Stay Hungry

by Sebastian Maniscalco

  Everyone was talking about what to order, the handmade tagliatelli with Bolognese ragú; the cappelletti with truffles, ricotta, and prosciutto; the rack of lamb with arugula-anchovy pesto; the forty-day aged tomahawk rib eye. I’m getting hungry typing the menu now, but at the time, my appetite was gone.

  “Do you think it was okay?” I kept asking. “It’s going to look like shit, probably.”

  Lana said, “Just forget about it. It’s over. We’re at this amazing restaurant. Have some mortadella and relax. There is nothing you can do.”

  For the first time in my life, mortadella did not make me happy.

  “Eat, Sebastian,” said my ma.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  The whole table stopped and looked at me. For me to refuse food, this was serious. My mom probably thought about calling 911. I’m always starving after a performance, but at Osteria Morini, I couldn’t eat one bite. I tried to rally my spirits, but how could I enjoy myself? I didn’t know what the edit was going to look like when it aired later that evening. I couldn’t relax until I saw it. Were 3.8 million people going to point at their screens and say, “Look at the idiot!” It was too much to contemplate, yet I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  My family and friends reassured me at dinner. They described their reactions to my brain freeze while they watched it live in the green room.

  My wife said, “We all looked blankly at one another, holding our breath, more tongue-tied than you.”

  My manager Chris, owner of the Gotham Comedy Club, has seen hundreds bomb on stage. He said, “I kept saying, ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ over and over. So, yeah. It was bad.”

  My mother-in-law said, “Your suit looked beautiful.”

  Mom said, “I’ve just never seen you like that before. It was . . . suspenseful?”

  They were trying to crack me up, and I pretended to go along with it. I choked down some pasta, but every bite was a dry swallow.

  Lana and I went back to our hotel room at the London. It was already turned down, and I love turn-down service. There is something about leaving your room a mess and coming back at the end of the night with a treat on your pillow and a bottle of water on the nightstand. It’s always an added bonus when they leave a card with the temperature for the following day. This was the first time the turn-down service didn’t make me happy. I was too anxious to lie down. I had to see the Frankenstein hack job of my set before I could hope to relax.

  Lana was having none of it. She kept insisting it would be fine, but how could she know? We had to wait and see.

  Finally, at 11:30 p.m., five hours since the taping, the show started. I barely heard Fallon’s intro. Liam Hemsworth came on, and Lana said, “He really is stunning.”

  “I know, right?”

  And then it was my turn. I got through the first forty-five seconds of my act with confidence and swagger. There was a quick cutaway to a different camera angle that picked me up as soon as my brain started working again. If you check out the video on YouTube (viewed 1.6M times; 1.5M by me), right at :46 seconds, it looks like I’m coming out of a coma. My voice is shaky; my eyes look dazed, or haunted. But I did recover, and after a rocky five or ten seconds, I got back into the rhythm of my set and made it through.

  Jimmy joined me on stage to shake my hand, all smiles and upbeat. I looked hollowed out. I gave him a traumatized glance, but he started jumping around, mimicking my moves and I followed suit. He did exactly the right thing to bring the energy up. Easy for him. He knew my gap would be edited out, but I didn’t.

  I turned to Lana and said, “Not a disaster.”

  “Not even close,” she said, smiling. “Are you okay now?”

  “Actually, to tell you the truth, I’m starving.”

  Now that the hundred-pound anvil of dread was gone, my stomach was desperately empty.

  I ordered the branzino. When room service brought it up, the guy looked at me and said, “Be careful. There may still be a few bones. I don’t want you to choke!”

  I said, “Great, I already choked once tonight.”

  WE LIVE IN a world where everybody is always talking about how fantastic his or her life is. Vacation photos, toasting on a boat with champagne, celebrations and achievements. That’s what people put on social media. Everyone is just bragging all the time, or humble bragging, which is even worse. It’s like nobody ever fucks up or does anything wrong.

