Mean Dads for a Better America

by Tom Shillue

  But when it came time to audition, I went back to my roots of classic entertainment. I went down to the Norwood Public Library and memorized a few routines from the comedy albums that were available in their collection. I selected one of Bob Newhart’s famous one-sided “telephone conversations,” where he, as the head of the East India Company, speaks with Sir Walter Raleigh in the New World as he tried to wrap his mind around Raleigh’s enthusiasm for tobacco.

  SPEAKING INTO THE PHONE:

  What you got for us this time, Walt, you got another winner for us?

  . . .

  Tob-acco . . . er, what’s tob-acco, Walt? . . .

  . . .

  It’s a kind of leaf, huh? . . .

  Classic routines like this work with any audience. Years later, as an adult, I went to see Bob Newhart live at Carnegie Hall (June 12, 1998) and as an encore he performed a few of his vintage bits: “King Kong,” where a security guard on his first day on the job at the Empire State Building speaks by phone to his supervisor about an unforeseen problem; and “Women Drivers,” which despite its antiquated title and boldly retro perspective, got huge laughs from an audience of Manhattan elites.

  I did the Sir Walter Raleigh routine word for word for Mr. Fuccillo (Mr. Fooch), the math teacher who was faculty advisor for the Gong Show, and when I finished he said to me, “Shillue . . . you might be our Chucky this year. I got a feeling about you. . . . It’s an odd choice but I think it might work.”

  I was an odd choice. But the nerdy attention to detail I had brought to that old-school routine impressed him enough so that he made his decision straightaway. I was shocked but I didn’t have time for false modesty. “I’d be all over it,” I said.

  I did a lot of prep work for my role as host of the Gong Show. Because of the popularity of the TV show, the running gags were built in and all you had to do was ape the character that Chuck Barris had created. He wore a different zany hat each time he came out to introduce a new act, he told bad jokes punctuated by rim shots on the drums, and he would be overly sympathetic to the losing acts. “Why, oh why,” he would ask the judges, feigning genuine concern, “did you gong this adorable and talented creature?”

  I knew I could put on a good show. I had seen what worked in previous years. But I had a vision for myself, too: I wanted to use these elements and then build upon them to make the show my own. If it seems I was taking the role of talent show host very seriously, I was. When you’re in high school, that’s the only world that matters. I saw the Gong Show as a great opportunity to put a stamp on the Shillue high school experience. This show would be the closing scene on my teen movie, so I knew I had better get it right, and do it my way.

  Obviously, the teen-movie lens we all were using in the 1980s was the work of filmmaker Mr. John Hughes. We watched his movies and thought that our lives ought to measure up to those we saw on screen, even though we knew they were fictional. We didn’t have Instagram or Pinterest to use as a scrapbook for our adolescent experience, plotting out the highlights to brag to our friends in competitive ways. We had the John Hughes movie, and I was in the final act. But here’s the thing: I wasn’t worried about anything. I had nothing to lose. After my ordeal with Catherine, and spending every day at the hospital with her after school, all of the little high school dramas seemed small and insignificant. I was focused.

  In planning what would become my stand-up debut, I did what many comedians have done in some form or another at the beginning of their careers: I stole material. My plan wasn’t to plagiarize really, but to present classic routines as a tribute, basically a comedy cover-act. But there is no harm in that, and in fact I would recommend it. There is no better way to learn than with good material. So in addition to the purloined routine from Bob Newhart, I also spent weeks learning Rich Little’s famous “The Big Game” from the LP The First Family Rides Again from 1981. It’s a vocal impression tour de force depicting a fictitious poker game that Reagan hosts at the White House with Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Like the Bob Newhart monologue, I took the record to the listening room at the library and played it over and over, transcribing it onto a yellow legal pad. I then took my script home and learned it line for line, and although my impressions weren’t very good, the jokes were solid and based on broad caricatures of what Americans thought of the current and former presidents:

  NIXON: Sit down, Gerry. Let’s get this show on the road.

  REAGAN: Well, all right. Now the name of the game is draw poker.

