Everybody Curses, I Swear!

by Carrie Keagan

  Reason number two for “whoa”? Jack Black. Jack Black and Tenacious D were everything!!! Without the sweet, sweet sounds of the “D” masturbating in our ears for the last decade, NGTV would cease to exist. Their style of funny, filthy, and irreverent, while making everyone feel like they were the after party, was, exactly, what we strived to be. So the idea that the first time I was ever going to get onstage and do comedy was to “honor” Jack “fucking” Black was extra trots-inducing. This would not be my first time meeting the legend.

  No, no, Jack and I have a long history of silly fucked-up encounters. It’s always an adventure interviewing him. One of the more ridiculous exchanges we had was when I interviewed Jack and his musical partner, Kyle Gass, at the junket for Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny. Those two, separately, are fucking nuts. Now put them together and you have an extra spicy kielbasa sausage party you don’t want to miss.

  As I walked in I could see both Jack and Kyle were in great spirits. I reminded them that after a long day of doing regular press, No Good TV was in the house, which meant they could revert back to their more fun state of being uncensored. Like moths to a flame, they both came alive. Jack just lit into it from the get-go, while Kyle looked like he was brewing an idea to take the interview to another level. Well, it was safe to say he was brewing something:

  Jack: Fuckin’ fuck fuck. Fuck! Fuckity fuck! Fuckin’ fuck. Fuckin’ Tenacious D and The Pick of Destiny. FUCK!!

  (Right as he’s finishing up his opening, Kyle starts getting up from his chair, turns around, and bends down.)

  Kyle: No Good Television. Check this out!

  (He then proceeds to bust out the loudest, beefiest, lengthiest, and smelliest ripple fart you could ever imagine.)

  Jack: (With a panicked look on his face:) OH … NO!! OH NO!!

  It was an 8.4 on the rectum scale and it sounded like a group of thirty people blowing raspberries, and it lasted twenty seconds, which is an eternity for a rump roar. The studio reps, publicists, and camera crew all guffawed with amusement and horror. As I looked around I could tell they were starting to smell it and then feel it on their skin like I was … and like Jack was about to.

  Jack: (Laughing.) OH MY GOD! (Then a dense, moist pocket of shit vapor hit him square in the face, and he reached his hands up to wipe it away and get it off.)

  Kyle: No Good TV … you just saw some good TV!

  I couldn’t stop laughing, and his turd hootie was only part of the reason. As I looked around the room, I could see each person, almost in slow motion, swallow the great brown fecal cloud for the first time, and the look of abject terror that came across their faces was priceless. Some were grabbing their necks, some were starting to choke, some were heaving, about to vomit, but we were all trapped. And no one knew what to do.

  Me: Now it’s in smell-o-vision.

  Jack: Wooooooo.

  Jack was doing his best to smile and keep it together for the cameras, while casually attempting to wipe it away with his hand. But the room just kept getting more and more rancid from the Frequency Activated Rectal Tremor. At this point, people around us were panicking. The windows were closed and the AC was off. We had all been hot boxed by Kyle Gass, and this Dutch paperweight was turning into a death trap.

  Jack: It really stinks!

  Kyle: It’s really bad in here!

  Me: What did you eat? (Fanning the air across my face, wondering if I was about to get pink eye.)

  Kyle: I have no colon. (He was starting to feel the burning sensation in his throat that we were all feeling from the ghost turd. No doubt some part of him was starting to think that he just might have, accidentally, committed Dutch oven suicide.)

  Me: (Laughing to hide the pain.)

  I could see Jack was just dying and not in a good way. He put his head down and was trying to wipe the sweat off his brow. There was nothing to do. No one dared make a move for the door as it could ruin the interview. It was ridiculous. Not knowing what to do, Kyle tried to move forward with the interview. All the while Jack is desperately trying to avoid another bite of that air biscuit by keeping his hand in front of his mouth.

  Kyle: Did you ever see School of Rock?

  Me: I did.

  Kyle: Did you ever see the porno version?

  Me: I did not.

  Kyle: Guess what it was called?

  Me: School of … Cock?

  Kyle: No! School of Sex.

