The Joke Was On Me

Praise for Barry Friedman

You can’t go on the road with standup comedian Barry Friedman, which is probably good for your health and sanity. But you can feel what it felt like, through this funny, gritty, wondrously detailed, and scarily honest book.

Dave Barry

Barry writes so beautifully he actually made me miss shitty one nighters. Thanks A LOT Barry.

Carole Montgomery, Host of Funny Women of a Certain Age

He’s written a book with all the wisdom and humanity of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, but with way better jokes and twice as many clitoral piercings.

John H. Richardson

"I can neither confirm nor deny that I laughed out loud instead of clutching my pearls while reading the racy bits in Barry Friedman’s new book, The Joke Was on Me. Confessions aside, seeing the broken yet still beautiful world through his eyes is cathartic."

Jennifer Taub, author of Big Dirty Money

The Joke Was on Me: A Comedian’s Memoir

Print and eBook editions published by Balkan Press

Copyright © 2021 by Barry Friedman

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover photography by Amy Herndon Photography

Cover photography taken at Looney Bin Comedy Club in Tulsa, Oklahoma

To the mother and the daughter at the Riviera

Tell some truth up there.

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE INTRODUCTION

Game On

I asked Tracey, a lawyer with whom I once had a relationship based entirely on sex and gamesmanship—and whose father, incidentally, was a Nazi sympathizer—whether she wanted her (or her father’s) name changed in Road Comic, which was published in 2000 but written throughout the ’90s, the amniotic sac from which this book was culled.

Nah, I don’t care, she said. None of my friends or family read.

How about your dad?

No.

I changed her name anyway.

Tracey eventually went into treatment for alcohol and drug abuse, as well as sexual addiction, and then quickly married a man she found physically repulsive, so our relationship was at all times wild, troubling, choreographed, self-conscious, hilarious, pathetic, and a dysfunctional yearning for the adventurous—and we were together less than a month. We met at a Borders in southeast Tulsa, and, as we sat outside on the curb and decided to have sex the next time we got together—in my apartment, not her house (grubbier that way)—she said, Here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to have a good time, and then I’m going to cheat on you.

You’re going to cheat on me? I asked. I’m a road comic. You really want to see who can be more shallow in this relationship and who will cheat on whom first? Please. Game on.

In Mark Vonnegut’s The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity, he wrote, Knowing that you're crazy doesn't make the crazy things stop happening.

The crazy things. This is a book about that—and the things close to that.

When I wrote Road Comic, almost everyone in the book was alive, but now that some aren’t, or are dying, or simply in another orbit, the narrative had to change. Some of those people, like Tracey, some of those moments, the road stories, are now in sharper focus; some are unrecognizable. Who these people were then, literally—who they were to me and how they shaped and jarred and colored my life—is what I’m talking about here.

And here is twenty years after I first wrote about them. This book, in many ways, is a do-over.

My son, Paul, died seven years after the release of Road Comic, but I still have Nina, my daughter. When people ask whether I have children, I’m never sure whether to answer in the plural or the singular.

I usually go with the plural.

It’s not untrue.

As for those mentioned in the following pages, but mostly in the pages of Road Comic, my apologies, if I come across to any of you, particularly the women, voyeuristically cloddish in characterizing your identity, occupation, struggles, confidences—or boorish in describing the times I tied you up to a wicker headboard in the Bahamas or a refrigerator in Texas.