  But people do fuck up in life, all the time. We make mistakes, big and small. We all have stories to tell about the not-so-good times, and I happen to believe those are the ones we should share. It would be like a public service so everyone doesn’t think being perfect is the norm.

  If you pretend nothing’s wrong, then you don’t take the step of asking, “What the hell happened?” Since my career and my family’s security relies on me not shitting the bed/whole house/entire neighborhood on TV, I needed to know what had caused my brain to betray me that night, and take measures so that it never occurred again.

  I think what happened was a deadly combo of overload and overconfidence.

  The overload was all the craziness that week. There was so much going on. I was talking, talking, talking on the radio tours; I was pitching the book. I was doing other interviews about the special. I had people in town and felt responsible for entertaining them. My head was spinning in a bunch of directions, and by the time I stepped onto that stage, it had spun clear off my neck.

  The overconfidence was thinking I could handle doing every-thing at once, no problem. I thought I could just go up there and do standup as if it were no big deal. It was like saying a smug “I got this” while falling off a bridge. I didn’t respect the mental demands of doing a live comedy set on national TV. It was almost like, after a week of glutting my ego with positive feedback, I forgot the philosophy of life that had gotten me this far: Stay Hungry. Pare it down. Keep focused on what you’re doing and on the reasons you’re doing it.

  I would never again be too casual about any performance, anywhere. Since Fallon, I reset my pre-show routine. If I have people in the dressing room, I kick them out ten minutes before I go on stage. Or they can sit there in stone silence while I review video of previous gigs and collect my thoughts. I get in my own space rather than inviting others into it. Afterward, we can talk and laugh and (most likely) eat. But before I go on, no talk, no food, clear head, no distractions.

  ONE MONTH AFTER the Fallon disaster, I did Conan.

  Back on the horse that bit me on the ass.

  I kept thinking about the yips, a phenomenon when a pitcher suddenly can’t control the ball. He’s throwing it, doing his regular motion, and the ball goes wild. No matter how he adjusts, he can’t fix it. It’s totally mental.

  I got it in my head that the yips could happen to me. I thought, Shit, will I freeze every time I go on TV? Is this going to be the new awful normal?

  To ward off the yips, I took the concept of staying hungry to the extreme. It was like I was training for a marathon. The whole week leading up into Conan, I ran my set in the bathroom. I ran it in the shower. I ran it with my wife.

  The day of the taping, I had Lana and one of my managers with me. You better believe I paid attention to the walk-through that time. I could do a full to-scale rendering of the stage—and the teleprompter location—from memory that day.

  Complete change of wardrobe. I wore a thin black cashmere sweater and black jeans, black shoes. Television studios are kept icy cold, and it was December. Still, I was sweating. We were in the dressing room and it was getting close. I told my wife, “Get out. I gotta be alone.” She got up to leave. I said, “Get back in here and let me do the set in front of you.” She came back in. I said, “No, leave.” I was driving her nuts.

  And then the moment of truth. I was called to the stage and began.

  I’m dealing with a possum problem at the house. Just moved into a new house. Me and my wife like to go in the yard at night, have a little wine. And these possums are comfortable,
like if they could talk, they’d be like, “What the hell are you doing here?” Now, I grew up in an immigrant family, and how we handled possums, raccoons, my father would be like, “We’re going to murder the bastards. We’re going to pour antifreeze on bologna.” What?

  That was the forty-five-second mark, the point on Fallon when it all went to hell. On the video of this performance, my eyes are clear. I am totally present and in the moment. I look up with a huge smile on my face because I remembered everything. The next line was right there, and I punched it.

  I woke up in the morning, birds, squirrels, raccoons, just murdered all over our property. Neighbors coming by. “Have you seen our cat?” “No, we haven’t seen it. Check the yard.”

  I killed on Conan, and I proved to myself that I wasn’t cursed with the yips. I’d redeemed myself and gained perspective on what could happen when you get too comfortable, too confident.

