What Goes Up Is Sure To Come Down

2014 at Pasqualis with Joey Villagomez

Back in March of 2007, I took a road trip up to the UP of Michigan. This is where Wisconsin & Michigan connect over the lake. A lot of people don’t even know that this part of the country exists, but thanks to comedy, I do. I’m pretty confident this is where witness protection hides out. Unbeknownst to me, this trip was the first of maybe 20 trips I’d have to this part of the country throughout my comedy career. The gig is two nights: the first night being in Negaunee, MI, and the second night being in Sheboygan Falls, WI. Over the years, I’ve been fortunate enough to bring a lot of my comedy buddies on the road with me to this gig: Ken Garr, Ryan Budds, Joey Villagomez, Jim Flannigan, Jay Washington, Brooks Sullivan, and more. This year, I had the pleasure of bringing Anthony Bonazzo with me. Anthony and I worked together at Zanies in St. Charles over the summer and hit it off well. The tough part about road-tripping together in comedy is that you never know what you are going to get with the other person in your car. Sometimes you hit it off right away and a six-hour car ride goes by in the blink of an eye with the two of you talking and laughing the entire way up. Other times, it’s torture from the moment you get in the car with the other person and it’s like a six-hour prison sentence; forcing conversation, listening to each other’s shitty music, constantly one-upping each other no matter the conversation, not to mention body odor and fluids. Thankfully, this time around, Anthony and I were that first statement - we hit it off and time flew by.

Friday afternoon Anthony swung out by me and we began the 6-hour journey up to Negaunee, just as I have for years prior. The goal for this gig is to get to Negaunee with enough time to check in to our lodging, but not early enough to have to stay at our lodging for any significant amount of time. The place we stay at is called “The Triangle Motel”. I have stayed here probably 10-times over the years and oddly enough, look forward to being back. It’s a rite of passage as a comedian to stay in these types of places. This is just a small town Motel where you have to fire up your furnace the second you walk in and then go take a shit with your feet in the shower. Anthony and I pulled in and the door to the front desk, which is the living room of the owner’s house, was locked. There was a note on the door that said that he was gone and to call the phone number he had listed to check in. You know you’re in a small town when they don’t include their area code when giving a phone number. See…witness protection. I tracked down the area code to call the owner and he told me “I left your keys in your rooms, just go on into room X and room X”. So, I went into my room and did my normal check for dead hookers in the closet and drugs under the mattress. This time I came up snake eyes, so I threw my bags on the bed, took a shit, soaked my feet, and went back out to the car to head to the show.

Trying to figure out why this lady isn’t laughing

We made our way over to Pasqualis, a pizza pub in northern Michigan that has been doing comedy every other week for 25+ years. Clarke, the owner, is one of the greatest guys you’ll ever meet in this business and it was great to see him and his family again. They always treat the comics like royalty and this time was no exception. The way that this place runs their shows is that they invite three people from the audience up on stage to tell a joke, the audience votes on the winner, and then they win free tickets to another show. It’s a tradition they’ve had for a long time and it helps as there isn’t an opening comedian outside of the feature & headliner. After these comics went up, Anthony went on stage and had a great set. He worked with the crowd and really brought them into his energy. It’s important to have that from the other comics on the show - the last thing you need is someone to suck the energy out of the place and shit on the audience for not laughing, which ruins it for the headliner. (trust me, I ruined a lot of shows in my youth of comedy). I went up on stage and launched right into my rants and the crowd was pretty receptive from the start. Now, doing stand-up comedy comes with blinders. What I mean, is that while everyone else in the room is laughing, a comic has blinders on and can only focus on those in the crowd that aren’t laughing. Call it insecurity. Well, this one lady in the front row wouldn’t laugh or crack a smile at anything I did. Everyone around her was laughing, but she sat there stone-faced like I was pitching a timeshare. I prodded at her and verbally poked at her to try and get her to open up, which resulted in her burying herself in the mozzarella sticks at her table to not have to look at me. While she was scooping up marinara sauce I told her “I hope you spill that all over your shirt” and got the whole audience to watch her eat it. Fuck it, she made me uncomfortable by not laughing, time for an eye-for-an-eye. After a while of playing my entire act to her, I finally broke through and cracked her a little. This stubborn grump turned her face away from the stage to laugh, so the only gratification I got was watch her shoulders move. I fully deserved not to be able to truly enjoy this moment after the hell that I put her through. While I was pitching my CD’s later in the show, I heard another woman stage left (the opposite side of the picture above) who had been laughing the whole night, make a derogatory comment about me to the friend next to her. I was going to let it go as the audience didn’t hear it, but my fragile ego got the best of me and I addressed it. I tried to ask her to repeat what she said so I could at least get the audience on my side with hearing this ignorant shit. This lady wisely declined to repeat what she said. So, rather than tear her apart as I didn’t have the “evidence on record” so-to-speak, I decided to go with the stern, but repetitive “be fucking nice” like Pesci to De Niro in Casino when De Niro comes storming in the restaurant looking for his wife. It worked and it kept the woman quiet throughout the rest of my show. The only problem is, I embarrassed this woman, so now I had someone who was laughing for me turn completely quiet for the rest of the show. After the show, while I was selling my CD’s, the woman who made that comment came up to me and explained that while she did make a derogatory comment, it wasn’t about me. It turns out that she was bitching about the other woman who hadn’t laughed all night and was talking shit about her, to her friend. When I asked her on stage to repeat what she had said, she didn’t want to do it because she didn’t want to start an altercation with the other woman. She then went on to tell me how much she loved my show. So, I sat there with my tail between my legs, feeling like a frail dip-shit, apologizing to my super-fan who I humiliated in front of everybody. I gave her both of my CD’s for free and told her to listen to what it sounds like when I’m not an asshole to my fans. I went back to my motel to soak my feet and sleep on a boxspring. Fuckin’ comedy…