  At this point, Jack, who has this bizarre smile on his face that’s trapped somewhere between annoyed and homicidal, pipes up, speaking through his teeth and keeping his lips as closed as possible.

  Jack: No, it was School of Cock, School of Cock. (He says impatiently.)

  Meanwhile, the gaseous anomaly had evolved into a terror resembling Stephen King’s The Mist and was slowly eating through all the breathable air in the room, exposing everyone’s last nerve. Jack being at ground zero for the anal volcano finally broke down.

  Jack: Here’s the thing: There is a powerful stench in this room!

  Me: (I just start laughing my ass off.)

  Jack: (Looks off screen at a studio rep.) And we’re pretending like there’s not … can you turn on the fan? (His voice is getting more serious and desperate which each word.) It’s okay if it hurts the sound of the interview, at this point. (Behind the scenes, people are scrambling to get it done; terror has set in.) Yeah, leave that door open. (The fan is on and the PA is being tentative about what she should do with the door.) For real! For real! (Jack starts to make motions with his hands as the fake smile on his face turns to a frown as he feels like he’s suffocating from Kyle’s booty bomb, but the PA isn’t sure if he’s being super serious.)

  Me: Is it burning your nostrils?

  Jack: (Frustrated at the PA:) She thinks I’m joking! (Throwing his hands in the air.)

  Finally they opened all the doors, turned on the AC, and got all the fans going. We proceeded to complete the interview, but the terror unleashed from Kyle’s ass was not to be underestimated. That triple flutter blast dogged my entire interview and the rest of the day for every other interview. Rumors persist to this day that that particular room at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills is haunted, and if you listen closely you can still hear the brown horn brass choir take an encore. With memories to last a lifetime such as these, I had to make sure I came to the roast with some game.

  Fortunately, I got to collaborate with some seriously killer writers in putting my debut together. You didn’t think I was going to write it all by myself, did you? Fuck that. I was going to be too busy trying not to throw up. The challenge for me in writing roast jokes is that I’m not really comfortable making fun of people. That’s not my sense of humor. I like people to feel like we’re all on the same team, but that is the exact opposite of the typical jokes that you hear at a roast. It took me a few days to try to figure out the right angle, but I finally gave my writers a direction—my tits. I figured my tits could tell jokes that I couldn’t, and I was pretty sure that no man was going to be insulted by a message from the girls. So first in was the super-talented and funny Beth Armogida, a former writer on The Tonight Show, who taught me how to go balls deep without getting messy. Then I mixed in a few gut punches and a couple of chin whacks from two members of the kick-ass pit crew from Buzz—the quick-witted Chris DeLuca and the consistently brilliant Andrew Goldstein. Then, I topped it all off with a coup de grâce to end with a bang.

  When I accepted the gig, there were a couple of things that set my mind at ease a little bit. First, being someone who likes to drink more than your average bear, I know firsthand that everyone is funnier when alcohol is involved. Booze has always been a good friend of mine, and I thought the roast was going to be just another example of that. Uh … not so much! About a week before, I found out that it was taking place in the middle of the week at lunchtime. What the fuck? Look, I’m not against getting drunk on a Wednesday at 1 P.M. (as a matter of fact, it’s Thursday at 3 P.M. as I write this, and I’d be lying to you
if I didn’t tell you that this chapter is sponsored by Jameson), but I was assuming that that would not be the case for most of the people in the audience. They were professionals and businesspeople who had shit to do.

  Strike one!

  The second thing that I was counting on was a teleprompter. I’d seen the roasts on TV, and everyone read off of a teleprompter. I was taking solace in the fact that, as nervous as I was, I wasn’t going to have to memorize my roast. Wrong. When I got there, I was told that there wasn’t going to be a teleprompter but that the staff could put my jokes on little cards to bring up onstage with me. Are you fucking kidding me? Tiny little blue cards that had little tiny letters on them?

  Strike two!

  To top it all off, and the one thing I hadn’t even thought of until I got there, was who I would be performing in front of. I guess I was so busy worrying about what I was going to say I didn’t even think about who I was going to be saying it to. When I walked into that room, it was packed with comedians, jaded Hollywood muckety-mucks, and people who have been coming to these things for years and have seen the best of the best.

