This post has absolutely nothing to do with weight loss, so many of you may want to skip it.
I saw the headline “Comic Dead From Apparent Suicide” on the LA Times website, and wondered who it was. I knew it couldn’t have been a really big star, because their name wasn’t in the headline. Turns out it was Richard Jeni. What a shame. How come it’s never the Dane Cooks or Carrot Tops of the world?
I really haven’t paid much attention to comedians for several years, but I used to. And Jeni was truly one of the best there ever was. But he had the misfortune to come up at the wrong time, in the late 1980s, when anybody with a pair of chinos and a McNugget joke could get booked on Budd Friedman’s Evening At The Improv. It’s hard to stand out when you’re surrounded by a million hacks, and a million TV shows willing to put hacks on. Jeni did pretty well, with lots of one man cable specials, but he never came close to the fame he deserved. Meanwhile Dane Cook is hosting SNL and Rob Schneider keeps getting starring roles in movies, each one crappier than the last.
They say Jeni battled depression, and not just from seeing lesser talents and no-talents outshine him. He was just that way, according to friends. And I believe it. I have a good friend, Lisa, who years ago managed a comedy club, and I used to hang out at the club with her. I saw a lot of shows, and I met quite a few comedians. By the way, if you’re a fan of comedy, don’t start hanging out at a comedy club. You’ll learn two things fast. First, most comedians aren’t very original or very funny. Most acts are quite similar, and in most cases, if you’ve seen one you’ve seem them all. You’ll soon come to despise a lot of them, or at least their material. The second thing you’ll find out is that the few really original and funny comedians are usually really, really messed up deep down inside. Not every single one of them; there are some rare exceptions. But the vast majority of them are not happy campers. Many of them have serious drug and alcohol problems, and almost all of them are usually depressed and often morose. Who knows why, but it seems that the best comedy springs from some extremely unhappy people.
There was one local guy who used to come and do open mics back then. Now, open mics are awful. Just about everyone who gets up is beyond terrible, but you can’t tell them that. But this guy Tom actually had the stuff-funnier jokes than a lot of the pros you’d see on TV. But he had horrible stage fright, and he drank like a fish. Pros would tell him that he should move to LA, that he had what it took, but he had zero self confidence, and was terribly depressed on top of the drinking problem. We heard some stories about the way he grew up, and it wasn’t very good. On top of that, after the LA riots he was convinced a race war was about to break out, and that America was doomed, and he started reading all kinds of far right wing books and Jewish conspiracy stuff, and pretty much just dropped out of comedy. Like I said, comedians are strange. I’ve often wondered what would’ve become of him if he’d gotten his head screwed on straight and stuck with it.
Another desperately sad case was an actual touring comedian, and he was the funniest man I’d ever seen, and I’d seen a lot by then. Just the driest delivery with some really killer material. I’ll call him Joe-I won’t mention his name for reasons which will be obvious, but he’d actually been on Star Search at one point. I thought Tom had a drinking problem until I met Joe. He was brilliant and hilarious, and deserved to be on Letterman and Carson, but he sabotaged his own career with his habit. He’d drink 20 beers at the club after his show, and then go out to a nightclub for more. It became increasingly difficult for him to get bookings because–and I swear this is true–he’d drink himself into oblivion every night and then wet the bed. No joke. Comedy clubs either rented an apartment or provided hotel rooms for the comedians, and after you leave behind a mattress soaked with urine a few times, nobody wants to put you up.
Another time Joe dropped some acid with a bunch of drunks and floozies he’d brought back to the Holiday Inn from the comedy club. At that point he decided it would be a good idea to take a magic marker and write his philosophy of life on the walls of the hotel room, in detail, which he did. He probably would’ve won on Star Search, but he blew that, too. He walked into the bar of the hotel where the judges were sitting around having a few drinks, and that ruined any chances of his winning the next day. Because, from the stories I heard, he didn’t so much walk, as he was carried, because he was too drunk to stand up. And who was carrying him? Two quite obvious street hookers. Once Lisa called his house to see about booking him. When the phone rang, an older woman answered, and Lisa asked if she could please speak with Joe. The woman began screaming “Damn you, you $#&*%$! b**ch! I told you to stop calling here! My son pays his bills!!!” Ah, poor, doomed Joe. Last I heard he’d quit the biz about 10 or 12 years ago and was working at a factory out in Nebraska or someplace. There’s no telling how big he would’ve been if he could’ve just conquered his demons, but he couldn’t. Many comedians can’t.
And in the end, it looks like Richard Jeni couldn’t either. Which is just a horrible, horrible shame. I’d forgotten just how funny he was, and how easy he made it look. Go to Youtube and watch a few of his videos. He was one of the best there ever was. And now he’s gone.
Rest in peace, Richard Jeni.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 1:51 am and is filed under General, The Bad Stuff, Depression. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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