The view of our parking lot at 11am. That sole car is mine. I told you, witness protection…

Saturday morning, I woke up with my feet hanging off the bottom of the mattress that must’ve gotten shrunk in the wash. Checkout is at 11am and I decided to take full advantage of the time. Not because I wanted to stay in this room longer, but because I have two kids at home and it’s not often that I get to sit around doing nothing. One thing I make sure to do on the road is wake up at the same time I would wake up at home to FaceTime my wife & kids. This keeps the routine at home so my kids can see me just the same as they would if I was at home. For you nitpickers, I realize that it’s not exactly the same. I’m not waking up every day at home, making my kids go downstairs so I can FaceTime them from my bedroom. I’m not an asshole. But, it’s close enough to the real thing. This is not only important to me as a Father, but it also is important for me to show my wife that I’m not just living it up on the road, sleeping in, and partying while she is at home taking care of the kids. This is also part of the reason I document my stays, so she can see that I’m not exactly in paradise - but rather my one night in Alcatraz north.

See, proof that I workout on the road…nobody would believe me without this picture…I’m a douchebag.

Anthony and I hit the road around 11am to head down to Sheboygan Falls, WI. This is about an hour north of Milwaukee and about 3-hours south of where we were in Negaunee, MI. We passed the time talking about our show the night before, the bits we liked, and spent a great deal of time talking about drugs. I’ve always been a control freak when it comes to my own body, so I’ve never been a drug-user. I’ve always been too scared to let a substance take over my body as I’m afraid of what my spastik self will do if under the influence. Now, being the complete hypocrite that I’ve always been, I don’t have a problem drinking and letting that take control over my body. I think I feel that I can control the drinking more and rebound quickly if I feel myself going overboard. Whereas with drugs, you have to let them run their course. I’m sure my theory is flawed as fuck, and complete bullshit, but I buy my own bullshit, so leave me alone. However, I have always been massively interested in other people’s stories of drug use as it fulfills that part of me that would one day like to try LSD and see God, or even just eat a stem and see a color that I didn’t know existed. For clarity sake, I’m talking about recreational safe drug use, I’m not talking about life-damaging use and abuse, those stories don’t interest me in a fun way. After three hours of talking about drugs, we made it to Sheboygan Falls. I asked Anthony if he wanted to go see the Falls, and thankfully he said “no”. I have traveled this route so many times over the years, that I have seen the actual Sheboygan Falls more times than I care to count. Instead, Anthony who is a personal trainer, and I decided we would find a local gym to go workout at. When you’re on the road in your 20’s, it’s all about performing, partying, promiscuity, and sleeping. When you’re on the road in your 30’s and 40’s, it’s about performing, heartburn, backaches, and “how many miles before the next bathroom”. Healthy choices start to take over, and we found a YMCA in the area. I was able to share with Anthony a quick road hack for comedians. Typically, if you tell the front desk of a local gym that you’re in town performing at one of their local venues as a comedian, they will let you use the gym facility for free that day. I just state “if you want to go to the show, we will get you comped” and they are typically happy to exchange gym time for comedy. Although, in all my years of doing this, I don’t think I’ve ever had anybody actually take me up on the offer of comped tickets.

