Humor is subjective, Gary keeps telling me. His past boyfriends loved his jokes. His mom finds him hysterical. He always cracks me up. The only reason that the crowds never laugh along, he claims, is that they're too slow on the draw.
On Saturday night, I catch a train into Brooklyn and meet him at his studio apartment. I arrive in my best night-on-the-town gear: a long-sleeved, umber orange dress with brown leather boots and a grey obi belt pulled snug around my waist.
Gary, meanwhile, has shaved his face and seems content wearing all black, from his long-sleeved tee to his jeans to his sneakers. Paint his face white, and he'll be ready to mime.
Gary doesn't do standard jokes. Impressions are his game. Rambling, self-deprecating monologues in celebrity voices, interspersed with bizarre, dialogue-heavy arguments between multiple characters, all performed as a one-man show.
He swings open the apartment door, and before I can say hello, Gary dances out into the hallway, twirling an invisible cane and top hot. Full Michigan J Frog, he belts, "Trina, my honey! Trina, my baby! Trina, my ragtime gal!"
Giggling, I bite back all comments. When Gary starts a bit like this, you've got to let him finish. Besides, it only takes one glance at his inflamed nostrils to see that he's coked to the gills.
He drops to one knee and cues jazz hands for the finale. "Come on, Trina! Tell me I'm your OOOOWN!" Then, he's up on his feet, about to burst into "Michigan Rag".
I grab him gently by the ear before he can start that encore. "Let's get a move on," I say. "I want good seats for this train wreck."
He locks the door as I tug him down the hallway. Hopping on one leg against my pull, he switches gears to Cleavon Little from "Blazing Saddles". "He'p me! He'p me! Somebody he'p me!"
He bounces off the walls in the elevator, despite the puzzled and more than mildly concerned looks from the other passengers. Once we hit the pavement, I decide that I can't be bothered to drag his schizoid ass the thirteen blocks to the comedy club, so we order an Uber. Gary tries to perform a striptease for the driver, and I have to yank him into the backseat before the guy ditches us.
Unbuckled, I catch Gary sniffing at nostril drips and playing bongo drums with his knees. In his real voice, he says, "Nice dress. Where'd you get it?"
"Macys in Woodbridge. I got these boots there, too. This belt was actually a birthday --"
"Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Cool." Glancing at the driver, Gary whips what appears to be a Foghorn Leghorn Pez dispenser. He flicks back the rooster's head to reveal a square of white powder in place of a sugar tablet, sucking it right up his nasal passage.
"Somebody's flying high tonight," I say.
Snorting, he swipes the underside of his nose. "I always get edgy before a gig." With a southern-fried twang to his voice: "Ah-said, ah-said, ah-said, boy! A lil sumthin' sumthin' to take mah mahnd owff the payyyn, bo-AAY!" Then, back to normal: "Oh, shoot, sorry. Want some?"
"Eh, not for me. A couple years ago, maybe, but I've had to cool it with that shit since my sister had her close call. This girl is sticking to weed and booze tonight, thank you."
"And the cock." In full Scottish brogue: "Don't be fahrgettin' the niece heird COCK!"
"Hey, I'll not forsake it as long as it doesn't forsake me."
"Thaire's a gud gurl!" Back to his standard voice: "If the cock-wielders ever get tired of pounding your dusty muff, send the boy's my way." And one last pitstop to Trainspotting Land: "Thais cunt's alwae's up fae a lil ay they auld humptae pumptae!"
The driver is glad to get shod of us at the comedy club. It's a full house inside. We're lucky to grab a seat for two in an awkward corner of the room. Gary asks me to order him a G&T before he runs off to sign in, or whatever it is comedians do backstage. I request a Cosmo for myself and am still waiting on both drinks when Gary returns. The waiter finally brings out the rounds as the show commences.
First up, the MC introduces a hipster-looking girl with dark-rimmed glasses and a cool hoody. She looks fresh out of high school, glowing with inner buoyancy. She sticks mostly to nonsequential one-liners. I giggle at one about MySpace being so old that even perverts don't see the point. Meanwhile, Gary doesn't stop fucking with his nose and tamping one foot upon the floor.
A young buck strides onto the stage, full of spunk, only to choke the moment the MC hands him the mic. He stutters out his set, flop-sweating through his butchered punchlines. Gary whispers to me, "I hate watching this happen to kids. First time in front of a crowd, most of them turn into deer in the headlights. He's got some good lines, too, if he could just breathe and find his confidence."
Gary seems more interested in the lines coming out of the repurposed Pez dispenser than any of the ones onstage. He keeps excusing himself to the bathroom throughout the sets to maintain his own powdery cool. He stays in there a while, too. Not enough time to hand out a quick BJ, but perhaps long enough to psyche himself up in front of the mirror.
Meanwhile, we hit a series of dick and pussy jokes with the comics. The stale, typical ones that you already know. A couple chuckles here and there, but it's mostly groans. The hecklers start into one of the performers, and the MC has to usher him offstage, early, before the room starts to turn.
Gary titters beside me. In what I can only assume is an intentionally bad Irish accent, he says, "Well, I'll be fecked! If it's not this mad BAH-sterd again!"
