audience can sense. Succeed, and some of that vulnerability is gone, making the laughs harder to come by.
But if you’re meant to do comedy nothing will stop you. Comedy is like sex: treacherous. You have to hang out with people you normally wouldn’t, doing things that take you out of your comfort zone hoping to impress them. Getting naked with strangers? If it wasn’t for our built-in desire for procreation, I bet most people wouldn’t dare going after sex. But that natural drive keeps us coming back for more.
I knew right away that I had a natural drive to do comedy. Bombing my second time out wasn’t going to keep me away. After the show, another comic took me aside. “You were funny,” he assured me. “You’ve just got to calm down a bit.”
A few seconds after he walked away, the Legendary Wid—the man with 250 props—patted me on the back. “You don’t have to calm down,” he said. “Just be who you are.”
CHAPTER 12
OPENING ACT
Todd gets a weekend.
I was back on the Comedy Works stage just about every Wednesday night. High school became even blurrier—on the Thursday mornings I actually showed up, I got really good at forging my dad’s signature on late slips. And by then I was already counting the hours to the next show on Friday night.
I was hanging around the club so often that Steve Young decided to put me to work. I did everything, from lights to sound to keeping the flow of traffic moving up and down the narrow staircase. Steve also let me use the PA to announce that the show was about to begin. One night I decided to try my hand at a joke, the same one that had cracked me up the first night I’d visited the club.
“If there’s a Mr. and Mrs. Burke in the audience, a Mr. and Mrs. Burke, please call your babysitter immediately. She wants to know where you keep the fire extinguisher.”
Suddenly I heard a woman’s scream and a commotion in the audience as a terrified couple rushed for the door. It turns out the joke plays a lot better when you use a more obscure last name.
“I think you’re funny,” the doorman, Tony Molino, told me one night after I finished my open-mike set. “You’re going to get a weekend spot soon.”
That was nice of him to say, but getting a paid weekend spot was such a big deal back then that I remember thinking I wished he knew what the fuck he was talking about.
As it turned out, he did.
One afternoon, everyone was buzzing because Jay Leno was coming to Comedy Works. I’d grown up watching Jay do stand-up on Merv Griffin and The John Davidson Show. While he was still a few years away from subbing for Johnny Carson, there was no doubt that he was a legitimate star and that his show was a big deal, even for Comedy Works—tickets were selling for fifteen dollars instead of the usual five.
He was coming to Philadelphia from a club in New Jersey and someone had to go pick him up. I nearly shat in my pants when Steve asked me to do it. I borrowed my parents’ station wagon and brought along two of my friends for moral support. “Whatever you do,” I hissed, “don’t ask any stupid questions.”
Jay was friendly, but I was still incredibly nervous to have him in my car. I wanted to talk to him—about performing, about life, about anything—but I was seventeen and I was nervous and my mind went blank. The only thing I could think of was a piece of trivia I’d heard at the club: Jay always got paid in cash. “So hey,” I asked him. “What do you do with your money?”
“What, are you looking for financial advice?” Jay replied.
“No,” I tried to explain. “I mean where do you keep it? I heard you only got paid in cash.”
My friends in the backseat started cracking up. Jay looked puzzled, wondering why we were laughing at him. I sighed and explained that I’d made my friends promise not to ask him any stupid questions.
Jay gave me a crooked smile. “Well, I guess you lowered the bar for them. So where’s Steve Young? Will he be at the club?”
I explained to Jay that Steve taught a stand-up comedy class at Temple University. Jay’s face lit up. “Take me there. Right now.”
I strolled across campus with Jay. Everyone seemed to be staring at us. I didn’t do a very good job of hiding my smile.
We got to Steve’s class, where his students were taking their final exam. These kids must have been nervous enough having to do a five-minute set in front of their classmates—I can only imagine how much terror they must have felt when Jay Leno walked into the room. But Jay was incredibly supportive. He even bought a joke right on the spot from one of the girls in the class. (Which, thirty years later, I can still remember: “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter? I tried it. I can’t believe it’s not car wax!” Maybe not that funny now, but back then it was very topical.)
When I got back home, after dropping Jay off at his hotel, there was a message from Steve on the answering machine. “Call me,” he said in a very low voice. “I might have something that would be fun for you to do tonight.”
I called him back immediately. “So how would you like to open up for Jay Leno?” Steve asked.
“Tonight?” My stomach started doing somersaults.
“All the shows . . . the whole weekend.”