The Thanks

To my father, for his good humor, bombast, the thousands of dollars he gave me at the keno pits in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, for once saying, Don’t try to figure out women. They have funny little minds, and for living long enough to remind me how easy life can be; to my brother, Wayne, for keeping the sibling rivalry to a minimum, for padding his expense account whenever I was around and/or needed a meal or a place to stay, and lending me a hundred dollars so I could take Stephanie Guagenti to my high school prom, an altogether desultory affair, for which I never paid him back; to my sister, Susan, for taking such good care of our mom while she was dying (and when Susan was going through a divorce), and for never taking it personally when our father called her Cynthia; to Ed and Anita, the happiest married couple I know, my aunt and uncle, a perfect aunt and uncle, who let me move in on two occasions and never let me take myself too seriously (even when I had reasons to), and who always had me over for Sunday dinners (even when I forgot to bring Anita’s cherry Danish); to Dave, for a lifelong friendship, for finding the place on the South Shore of Long Island that served 25-cent pizza (even in 1976, nobody was doing that), and for that glorious afternoon at Vet Stadium in Philadelphia when we talked of television pilots, ate expensive hot dogs, and longed to be the shirtless fat guy in cutoffs wearing a hat that held two beers and an elaborate delivery system that brought the beer directly to his mouth; to Ronnie and Louis, the second-happiest couple I know, and their daughter, Jill, for being generous, patient, encouraging sounding boards for the early drafts of Road Comic, and for also letting me move in (also twice); to Marc Glick, a sweet, gentle soul who died in 2018,  and who could also be a miserable-prick lawyer who made sure I kept the international film rights to Road Comic in the unlikely event that was ever going to be an issue; to Vern and Lisa, the third-happiest couple I know, for believing in each other, marriage, and God—even when He most certainly forgot about them—and Vern, especially, in his time as editor of the AAPG Explorer, a petroleum-geology magazine, for throwing work my way the past thirty years, even though I knew (and still know) nothing about petroleum or geology; to Linda, for being my Elaine Benes; to Kelli, for shooting hoops with me in Encino, and Christina, for shooting pool with me in Denver; to Shelly, for being Big Shel; and to Bridgette, for coming to the MGM and holding my dad’s hand by the Bellagio waterfall after my mom died; and, speaking of, my mother, the indefatigable Florence Friedman.

I will try not to make from this book shit.

I’ll explain later.

Thanks, too, for reasons obvious and clear and prurient and tender, to Lori, Shawna, Lauren, Elizabeth, Amy, Erin, Jenny, Ronnie, Katie, Kate, Liz, Daria, Suzanne, another Erin, Kim, Dee, the woman in Baltimore outside the comedy club Slapstix who told me about blue ovaries, and Elena from Russia for the greatest Tuesday-morning shower ever. There was the girl at the Etta James concert in Birmingham who smiled at me and for whom I probably would have moved to Alabama had the hug lasted any longer. Also to Kim, Leslie, Cindy, Danielle, Debby, Debbie, Deby, Trish, Denise, Tong, Sheri, Tiffany, Julia, the girl with the vine tattoo on her lower back in Reno, and Emmy, for the rose, the Diet Pepsi, and the cold pizza in the elevator at the Excalibur, thank you. I am forgetting many others, which is embarrassing—not that I forgot them, though that, too—but mostly because there were so many.

There’s Bettina.

[Almost twenty years after Road Comic was released, weeks after he robotically removed my prostate, my urologist asked me whether Asia (Chapter 7), an international beauty-pageant winner, was real, because when he read the book on his month-long European vacation, he couldn’t find her name or her title when he looked her up on Google. I assured him she was, but that I had changed her name, adding, Of all the compliments I have ever received in my life—writing or comedy—I think having my urologist fact-check me in the South of France may be my greatest achievement.]

Claudia.

I especially want to thank those of you who saw me onstage. 

This is for and because of you.

This, too.

When Mark McGwire hit his 62nd home run in 1998, in St. Louis, against the Cubs, the one that broke Roger Maris’ record—and this was before anyone knew the extent of McGwire’s juicing or his all-encompassing douchebaggery—the game was stopped and a microphone was set up on the pitcher’s mound so he could address the crowd. The first thing he did was to thank his great ex-wife for bringing their son to the game.

(Your joke here.)

To my ex-wife Jane, the only ex-wife I had when Road Comic was released. (I have another since then. That book will be out soon.) I want to thank her for bringing both of our children to our game, too. While we were getting divorced, my rabbi told me that it would be difficult for a woman to get airtime in my life. When I asked Jane if that were true, she said, Sometimes just walking into a restaurant with you takes too much energy. That I liked how I walked into a restaurant was part of the problem. In Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, Alan Alda plays a smarmy, facile, self-aggrandizing director, full of epigrammatic wisdom and excessive smugness—a complete blowhard. At the end of the movie, a wedding takes place, and we see the young couple about to take their vows. It’s a beautiful scene, but the father of the girl, a rabbi, the sweetest of men, played by Sam Waterston, is going blind. It was at this moment I looked over in the theater and saw Jane crying. Later, I asked what the tears were about.

Those two kids, so young, so full of hope, she said, but they have no idea how their lives and dreams . . . it’s all shit. It’s all going to change.

That’s why you’re crying?

That’s why I’m crying. Is that OK with you?

