My good friend Rodney, the guy the character Rodney was based on, has a really fun You Tube channel going. If you have any interest in motorcycles, RVs, or laughing, please go check it out.
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There is something to be said for laughing at how bad things have gotten. Rick understands this.
When I was a comedian, I was accused of being a masochist, because the worse the setup, and the more uninterested the audience, the funnier I found everything. Many was the night that my opening act would be standing in a corner of the bar with no raised platform, a single track-light shining directly in his face, and Radio Shack’s least expensive microphone in his hand. He would tell a joke, receive an indifferent silence from the audience and the sound of me laughing diabolically in the distance, which would have made sense if not for the fact that I was going to have to go on right after him, and do twice as much time.
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This is based on a real mascot, called “Li’l Sammy Mover.” I found the concept to be poorly thought out.
Another mascot that wasn’t given a lot of thought belongs to a restaurant in Butte, Montana called Pork Chop John’s which is the home of “John’s Pork Chop.” Their mascot is a pig wearing a crown, named “Pork Chop King.” I find that disturbing, as if he’s a despotic ruler who is inviting me to eat his subjects. For all I know, those pork chops are made from dissidents who spoke out against the Pork Chop King’s corrupt regime. I feel bad enough eating a fried pork chop sandwich and a side of pork nuggets without that kind of moral ambiguity.
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One interesting thing about the ’70s (The decade with “gusto”) is that gay men were represented on TV, but mostly it was either young straight actors playing gay men (Billy Crystal on Soap and John Ritter on Three’s Company [okay, he was a straight actor playing a straight man pretending to be gay]) or it was men who everyone was pretty sure were gay, and made occasional jokes about maybe being gay, but who didn’t really acknowledge it. (Paul Lynde, Charles Nelson Reilly, Liberace, etc.) Somebody much smarter than me can probably explain why that was. I just find it interesting, the weird mid-way points society goes through when a group is taking the (sadly) long journey from intolerance to acceptance.
An interesting side note. Wayne Newton hated Johnny Carson and continues to speak ill of him to this day. My understanding is that it dates back to the ’60s and ’70s, when Carson used to do jokes on the Tonight Show suggesting that Newton was gay and connected to the mafia, which is sort of a difficult combo to pull off.
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My brothers and I all suffer from the same problem: insincere looking smiles. I think it has something to do with our upper lip geometry. We can smirk with the best of them, and we all do a toothless-smile-of-mild-contentment well, but if we attempt any smile that involves showing teeth the effect falls somewhere between used car salesman who hates your guts, and guy who really hopes you’ll decide that there’s no reason to look in his garden shed.
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Not all exposition needs to be handled in dialog. Some of the smaller details can be left as very subtle clues. Readers who find and understand these hints will feel clever, and those who don’t probably won’t miss them. For instance, the S on Stabby’s shirt is supposed to look as if is was made from crudely smeared blood stains. Two separate stains, as if they were created after two different stabbings. Stabbings that held special significance.
In panel three, I mention that Stabby’s parents were found stabbed, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
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Panel 3 is one of the best drawings of myself I ever did. Yes, I’m aware that in it I look insane.
The tall chair thing is something LBJ used to do. He had a specific chair, in which only he was allowed to sit, installed in Air Force One. It, and the desk in front of it, were designed so that he could adjust their height, ensuring that he would tower over the people seated around him.
Also, if you look at the desks on late night talk shows you’ll see that the host’s seat is always higher than the guests’ chair. Andy Kaufman made a joke about it in a PBS special once. (Think about that for a moment. There was a time that Andy Kaufman was doing specials on PBS!)
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This is one of the meanest comics I wrote. I also like it more than most. I do want to make it clear that all of the insults are aimed at Jenkins, not his girlfriend or their unborn child. Making fun of either of them would be unconscionable, in my opinion. The child didn’t do anything wrong, and while the girlfriend made one bad decision (getting in a relationship with Jenkins), I’m sure she’s already suffered for it.
Note from Missy: If this were written today, I’d probably ask Scott to name the baby “Burdyn” instead (or “Burdynne” for a girl), since that seems to be the way the last 8 years have taken us.
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Okay, I want to tell this story, but I need to be careful about what I say, and how I say it.
I had a coworker at one of the Disney locations I worked who referred to himself, in the third person, as “The Maverick.” Literally. He would enter a room and say, “Uh oh! Here comes the Maverick!”
I may have mentioned here that I don’t have a lot of faith in my own memory as far as dates, times, and important tasks go. Sci-Fi movies, dialog from The Simpsons, and times I’ve been insulted, those I remember for life. I need to write everything else down. So, I always carried a notebook with me at work, and would jot down notes as needed.
One day, The Maverick saw me writing down a reminder about something and confronted me about it. It seems at his previous location, in one of the theme parks, his coworkers had taken detailed notes of his “activities,” creating a paper trail that led to his being given the choice of either transferring out of that specific area, or being terminated.
I can’t say what he was doing wrong without getting into a lot more detail than I can here, but I can tell you that he was NOT endangering anybody’s safety, management was right to threaten to fire him, and the guests who complained were all from the same racial background. I know all this because he told me what he did, proudly, still utterly convinced that he was right.
Stories like this are why I believe, deep in my heart, that in any line of work where the jobs are filled by human beings, there will be a certain number of them who are incompetent or deranged enough to be a problem, but not quite enough to have been fired yet. We tend to overestimate the numbers of these problem people, because they’re the ones we hear about, either in amusing anecdotes, or on the evening news.
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