  Do you know how hard it is to make a comedian laugh? They’ve heard every premise, every setup, and every punch line ever. The best you can get out of a comedian isn’t even a laugh; if they like a joke they’ll just say, “That’s funny.” Thanks for the truckload of confidence. The Hollywood people and vets of the Friars Club were not going to be any easier. They had heard everything. What in the world was I going to say that could possibly make them laugh?

  Strike three!

  I felt like shooting horse tranquilizers directly into my eyeballs. Panic had officially set in.

  The one thing I was sure of was that I knew I needed to bring a friendly face with me. Someone I could lock my eyes onto when I was up there so I didn’t feel alone. Someone who had a calming effect on me. So I brought my buddy Shane Farley, the showrunner and executive producer of my show Big Morning Buzz Live. He was someone I trusted would always have my back should airship Keagan take a nosedive into her river of dreams that day. The plan was for him to sit somewhere where I could see him, and no matter what everyone else was doing, he would laugh uncontrollably. Stacking the room in your favor is always a good idea.

  I remember when I was in fifth grade, I wanted to be in charge of handing out everyone’s Valentine’s cards to my class. We were going to have a vote to see who got to be in charge, so a few days before the vote, I brought a bunch of people lollipops, and they promised to vote for me. Well, when the big election day finally arrived, my teacher counted the votes, and I was already walking up to the front of the class to give my acceptance speech when she said, “The winner is … Karen Muench.” What the fuck? Turns out sneaky Karen had the same idea I had, but her parents had a little more money and she gave everyone gift certificates to McDonald’s. “Damn you, McRib! Why did you have to come back?”

  The big day itself felt like riding a hurricane on a rubber dinghy. My ridiculously jam-packed morning had me ricocheting from one thing to the next like a pinball in an orgy of thumper bumpers. My head was spinning so fast while we shot my morning show that I didn’t have much time to panic about my pending date with the kings of comedy. That is, up until I walked into the Grand Ballroom at the New York Hilton and laid eyes on the over three thousand New York Friars Club members, dignitaries, celebrities, and friends who were about to witness my stand-up debut. Holy fuck! In that instant, I felt like I had all the Red Bull and diarrhea! But there was no turning back now, so I started making my way to the stage. As I walked across the stage to take my seat on the dais, the gravity of the situation hit me like a donkey punch. I looked around and saw Amy Schumer; Sarah Silverman; Richard Belzer; Artie Lange; Oliver Platt; Jeffrey Katzenberg; Richard Marx; the “Roastmaster General” himself, Jeffrey Ross; and living legend Jerry Lewis, to name a few, and I thought to myself, What the hell am I doing here? Seriously, here I was, a woman with no “official” stand-up comedy experience, except for the occasionally well-placed dick joke in an interview, and I was onstage with legends. Legends! To make matters even worse, they had NO IDEA who I was. To them, I probably looked like the lead actress in a remake of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! All bust, no bite!

  As an aside, I have to say that one of the more ironic, gratifying, and completely unexpected things that happened at the event was running into my old friend and former business partner, Gene Simmons. I’d come a long way since the last time we had seen each other a couple of years back, and we ended up having a lengthy catch-up sesh! Gene was an early believer in me, so it was great to have our paths cross at such a prestigious event and to have so much to share. Of course, Gene being Gene, he had plenty of things to say and advice to give. And, me being me, I had plenty of grief to give him in return. No matter what, Gene and I will always have Santa Monica Boulevard!

  Anyway, back on the dais, I was somewhere between crying, puking, and pooping—even my insides wanted out of there. Things were spiraling quickly, so I sat down and looked out at the table where my friend was sitting. I needed a friendly face to talk me off the ledge, and when I found his table, someone else was sitting in his seat. No, no, no, no, no, no. That wasn’t possible. He’d shown me where he was sitting! That was the table where he was supposed to be sitting. I scanned the audience … nothing. Ladies and germs, let the flop sweats begin!