That’s not why you cry, I said, taking this personally. You cry in this case, here, because the Martin Landau character got away with murder. You cry because the Waterston character, this sweet rabbi, is going blind and won’t ever see the smiles of his grandchildren. That’s why you cry."

(Thinking about it later, I realized she cried for a perfectly good reason.)

Well, of course you wouldn’t cry during the wedding, she said. You’re the Alan Alda character.

THE ACTUAL INTRODUCTION

Let me try this again

Before becoming a comedian, I never would have imagined being between the legs of a former dominatrix, admiring her clitoral-hood piercing, while listening to her talk about fetishes and safe words. But you make decisions in life, say, where one day you decide to enter an open-mic comedy contest at a Tulsa hotel and then, six years later, after a show, you find yourself at the Allen Park Inn in Houston with a woman named Dra, who is explaining how urethral sounding—sliding a well-lubricated (the website calls for a very well-lubricated) rod in your penis and through your urethra—when done properly, can be a satisfying form of sexual foreplay, and you can’t help but think that life is full of connections. The cause is neither sufficient nor necessary—plenty of comedians have played both Tulsa and Houston and have never inserted rods in their cocks or fucked former dominatrixes, and I’m sure there are comedians who have done both and never played either city. Nevertheless, if you’re looking for common denominators in life, and I always am, I found one.

Comedy.

And that connection of who I became, what I did, what I ultimately understood, and what never took hold in my life as a standup comedian is what I’m talking about here.

The Joke Was on Me is my attempt to re-solder the connections.

So let me try again.

This is still just my side of things, obviously, a cacophony of stories that ping, both audibly and visually, at odd hours and times, and of good fortunes and garden-variety disappointments—Las Vegas, the Bahamas, the interstates in Kansas, as well as stories of love and like and lust and all the lies in between—but this time with the lens pulled back farther to see what else was strewn about. Along the way there was a stripper with tattoos who was recovering from surgery, a beauty-pageant winner with jokes and scissors, a German girl with bad things inside her, a Texas girl who liked masturbating with a pink candle, three women on a bed in a shitty room at the Maxim Hotel in Vegas, Brazilian girls at an Oscar party, and, mostly, the point, the comedy, its transcendent beauty, the pettiness, the competitiveness, the waitresses and bartenders, and, of course, the comedians—those glorious, fucked-up, brittle, hilarious, pedestrian, and troubled men and women who perform night after night, in hotel bars and cruise ships, Vegas casinos and VFW halls . . . and all for the same reason: Please, love me.

Who doesn’t show up in Road Comic, the original, but should have, are those people I failed to see and hear all along the way. The Joke Was on Me is an attempt to find the people and things I missed.

Even when we are working, and Road Comic chronicled my first fifteen years or so in standup, comedians during a weeklong gig can spend much of the day shopping and napping and calling ex-loves and booking agents on the phone (during the ’90s, anyway, on the hotel phone). For me, as I imagine for most comedians, getting the gig was always more taxing than performing—the endless phone calls on the specific days, between the specific hours, to get the booker, just to be told, We’re not booking now. Try next Wednesday between eleven and three. The gig itself, then, when it actually was procured, was the easy part—it was barely work. The gig, the weeklong stay at the club or hotel, the other twenty-three hours of the day, was the time of and for women and drugs and alcohol and idleness. As the years piled up, there were fears, too, that went along with all that. There was the sense, in my case, not just of wasting my life in bars and hotel showrooms and becoming the cliché I probably already was—that of being a forty-something comic, squinting through lights and cigarette smoke and straining onstage or in bed to, as Joni Mitchell wrote, lay down an impression and your loneliness—but of not being too concerned about the rationalizations and compromises and embellishments along the way. Let the mask grow to fit the face. There’s a naked girl, sexy and drunk and on her stomach, named Allie (or so she tells me) in my bed, and she just handed me a bottle of hotel lotion.

I was with Jane, my first ex-wife, and we were driving on Interstate 44 in Tulsa, when she saw the sign advertising a comedy contest at a hotel, the Trade Winds East, in which there was a $100 first prize for the winner.

You should do that, Jane said.

Yeah?

Yeah.

I did.

I won the hundred bucks that night doing jokes about peeing in a lake and girls eating corndogs at the state fair, and impersonating Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker. There was a contest the following week as well, at the same hotel, which I also won, doing the same material but adding some actual jokes to what charitably would have been called my act.

Three guys standing in line at a bank. The second guy feels the third guy rubbing his shoulders.

What are you doing? he asks.