The road to Sheboygan Falls crosses from Michigan to Wisconsin

Saturday night, after spending hours sitting at an Applebee’s killing time, we finally got to the show at the Odyssey Fun Center. This show was packed wall-to-wall with a crowd ready for comedy. Again, this show didn’t have an emcee that performed comedy, instead they use an employee of the room to simply quiet the crowd down and introduce the comics to the stage. This gentleman asked Anthony how to pronounce his last name about 10-different times and then went on stage and fucked it all up by introducing him as “Anthony Bozo”. It’s fine, no big deal. Anthony went up first and had a great set - he really hit on all 4-cylinders. After his set, the host came back up to transition from Anthony to me as the headlining comedian. Instead of simply doing his job, the host came back up and said “Did anybody else find Anthony not funny, or just me?” and raised his hand. Nobody else in the audience raised their hand and the host stood there looking like an asshole. Anthony shouted out to him “why don’t you do 5-minutes right now” and the host was a chicken-shit and didn’t do anything. Instead, he switched gears to introduce me and botched the introduction that I gave to him and didn’t even attempt to say my last name. Instead, he said, “this guy has albums online, here he is, Vince”. I was fucking livid after what he did to Anthony. As comics, we are on our own, we are all each other have until we win over the crowd each night. The host is supposed to endear us to the audience as someone the audience will “love”, to try and make our job a little easier. For this host to try and bury Anthony was not only unprofessional, but he was silently letting the crowd know that it was ok to shit all over us. I couldn’t have that, so I got on stage and went right into defense mode. I ripped the host a new asshole immediately and was relentless about it, to the point where the audience had to basically tell me to “proceed with my actual act”. While it was an uncomfortable start to the show, it was basically me peeing on the stage saying “this is my territory and don’t you fuck with it or I’m going to chew your ass apart”. It is my belief that as a comic, we are there for the audience. It’s not “my show”, it’s “your show” - you paid to get in, I am the entertainer. However, for the sake of all of us that night, I had to establish that domain and make it known that we aren’t going to stand for someone talking shit who doesn’t have the guts or drive to follow their dream or even simple instruction for that matter. I won the audience over throughout the course of my 60-minute set and got a huge applause at the end. Before I stepped off stage to bring the host back up, I wanted to establish our role one more time. I asked the audience if they had fun and they cheered loudly. I asked them to give it up for my hilarious friend and feature performer Anthony Bonazzo, and they cheered loudly. I then said “you’ve been an amazing audience, now let’s bring your shitty, terrible host back up here” and I put the microphone on the ground and walked off the stage before he got up there. The host walked back up and the audience turned on him and shouted “why don’t you tell a joke”, to which the host started to tell a knock-knock joke, fucked it up and basically got booed off the stage…we win.

On stage in Sheboygan Falls. Always great crowds.

This venue is such a fun room and I’ve had so many good shows here over the years. The management is top-notch and the hosts are always great…this was a one-off situation. In retrospect, this host was probably just trying to improv and be funny with his dumb comment and realized very quickly that it was a poor decision. Looking back, I sincerely doubt this individual meant what he said…but rather had to learn the hard way not to veer from the instructions. I spoke with management afterward and explained to them that a comment like that hurts the integrity of not only the comedians, but the show and venue as well - as they are producing the show. Management could not have agreed more and were absolutely amazing in how they handled the process. We’ve had a relationship for a lot of years and I want to continue working for them for years to come. Anthony and I immediately jumped back into our car to make that ride home to Chicago. Comedians, whether we have a hotel or not, typically try to get home on the night of the final gig. There is something about sleeping in your own bed that is rewarding and fulfilling after being on the road. I got home about 1am and got yelled at from my wife for shitting with my feet in the tub…I just told her “that’s the road”.