  CARTER: I fold!

  REAGAN: I didn’t deal the cards yet, Jimmy.

  As a comedy routine it still holds up. It’s simple, tight, universal, and hilarious, especially when it is delivered by someone as skilled as Rich Little.

  As I learned the script line for line, I began to appreciate how the routine builds. No words are wasted, the lines are short and to the point. I learned about the crucial impact of that mysterious thing my dad was always talking about, timing. You had to deliver punch lines at just the right moment to create maximum impact. You can pause sometimes, if you need the audience to make a quick connection, but “slow build” doesn’t really work in stand-up. The best punch lines are delivered just as the audience is already figuring it out for themselves. It’s like getting the entire audience to sneeze at the same time. It takes great skill to pull off something like this. I pored over these routines and worked them to death. I knew I’d stumbled on to something big. I loved this stuff. I knew I’d never be able to stop doing it.

  As the show approached, my faculty advisors, Mr. Fuccillo and Miss Dyer, gave me tips and offered a bunch of recycled jokes that had been used in past years. I remembered many of those jokes and didn’t want to repeat them, but I asked them to keep the jokes coming just in case there was something good. I also found some joke books at the library, such as The Toastmaster Generals Favorite Jokes by George Jessel, and Doc Blakely’s Handbook of Wit and Pungent Humor. Unsurprisingly, 99 percent of what I found in these tomes was not suitable for my purposes, because they either took too long to set up or took place in a doctor’s office in 1958 (too retro even for old-fashioned Tom Shillue!).

  At a rehearsal one day, Miss Dyer approached me when I was alone. She whispered to me, “Here’s one you can use. . . . Mr. Fuccillo was so lonely in high school, he used to go to the drive-in movie alone and do push-ups in the back seat of his car.”

  I wrote it down. It didn’t seem that funny to me, but it was short and punchy and Miss Dyer seemed to think it was hilarious. So I wrote it down, with the intention of figuring it out later, and using it only if I needed it.

  Along with all the comedy material, I prepared a couple of songs with my barbershop quartet, the Boys Next Door. We’d been singing in the bathroom and the stairwells for months and I thought it was time to debut the group in front of an audience.

  The night of the show arrived, and it was a packed house, as usual. But, for the first time, the show was going to be simulcast on local cable TV, so there was a production van parked outside the exit door, and three cameras in the auditorium. There was a buzz of small-town excitement in the air.

  All the amateur acts on the show got a warm reception. Of course they did—it was a filled-to-capacity audience full of friends and family. You have to remember, this was pre–American Idol America, so the standards were pretty low. If you could get through “Once, Twice, Three Times a Lady” and end in the same key you started in, you were considered a prodigy, and shipped off to conservatory school, blissfully unaware you were embarking on a bright future in the service industry. This is why I don’t find it at all sad when Simon Cowell makes some fifteen-year-old cry in front of her shocked family and all of America. Much better to have your dreams crushed when you are young and resilient. Trust me, those crying American Idol kids are back playing soccer and laughing with their friends a week later. Or they should be. I think the “Once, Twice, Three Times a Lady” guy I went to high school with is now working at Guitar Center.

&nb
sp; The vast majority of the students in the show, however, were just there to have a good time. Most of the acts in the Senior Gong Show were just kids matching their lip movements to prerecorded music. (The term lip-sync was not yet common usage in the ’80s—a bunch of guys doing an air-guitar version of “Brown Sugar” was listed in the program as “A Pantomime of the Rolling Stones.” How quaint.)

  And of course there was the requisite dance number where the boys’ football team dressed in drag and did a kickline dance to whoops and hollers from the audience. I’m sure there wasn’t a town in America whose high school variety show in the 1980s didn’t include a showstopping number where jocks donned skirts and pranced around to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”

  I still remember the experience of hosting the show vividly—the funny hats and the generic jokes worked as I expected them to, since these were the familiar touchstones that everyone who watched the television version of The Gong Show knew. But my ad-libs in between acts were getting unexpected laughs, and this was the real thrill for me. I was getting organic laughs by bantering with the audience. This is where I made a decision right there on the stage to abandon my “acquired” material. I ditched the Bob Newhart and Rich Little routines I’d worked so hard on and decided to go it alone. This was the first time in my life I was in command of a crowd, and I wanted it to be all me. It was a very powerful feeling and I knew I wouldn’t forget it. If you hear comedians talking about their first good crowd, it sounds a lot like addicts talking about the first time they smoked meth or snorted a line of coke. I imagine the feelings are very similar—especially the sense that there is no going back.