Sorry, says the third guy, but I’m a massage therapist, and I tend to practice my craft wherever I am.

That’s ridiculous, says the second guy. I’m an attorney, and you don’t see me fucking the guy in front of me, do you?

Very few comedians, very few good ones, will do actual jokes onstage because it’s cheap and easy and any cousin of yours at a barbecue can do that among family members, but comedy for forty-five minutes in front of strangers is something different—and you can’t (or shouldn’t) do lawyer jokes. The language of what is a joke and what is a bit is interchangeable, and not all that interesting, but a joke would be . . . Two Irish guys walk out of a bar—hey, could happen; a bit would be an observation about cops eating doughnuts, the divide between men and women, or the jealousy one feels when you discover your ex-wife is sleeping with Potsie (Anson Williams) from Happy Days.

I then found the actual comedy club in town, the Tulsa Comedy Club, and signed up to perform at its Open Mic Night, which was held every Tuesday.  Back when comedy clubs ran full week schedules—which is what they called it, even though they ran Wednesday to Saturday or Sunday—club managers would allow amateurs to come onstage one night a week, usually in five-minute blocks, and perform. These locals invited their friends and families to the clubs, which was really the point from the club’s perspective, so it didn’t matter how funny the locals were as long as their guests ate and drank and ran up tabs. But for those who wanted to become comedians professionally, this is how you went about it in the 1980s and early 1990s, especially in the Midwest. In Los Angeles and New York, stage time was at a premium, and it was difficult to get work any night of the week, but in Oklahoma, where I started (and I’m from New York—not the smartest career move, leaving Manhattan), the clubs in its major cities, Oklahoma City and Tulsa, were much more amenable to providing stage time for locals.

It was on these nights I’d meet comedians who worked the road and who, eventually, would ask me to work with them in places like Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Omaha, Nebraska, which started my career. At the Tulsa club, there was a raised section at the back of the club where the professional comedians would gather, which was often where the real show was, for while the open-mic’ers were dying miserable deaths,  these road guys would hold court and provide a running commentary of the carnage happening onstage.

After performing for a few weeks at the Tulsa Club’s Open Mic Nights, I knew I wanted in the business. I also knew I wanted to be one of those real comedians in the back of the showroom.

Over the next two decades, the moments, an amalgam of seminal, ridiculous, crude, and enlightening moments, added up. And all of them, in some way, came back to that sign on Interstate 44 in Tulsa and the Trade Winds East.

My comedy memories here in The Joke Was on Me, far from being chronological, are scattershot, leapfrogging in front of one another, pushing others out of the way, often crowding out the meaning because the meaning got in the way of the laugh. Some comedians excel in the journey, the unfolding of the story, and how they tell the joke, which is actually more important to their acts than the punchline. Bill Cosby, for instance, before he was accused of drugging and raping all those women, or maybe during the time he was drugging and raping them, would cover only four or five topics in a two-hour set. He said it takes a comedian ten years onstage to know who he or she is. I think I was in Reno, Nevada on my tenth-year anniversary—there was no epiphany. But I remember sitting in the back of the Tulsa Comedy Club, about to go onstage, early in my career, when one of the road comics said, Hey, Barry, tell some truth up there. And don’t suck.

Still the best advice I ever got.

Many years later, after a show at the Atlantis Hotel and Casino in the Bahamas, I found myself standing on a bridge between the Coral and Royal Towers with a nineteen-year-old college freshman from York, Pennsylvania, my hand down her pants. I had just turned forty, and at that moment thought—actually rolled this around in my brain while searching for her clitoris—if my life (not to mention my hand) was where it should be. The reason, it occurred to me, that my hand was down the pants of a nineteen-year-old was because I was a comedian, because I was the comedian she saw onstage an hour before, and because I entered a comedy contest at the Trade Winds East in Tulsa.

A little inside-baseball here: When I wrote Road Comic, I didn’t like how that previous paragraph came out, for I was worried it sounded less like a comedian reviewing the schema of his life on the road and more like a comedian who just wanted to brag about fingering a girl on a bridge in the Bahamas; so, here, in The Joke Was on Me, I gave that paragraph a rhetorical whack, trying to emphasize the connection, the serendipity, and the absurdity of the plot points that got me to that girl’s pants—that’s why I kept italicizing because.

But, who knows, maybe it still sounds like I’m bragging.

I hope not. My intention was not to write, again, about fingering this girl on a bridge in the