Watching Bobcat Goldthwait do his sets this month at my downtown venue gave me a nice nostalgia buzz, not just for him, but for a whole set of comics from a bygone era. Bobcat was good, if a little tamed. But the signature voice was there: a loud rasp that seemed to come from a deeper part of himself that most of us would want to admit to.
I remember a time in comedy when stand-ups didn’t try to pretend they were “regular guys.” They were weird, wired and out there. The experiences they talked about and the personas they adopted were from another planet, one that astronomers hadn’t discovered yet. Bobcat was one of these surreal comedians, but so was Gilbert Gottfried and Emo Philips. They all became my friends. I adored their strangeness, and for a while, they were the hottest thing in comedy.
Gottfried was the first, the strangest and, against all odds, became the most successful. When my assistant saw him in New York, she immediately booked him at my club, even though she had no right to do so. “If he isn’t exactly what you’ve been looking for, you can fire me,” she said confidently, and she was right. Every night for a week, I watched a man completely lost in his own, dark, magical world, screaming and braying like a manic Jewish donkey.
It was his first time out of New York. He wouldn’t leave his hotel room and needed an escort to get the six blocks to the club. In Ottawa, I took him to an after-hours club where he sat at the bar and talked to a dog for two hours, never breaking character. It was either a magnificent piece of performance art or a complete psychotic break. Gilbert eventually became famous as a cartoon voice, of all things, and as a regular on the wheezy Hollywood Squares.
Emo Philips has been called the best joke writer in America, and for good reason: he is. There was a moment in the early ’80s when his cerebral approach to surreal comedy was catnip to the university-educated crowds at comedy clubs. References to philosophy, religion and art were central to Emo’s material, and they still are.
In the beginning, Emo wore a ridiculous pageboy haircut; thrift shop, mismatched plaids; and carried a trombone onstage that he never used. His bizarre sing-song voice was high-pitched and basslike at the same time. His relationship to Judy Tenuta, another surreal comic who wore a prom dress and played an accordion, only enhanced the oddball image. Offstage, Emo was a polite, almost courtly gentleman who liked to go hiking and discuss obscure theological tracts. Emo’s career never seemed to evolve past live performance, which is a shame. He wrote and directed a short film that eventually became Meet the Fockers, although Emo was not included in the commercial version of the product.
I’ve always been an Emo loyalist; in fact, he’s playing the downtown Yuk Yuk’s the week of May 12. And back to Bobcat, who’s become a filmmaker and has two amazing films to his credit. Sleeping Dogs Lie and World’s Greatest Dad are dark, independent films that have wonderfully offensive premises but are brilliantly constructed screwball comedies.
And any time you get a chance to see Goldthwait, Gottfried or Philips, you should — three comics who were always different and proud of it.
Post City Magazines’ humour columnist, Mark Breslin, is the founder of Yuk Yuk’s comedy clubs and the author of several books, including Control Freaked.