  Halfway through I tried some of my original material. I did some impressions of the principal and vice principal. They did the morning announcements over the PA every day, and every student was familiar with their cadence. The principal, Mr. Piccirilli, always began by tapping three times on the microphone and saying, “Could I have your attention please.”

  Using the handheld microphone I unremarkably re-created the tap, tap, tap . . . and brought down the house. I moved on to the vice principal, Mr. Usevich. He talked loud, so I talked loud . . . boom, easy laughs. Since I now had the crowd in the palm of my hand, I continued. Mr. Murphy, the phys. ed. teacher, was standing at the side of the auditorium; I suppose he was acting as a chaperone in some capacity, but I had no idea he was going to be there. Mr. Murphy was a very popular, very good-looking young guy, and in great shape, but he had a bald spot on the top of his head. Perhaps because he was considered such a “hunk” in every other way, students felt very comfortable teasing him about his bald spot, and he always seemed to be a good sport about it. Coming off my roasting of the administration, I thought I would ad-lib a line about him.

  “Mr. Murphy is here . . . Hey, could we turn down the lights in this area [gesturing to Mr. Murphy and squinting], they’re kind of reflecting off Mr. Murphy’s head.”

  I wasn’t prepared for the response. A huge burst of laughter, mixed with “Ooohh”s and “Aaah”s. It wasn’t even a good roast joke; it was a bit rambling. But as Mr. Murphy, his face now red, smiled and nodded, the crowd continued to laugh. They loved it, so of course I continued. Then I recalled the joke Miss Dyer had given me. It was buried in the back of my cue cards, but I was able to recite it from memory.

  “You know, Mr. Murphy was so lonely in high school . . . he used to go to drive-in movies and do push-ups in the back seat of his car.”

  The audience absolutely exploded. I can’t describe the cacophony that followed. I still didn’t find the joke that funny, but the crowd was losing it. They were shrieking, and howling, and looking at each other like they couldn’t believe what I’d said. It was very strange, but I wasn’t going to argue with a big laugh. I stood there smirking like a pro, trying to milk it the way Johnnie Carson did, looking from side to side at no one in particular as if to say, “I don’t even know what I just said!” But the reality was, I didn’t. I thought I had made a joke about a guy doing push-ups.

  It took a while for the crowd to quiet down, and as I moved on to announcing another act, I could see the principal, Mr. Piccirilli running down the side aisle and speaking in an animated fashion with one of the guys manning the public access TV cameras. He didn’t look happy, and for a moment I thought he might be upset about the bald joke; he was probably not aware that it was a running gag at school, and that Mr. Murphy was totally cool with it. Anyway, what did I care? I was owning the stage just then.

  Like most scandals, the Norwood High Gong Show Scandal took a while to brew. I had heard over the weekend that there was some type of “power outage” during the cable broadcast of the show, and only part of it had aired. I wasn’t aware of the real story, which was that after my roast of Mr. Murphy, Mr. Piccirilli had, in fact, stopped the public access broadcast and confiscated the videotapes of the show. I was called into his office bright and early on Monday morning. As I was walking into the office, Mr. Fooch and Miss Dyer were walking out, and they had grave expressions on their faces.

  Mr. Piccirilli told me that he had destroyed the videotape of the show and he was embarrassed for the parents and families who were in attendance. He assured me that it was not my impressions of him and the vice principal that were at issue.

  “We have good senses of humor and we can take it. It was the remark that you made about Mr. Murphy that was, frankly, way out of line.”