  Redemption is a theme in my life, the drive to correct mistakes and rectify wrongs. Lana knew what it meant to me to walk off Conan’s stage in one piece, and she gave me a big hug in the dressing room. No tears. By the end of the night, my face hurt from smiling so hard.

  She said, “How do you feel now?” My wife is like a shrink, always asking how I feel.

  “Hungry,” I said. “Where you wanna eat?”

  9

  * * *

  ICING ON THE CAKE

  The American Comedy Awards are the most important awards that you have never heard of—at least to us comedians. I wouldn’t call them the Oscars or Emmys of comedy, though. The Oscars do (rarely) award prizes to comedic films, and the Emmys give a nice showcase for funny TV shows and performers. But the Lucys, as the ACA statue was called, after Lucille Ball, were a very big deal (especially for the winners).

  When I was nominated in 2014 for Best Club Comic, I was in shock. The other nominees—Maria Bamford, Bill Burr (my old neighbor), Jerrod Carmichael, Ron Funches, Kyle Kinane, Sean Patton, Brian Regan, Rory Scovel, and Doug Stanhope—are all top-tier people I admire, especially Brian Regan.

  My introduction to Brian’s comedy was in 1988, at a Thanksgiving dinner, watching him on TV. He had a bit about getting a snow cone after a Little League baseball game. The way he told the story, his distinctive delivery and how he acted it out, is what made it so funny. It can’t be translated into words (Google “Brian Regan Little League”). Brian’s ability to convey his message through his body and vocal inflections adds dimension to his comedy. In 2016, I got to see it up close while working with him at the Oddball Comedy Festival. His is the type of act you can see over and over. You laugh just as hard the tenth time you hear the material as you did the first time. He’s the type of comedian other comedians backstage gather around the monitors to watch. I’ve heard he takes a shot of peach schnapps—the too-sweet pink liquor in Sex on the Beach, the Bikini Martini, and the Fuzzy Navel—before every show. On the Oddball tour, I joined him in this ritual for shits and giggles.

  All of the other nominees in my category were entrenched in the comedy world. I was never really a member of that club, nor had ever participated in any popularity contests. I’d always kept an eye on who got nominated for such awards, though, and wondered who the hell was in charge of choosing the list.

  When I heard the news, I called my managers, figuring there was some sort of mistake, but they confirmed the nomination was real. I was up for a Lucy and I was invited to the award ceremony at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York a few weeks later. The event organizers weren’t providing air travel or hotel reservations, but they were serving a barely edible meal and free drinks.

  If I didn’t attend and I actually won, the presenter would have to say, “Sebastian Maniscalco isn’t here tonight because he tried on his wedding tuxedo, couldn’t button it, and didn’t have time to get the waist let out. I will accept this award for him.”

  On the off chance the presenter was going to say my name, I wanted to be there to hear it. Did I feel a need to be in the room, to look pleasantly surprised, kiss my wife, stand up, pretend to trip dashingly as I wove my way through the maze of tables to accept my award, and deliver a speech that would be a bonanza of laughter and tears? No. I never did comedy for awards. But it is nice to be recognized, to get a kind of milestone marker in your career. I think all performers have fantasized about what they would say at the podium. If for nothing else than because it would be nice to thank those who helped me along the way.

  First order of business: my outfit. Since NBC was televising the awards in prime time (another reason to be there), I decided on my Tom Ford wedding tux. True to form, it didn’t fit anymore. Last time I’d worn those pants was around two years prior, and I had been sixteen pounds lighter. When I managed to close them, the button and buttonhole were hanging on to one another for dear life. If I wore them like that, they might have left a permanent line on my belly like I’d had a C-section. I tried buttoning the jacket and wearing a vest, but who was I kidding? The muffin top at this point was more like a popover. I wore the tux anyway. Even tight, it was my best option.

  I wrote an acceptance speech. I practiced it in our hotel room at the London the night of the award show. Lana was taking forever to get ready. It was a special night, so I didn’t want to rush her and get into an argument. I took a deep breath in an attempt to find my friendly voice and asked, “Babe, you almost ready?”