  And then, the first bit of good luck shone down on me in the form of Al Roker. He must have sensed how nervous I was. Either that or he saw the waterfall of sweat pouring off of my forehead. “You’re gonna do great,” he said, and smiled at me. I’m sure I’m not the first person to have ever said this but, “Thank God for Al Roker.” If it wasn’t for him I think I might have stood up, walked out of the Friars Club, and lain down on the closest train tracks. He kept my mind off of the roast as best he could just by making small talk and introducing me to a few people. Normally, I’d want to stay focused on getting my head straight, but in this case, any small talk was way better than the big talk that was going on in my head, which sounded something like this: TAKE YOUR STILLETOS OFF AND RUN LIKE THE WIND! GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE! RUN! RUN! RUN!

  As the show started, I was caught somewhere between trying to listen to these people—who I consider to be some of my heroes—telling hilarious jokes and going over my set in my head. It was honestly hard for me to concentrate because—and this was the final mindfuck they had laid on me when I got there—nobody knew what the order was. For professional comedians I’m sure that’s no big deal. For me, it was a pretty big fucking deal. I wanted to be able to prepare myself for when they called my name, so when people looked over at me, I didn’t look like someone who had just been seasick on a boat for three hours. Not only that, but to add to the pressure, the people who were going on before me were KILLING! I mean, they were slaying, and with a certain type of insult humor that this crowd was clearly here to see. A certain type of comedy that I, unfortunately, was not about to deliver.

  Strike four! In my baseball game there are unlimited fuckups.

  And then, it happened. Through a fog I heard Bob Saget say, “… Carrie Keagan!” My new best friend, Al Roker, nudged me and said, “You’re up.” I didn’t hear anything Bob said before, just my name, and it kind of echoed, like he was saying it on a mountain five hundred yards away—“Keagan, Keagan, Keagan!” It’s just as well that I didn’t hear how he introduced me because what that thingamafucker actually said was, “I’d like to say something funny about our next roaster but I honestly don’t know who the fuck she is. Please welcome Carrie Keagan.”

  As I walked up to the podium and looked out at a sea of people eating cold salmon and capers (perfect comedy food), something happened to me. I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but I basically had an out-of-body experience. I don’t really remember much, but it was like I was floating above the room and I could see myself standing there. I honestly don’t remember what I said and I can’t find those stupid little blue c
ards they gave me, but just like Rey in her climactic lightsaber duel with Kylo Ren in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I closed my eyes and let the force guide me.

  The first thing out of my mouth was something vile about Bob Saget, and then I went straight into introducing the room to my very intuitive co-stars, my tits. Basically, eight minutes about my tits and what they thought of the people up on the dais.

  “Thanks, Bob. It’s great to finally have your attention; I usually have to put my finger in your ass to do that!

  “I was seven years old when the show Full House premiered. Every Friday night, Bob Saget would come into my living room … until my parents found out and called the police.

  “Hey, Bob, at least John Stamos gave me candy, you cheap prick.

  “Bob, I’ll let you know when I’m finished, because obviously you wouldn’t have a clue.

  “I’m very excited to be here at the Friars, mainly because nose and ear hair gets me hot.

  “But enough about me. Let’s get right to the topic of the night: my boobs. They are amazing. Aren’t they? Some of you losers may not know this, but … having giant breasts can help your career. Well, except for Jeff Ross.

  “My boobs have special powers. They can predict the future. It’s true.

  “For example …

  “My boobs predict Freddie Roman will continue to tell jokes that are older and drier than Sarah Silverman’s eggs.

  “My boobs predict Richard Marx will die in a plane crash. Just kidding. Only famous singers die in plane crashes.

  “My boobs predict Amy Schumer will be my friend—my fat, dumpy friend.

  “My boobs predict Artie Lange will win the Nobel Prize after saving an entire village from dying of thirst just with his ball sweat.

  “My boobs predict Oliver Platt will finally stop sexting me his penis, which is a relief, because my iPhone won’t zoom in that far.

  “My boobs predict Jeffrey Katzenberg will have lots of success and make an ass-load of money. Hey, my breasts ain’t stupid. I heard Mr. Katzenberg likes 3-D … Hey, Jeff, I’ve got your 3-Ds right here. (I point to my boobs.)