  I tried to reassure him. “Oh, Mr. Murphy doesn’t mind. We joke about that all the time with him.”

  I still thought we were talking about the bald joke.

  “You say that kind of thing to teachers at this school?”

  “Just Mr. Murphy. And maybe Mr. Cooper. They’re both okay with it, so I thought it would be fine.”

  “It’s not fine! It’s obscene!”

  I couldn’t believe he was getting so worked up, and my bewilderment was making Mr. Piccirilli all the more agitated.

  “I hope you realize you’ve put the future of this show in jeopardy! We allowed you a forum in which to entertain your classmates, and you obviously thought you could take advantage of that. But I would say at the very least, you owe an apology to Mr. Murphy, and I expect you to go do that right now.”

  “Okay. I’ll do that. Thank you.”

  He seemed genuinely puzzled at my lack of contrition as I left.

  I went to Mr. Murphy’s office and told him I was sorry.

  “That’s all right, I can take it,” he said.

  “I thought it would be okay because you’ve made jokes about your hair in gym class.”

  “I don’t think it was the bald joke that got you in hot water, buddy. I’m pretty sure it was the line about the push-ups in the car!” Mr. Murphy burst out laughing.

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “I mean I gotta hand it to you, Shillue. That was ballsy!”

  Apparently the joke wasn’t about physical fitness. I thought about it all afternoon. I still didn’t get it. And then, it started to dawn on me why the principal got so worked up. Clearly the joke had to be something about sex. Why else would he get so angry? So the push-ups were simulating sex? Was that it? It seemed like a stretch to me. I was still hazy.

  It was only recently that I discovered the joke originally came from Rodney Dangerfield. Here’s his version: When I was a kid, everyone thought I got plenty of girls. I’d go to a drive-in movie and do push-ups in the back seat of my car.

  Now that version is a little easier to understand. Maybe if I had heard Rodney perform it, I would have gotten the sexual implications at the time. But here’s the thing: even though I hadn’t meant it that way, everyone was treating me like I had. Word got all around the school of the reaction to the scandal, and the aborted cable TV broadcast, and students were whispering about the joke to each other and laughing at their lockers. Teachers were shaking their heads at me as I passed, but they were smiling. They thought my joke was funny.

  I decided to stay silent about my naïveté and em
brace my new comedic persona.

  I guess the adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity applied. In the course of a few days I’d gone through all the essential elements of a show biz career: discovery, accolades, scandal, and gossip. And I survived. I was like a Gloria Gaynor song.

  The irony is, if I had been more streetwise and understood the joke, I would have been too afraid to do it. My innocence and naïveté had given the joke much more kick because it was so unexpected. And my lack of contrition that followed just blew the whole thing up even further. Another benefit to my sheltered, chaste lifestyle as a teen! You see? Abstinence makes you edgier.

  After all I had been through with my girlfriend, and now this newfound love of comedy, as well as the scandal, I knew I would no longer be content as an awkward art room kid. I was too experienced now. I’d seen and done too much. I liked my new identity as a worldly, comic leading man much better.

  Puffed up with the confidence of my debut performance, I decided to go into Boston to a comedy club to get the lay of this new land. I went to Nick’s Comedy Stop in the theater district, on the edge of what used to be called the Combat Zone. If anyone knows about the comedy scene in Boston in the mid-1980s, you know that it is a long way from the Norwood High School auditorium. I was underage but walked right past the bouncers on the way in. I guess there weren’t many underage kids trying to get into a comedy show all by themselves. The place had the feel of a Vegas showroom—brass fixtures lined the stage; the booths were dark-red vinyl—the lineup was a who’s who of 1980s Boston Comedy. All the comedians were fast, loud, dirty, and hilarious. And very Boston. Their acts had a confrontational, hard edge to them. I thought, I can’t do anything like this. I grew up in Norwood. I was an altar boy. My comedy role models are Bob Newhart and Tim Conway. I had an image of myself doing a quiet act in a double-breasted blazer, full of wordplay and pregnant pauses. That would never fly at a place like this. I needed a Plan B.