I hung up the phone and did my best to contain my emotions. This was a big deal, a kind of validation I’d never experienced before. I sucked in school and I never scored a touchdown. But now I was not only doing something important to me, I was succeeding at it. Someone thought I was good enough to op
en for Jay-fucking-Leno!
The excitement lasted two minutes. Then fear set in.
I fought through my nervousness and opened the show with my best ten minutes. The middle was Tom Wilson, visiting from L.A., where he’d moved to pursue his career. Then I returned for two more minutes to do a few more jokes and to introduce the headliner.
Jay stepped out on the stage and raised his hands to quiet the cheering audience. Watching him work those nights was like going to school for me, if school had been a place where I actually learned something. Jay was a total pro—you knew it from the moment he spoke. I had already seen plenty of comedians who began their set by trying to excite the crowd: “How’s everybody doing?” But Jay simply walked out, waited for the crowd to get quiet, and moved right into his routine. “I see Nancy Reagan won the Humanitarian Award this year. Good for her, I’m glad she beat out that conniving bitch Mother Teresa.”
What followed were fifteen minutes of joke after joke, barely giving the audience a chance to breathe. When he finally paused to say, “How ya doing, Philadelphia?” the crowd erupted.
“And how about that Todd Glass,” he said. “He’s a young kid, asked me for advice. Didn’t know what to tell him. Stay out of prison?”
I looked out at the audience, spotting my parents and friends. I felt great. I’d finally found a place where I belonged.
CHAPTER 13
SPRUCE STREET
Where Todd encounters swarming gays.
The end of my senior year was approaching. I knew I wasn’t going to graduate with any kind of diploma, but that didn’t seem as daunting or scary anymore. The fear of not knowing what to do was gone. I couldn’t wait to get started with my new life.
Comedy Works had become a regular paying gig. It was starting to feel strange living at home with my parents, so I decided to move into an apartment in Center City with some other young comedians from the club. There were only two problems with the new arrangement: Parking was a nightmare and the apartment was on Spruce Street.
Spruce Street, I quickly learned after moving in, was Philadelphia’s gay street. It sounds so funny—somehow different cities end up with different streets that are notoriously gay. And somehow, as chance would have it, I ended up living there.
Everywhere I looked, guys were holding hands with guys. Girls were holding hands with girls. When I couldn’t find a parking space nearby, I’d have to walk four or five blocks through this scene. Is this who I am? I thought to myself. Is this who I’m going to be?
Again, keep in mind that it was 1983. AIDS was emerging as a deadly disease, but we had a president who wouldn’t even mention it by name.
If everyone had been able to be open about who they were, I would have known that gay people come in all stripes. But the few gays I saw on TV or in popular culture tended to feel like caricatures to me, all affected speech and effeminate mannerisms. The people I passed on Spruce Street seemed to behave the same way.
“I don’t care that they’re gay,” I complained one night to my roommates. “But why do they have to be such a parody?”
“I’m sure there are all kinds of gay people,” one of them replied. “There are all kinds of straight people, too.”
Living in an openly gay neighborhood with clearly open-minded roommates, you’d think that this would have been a perfect opportunity for me to come out. There was another young comedienne named Ro who occasionally crashed on our couch. One night, after one of my roommates tried to hit on her, Ro confessed that she was gay.
“She was actually afraid that I wouldn’t want to be friends with her anymore,” my roommate later told me, shaking his head in disbelief. “I mean, I couldn’t believe that Rosie (last name: O’Donnell) would even be worried about something like that. It crushed me that she would think it would even matter.”
But I understood why she was afraid. At least she had the guts to be honest about it with her friends.
I think it drove me crazy to see so many openly gay people around me, especially the ones who were my age—I secretly admired them for living honestly, while secretly hating them for acting so differently from me.
Eventually it got to be too much. I moved back home with my parents in Valley Forge, a development I found myself explaining one night to Paul Reiser.
Everyone who worked at Comedy Works loved Paul. He was hilarious, a rising star who, despite having just done the movie Diner, always hung out with us after his shows, taking a genuine interest in our lives. One night he asked me where I lived.
“With my parents at home,” I explained. Paul seemed confused—I still looked a lot older than I was—so I quickly added: “But I’m nineteen. That’s where I belong.”
Reiser laughed and, like the nervous wreck I am, I kept going. “I used to live on Spruce Street, but, you know, it was hard with all the gay people swarming around. You know Spruce Street.”
I’m mortified now by what I felt and said back then. Clearly I was looking for some kind of response. I couldn’t have been more pleasantly surprised by the one I got.