Onto the stage shambles a man the MC announces as Danny McDowell. He looks like he just crawled out of bed following a weeklong bender. He stands close to six feet tall and probably weighs one-hundred and thirty pounds, soaking wet. He sports a ratty, gray button-down beneath a black trench coat that looks like it's spent time on the floor of every dive bar in the city.
His black, curly hair falls all over the place. He keeps brushing it out of his eyes. In one hand, he carries an opened bottle of Stella. In the other, what appears to be a stack of two-by-three-foot notecards.
Danny clears his throat into the mic. In a genuine Irish dialect, he softly slurs, "Hi there, everybody. I wanna thank all yehs for comin' out tonight. I wasn't actually gonna come out myself, but the rent's come due...as of last month...and the landlord says that if I don't put money in his palm on Monday morning, he'll be sending us to a small plot of land in the country to live out the rest of my days...beneath his brother in law's toolshed. So, please bear with us as we run down the clock once again."
Befuddled laughter ripples through the room. Gary claps his support and whispers to me, "This guy's a total psycho. You'll love him."
Danny's set isn't so much a series of jokes as it is a bizarre, abridged retelling of "The Empire Strikes Back", with illustrations. He juggles the mic and beer between his hands while holding up the crude drawings on the notecards for everyone to see.
"Because, you see, really, the vast majority of the events in the film and all the sufferin' that these beloved characters had to endure could have been largely skipped, had the Millennium Falcon not been such a piece of shite! Han Solo was too busy tryin' to get into Leia's hair curler drawer to take the clunker to the starship auto shop! So, right away, the theme of the film has nothin', nothin' AT ALL to do with stickin' to the light side of the Force. It's...Han? GO GET A FUCKIN' TUNE-UP!"
Somehow, Gary keeps his ass glued to the seat throughout the set, not missing a word. He cackles every time Danny either compares Yoda's sentence structure to that of a blue-collar, Cockney gangster or likens coming out of carbonite freezing to an Everclear hangover. "Whatever the cause, Han, you're gonna be stone-blind for the next three to four days. Get yeh some Pedialyte and start guzzlin'!"
He ends his set with a nice, cheap button about Luke Skywalker turning off the feeling in his artificial hand whenever he wants to play "the stranger" beneath the sheets. A massive round of applause as he collects his illustration cards and shambles offstage.
Gary kisses my cheek. "I'm on in fifteen. Time for some go-go powder."
I tell him, "Break a funny bone," as he runs off to the bathroom and then backstage.
Halfway through the next comic -- an exceptionally unfunny guy who labors under the assumption that punchlines work better if you scream them all -- I feel a tap on my shoulder. I look up to see Danny holding a pitcher of beer and stack of plastic cups, the illustrations tucked safely under his arm. "Would yeh mind terribly if I kept Gary's seat warm for him?"
I flash him a toothy smile. "I don't think he'd have a problem with that."
"Groovy." He drops into the chair and starts pouring the beer. "Danny McDowell, Shite-faced Irishman."
I accept the drink. "Trina, Slut Machine."
He gives me a cockeyed smirk and clicks the cups. "Well, Slut Machine, I think the three of us are gonna get along just fine."
When Gary enters the spotlight, he looks even more strung out than before. "For my opener," he says, "I give 'Airline Safety Lecture as Read by Jack Nicholson'. Thank you." He whips out a pair of sunglasses to hide his bloodshot eyes, and he launches into it.
He is spot-fucking-on. The grumpy smile, full of teeth. The pushed-out belly with the stiff shoulders and swaying wrists. The vocal, seething breaths before every sentence. While the lecture itself remains mostly unchanged from what you hear on the planes themselves, he spices it up with additional instructions. "And watch it with all these kids runnin' around loose. Would ya, folks? The next lil shit to step on my toes is goin' straight out the fuckin' window. That goes double for tappin' on the back of my seat."
Gary has me and Danny rolling in our chairs, cackling at his every tic and mannerism. The rest of the audience might be dead, for all the sound they're making. Even when he switches gears and reenacts the entirety of Monty Python's "Cheese Shop" sketch, jumping breathlessly between John Cleese and Michael Palin's parts, you could hear a pin drop in the club.
They hardly make a peep during his big finale of "Mary Had a Little Lamb", as sung by Frank Sinatra. "Mary, that crazy gal! It's fleece was-a, a-white as snow!" But Danny and I howl, seconds from pissing ourselves.
Once Gary takes his bow, my new comic buddy and I decide to meet him backstage and blow this joint. We catch him stealing another snort from the Pez dispenser as we enter the Green Room. "Hi there, PILL-grims!" he says in his best John Wayne impression. "How do ya...think I DID, up there?"
"Bravissimo!" I say, kissing him on both cheeks and then the lips.
Danny lifts his plastic cup in salute. "Yeh'd have brought the house down if they hadn't all had shite stuffed in their ears."
Gary turns camp-homosexual. "Thank you, dearies!" He clasps Danny's cheeks and kisses him on the lips.
Danny pushes him away with a scoff. "Fuck off, yeh twat!" He seizes Gary by the wrist and guides the Pez dispenser to his own nose for a bump.