  “One second!” she replied from the bathroom.

  Twenty minutes later, she emerged. She was worth the wait. She looked stunning in a tangerine Dior dress with spaghetti straps and a peek of pink lining at the handkerchief hem.

  “Do you like these earrings, or the other ones?” she asked.

  Any answer I gave her would be the one that got us out the door faster, hence, “The ones you have on are perfect.”

  We hopped into an Uber just as a downpour started. On the way, I asked Lana to close my shirt buttons. I didn’t ask her earlier because it would have taken up even more time. So she went to do them, but there was a problem. They weren’t going in the holes. I’d never seen this type of button before. You needed an engineering degree to figure them out, and I had only a corporate organizational communications degree. I was sweating, digging my chin into my collarbone to see, and twisting my torso like I was in Cirque du Soleil. Lana tried to get them in while I sucked in my popover to make sure the pants button didn’t fly off and shatter a window. In a fit of frustration, I called my guy Jason at Tom Ford (Lana had the number) and said, “Man, my shirt is screwed up! I can’t get the fucking buttons in.”

  He walked us through it, and we finally got them in. But by now, I was flustered and my neck was drenched. It wasn’t a great start to what could be a significant evening for my career.

  The driver got us as close as he could to the entrance—I think he dumped us at the bus stop on the corner—and we got out. I opened my umbrella and we walked up to the security guards. Before we could explain things, they directed us toward the general admissions line to get into the ballroom.

  “I’m supposed to walk the red carpet. I’m nominated,” I informed them.

  “You?” one said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Really?”

  After a moment of hesitation, they pointed us toward a check-in tent across a rainy path full of puddles. We trekked through the weather to the tent and went up to the woman who appeared to be in charge. She said, “Hi, there. The general admissions entrance is that way.”

  “I’m nominated,” I said, starting to feel like an idiot. I don’t like to sound arrogant or brag or say, “Do you know who I am?” But in this case, I had to say something or I’d never get into the room.

  She shot me the same look of disbelief as the security guys. They had to go through a binder that looked like a yearbook and search through the photos to try to find my face. Even after they found it, they still questioned me as if I were trying to fraudulently enter the red carpet. It was like there was no way possible I was meant to be the
re. I felt like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, but finally, they confirmed that I had the same huge forehead as the guy in their book.

  As soon as we hit the red carpet, we were blinded by a flash of lightning. Not real lightning. A hundred camera flashes had gone off because Seth Rogen was in front of us, standing in front of the “step and repeat” wall with the American Comedy Awards logo on it. Seth negotiated that scene like a pro. He was smiling and at ease, a natural.

  Next, it was our turn. Lana said, “You go. I’ll meet you at the end.”

  “No way,” I said. “You’re coming with me.”

  If you know anything about my wife, she goes with the flow. If I wanted her to try something, she was game. If I want to do something on my own, she’s cool with that, too. That night, I wanted her with me. So we walked together. As we began, the PR rep announced my name, which apparently was a cue for the photographers to clean their lenses. I waited for them to be done and told myself, They must really want clean, crisp photos of me. I walked along the carpet, twisting and turning, with no flashes going off, feeling a little conspicuous and uncomfortable. And then finally, a photographer called my name. “Sebastian! Sebastian! Move aside. I want one of Lana by herself.”

  What, for his private collection?

  I stepped aside and the lightning storm went off for my wife. This went on for the rest of our red carpet walk, people yelling at me to get out of the way. I was a good sport, laughing along.

  We entered the ballroom and found our seats at a table for eight in the middle of the room. Once we were seated, I shook off my annoyance and remembered why we’d made the trip. It was exciting to be in the room. Chris Rock was there to present a lifetime achievement award to Bill Cosby (pre–rape allegations). A quick glance around, and I saw Kate McKinnon, Amy Poehler, tons of comedy all-stars. We settled in and Lana had a cocktail. I was holding off because I wanted to be clearheaded for my award.