“Well,” Paul said thoughtfully, “maybe someday we’ll evolve enough as a society that they won’t have to all live on one street.”
CHAPTER 14
BOTTLED UP
Todd makes a friend.
When I was around thirteen, we had a pet parrot. You can train parrots to say just about anything, but the most interesting things are the words and phrases that the bird picks up on its own, a kind of fun-house mirror reflection of the home it lives in. Our bird had two favorites:
“Paul [my dad], do me a favor.”
“Maureen [my mom], I’m thirsty.”
My aunt Lil was a human being, not a parrot, but at times she seemed a little confused at what separated the two species. “Maureen,” Lil said to my mom one day, “you need to give your bird some water. He’s really thirsty.”
As a thirteen-year-old, this was about the most hilarious thing I’d ever heard. “Why is that so funny?” Lil demanded.
When I stopped rolling on the floor long enough to explain to her that talking birds weren’t actually using human cognitive skills to put a sentence together, but mimicking what they’ve heard people say, Lil got indignant. “Okay, okay!” she said. “It’s not that big a deal!”
Even now, as an adult, Lil’s reaction to the bird still cracks me up. I like to imagine how the conversation between her and the parrot might have continued if we hadn’t enlightened her:
“Paul, do me a favor.”
“Has anyone seen Paul? The bird’s looking for Paul, Maureen. Do you know where he is? The parrot needs a favor.”
“Paul, do me a favor.”
“Paul’s not here right now . . . My name is Lil. Maybe there’s something I can do for you?”
“Paul, do me a favor.”
“I’m heading out to the store right now. Is there something you need?”
“Paul, do me a favor.”
“I just told you—Paul isn’t here.”
“Paul, do me a favor.”
“Look, I’m trying to help. But you’re making it really hard.”
“Maureen, I’m thirsty.”
“Fine! I’ll get you some water . . . What, you don’t say thank you?”
“Maureen, I’m thirsty.”
“You know, for a bird, you’re a real asshole.”
Then again, maybe there aren’t as many differences between people and parrots as we think. As a teenager, I was surrounded by open-mindedness—people like my parents and Paul Reiser. But I still felt miles away from being able to talk to any of them about my sexual feelings.
Okay, I’d occasionally admit to myself, you’re gay. But that was as far as I got. I buried whatever thoughts and feelings I was experiencing as fast as I could. When I look back and wonder why I felt like I had to hide from everyone, one reason stands out above all others: From a very young age I heard the word “gay” used as a pejorative term. The word—along with others like “fairy,” “homo
,” and “fag”—was almost always used to express dislike or distaste, a substitute for “different,” “weird,” or “out of the ordinary.”
“That car is so gay.”
“What are you, a homo?”
“Don’t be such a faggot.”
I don’t think that I was being oversensitive—these were the facts, a reasonable conclusion I’d drawn from the environment I grew up in. Every time someone said those words, it felt like a paper cut. The little wounds kept building and building until all I could hear was:
“Gaygayfaggotgaysissygayhomogayfairypansygaygay . . .”
You get the idea. The crazy part, at least with the benefit of hindsight, is that most of the people who were using these words weren’t really homophobic, which makes the whole situation feel even more sad. I mean, if you’re a full-on homophobe, at least you’re speaking in a way that’s true to your feelings. But the majority of people—people who never would have consciously meant to hurt me—were using these words in a way that did. The vibe they were sending out to the world didn’t match what they were carrying in their hearts. Kind of weird to think that, when it comes to words like these, the homophobe is the one who’s doing a better job of articulating his true feelings.
Even though a lot of comedians I was surrounded by were evolved and open-minded, there were plenty who weren’t. I heard countless gay jokes told on and off the stage. Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay made jokes in their specials about homosexuals—sometimes even AIDS—and got big laughs.
As a comedian, you have the right to talk about whatever you want. That’s the point of what we do. But at the same time, you can still be judged for what you say, by time, by your peers, or both. Watch those old Eddie Murphy specials now—there’s no doubting his comedic genius and abilities, but do you think those gay jokes have really withstood the test of time? There’s nothing wrong with getting into topics that are taboo or controversial; the real test is in your approach. Are you going after an easy laugh by perpetuating an old stereotype? Or are you coming at it from a new angle, using comedy as a tool that can shatter the old stereotypes and make people look at a situation in a different way? You don’t have to spend money going to a comedy club to hear the same old takes on worn-out stereo-types—that kind of ignorance is easy to find in the real world.
