Beh Beh and the Fists of Fury

Bert was trying to make it in the stand-up comedy circuit.  It's an enticing prospect, like a career in popular music, and like it, it is a highly competitive field.  In the 1960s, there were folk clubs where budding singers would strum their Sears & Roebuck guitars trying to catch an ear of a record record scout. Nowadays, the folk clubs are all gone, but comedy clubs have grown like mushrooms after the rain.  Audiences pay money to spend an evening sitting in a crowded room, thankfully smoke free this time, and listen to three hours of bad jokes.  But then, most people like to boo and hiss along with their peers, it gives them the assurance that others think the same politically correct "progressive" thoughts, and like themselves disdain the forms of comedy they all implicitly agree are out of date and unfashionable.   How modern! Or post-modern.

Such affairs are sometimes competitions where the audiences choose via some applause-meter the winners, who will be invited the following week and paid a small fee.    Bert, like most aspiring comics, had a day job, and wrote and practiced his act (often with myself as his only audience) during off hours and weekends.  I helped him with the material, we wrote some jokes together, and with the delivery.   Some stand-ups fire off  a line after line without stopping, most, Bert among them, practice timing and silences.  We worked really hard on calibrating Bert's silences for the greatest effect.

Bert took on a stage name, the veracity of which he was able to support with an old fake ID, Bert Bukowsky, in honor, he told me, of the writer Charles Bukowsky.  He wanted to appear as a Jewish comedian. "Bukowsky sounds Polish or Russian," I informed him. "Well, aren't all Jews Polish or Russian?" he shot back.  (He incorporated this line into his act.) "And I tell jokes about my Jewish mother!"  (Bert's mother was native French.)

As he introduced himself on stage, he'd say, "Just call me B B" (pronouncing it 'Beh Beh'), "like the French call Brigitte Bardot". That line earned him the first laugh.

One time at a club competition he told the audience of an incident that happened to him, a public park ranger up in the hills during daytime.  He had to hand a ticket to a woman who was walking her dog without a leash, as required by park regulations. "Had to", because he did it reluctantly, normally issuing a verbal warning, but this time his supervisor was in the truck with him, and he had no choice.  The woman's dog was a pitbull, and the faces of the woman and the dog looked similar, as often happens with dog owners, men and women, so much so, he said, that he wasn't sure whether to hand the ticket to the woman or to the dog (audience laughs.)

It just so happened that this woman was also in the competition, somehow he didn't recognize her, or neglected to alter his act, she appeared before him, received almost no laughs, and when he returned backstage, unhappy as she already was at the cool  reception of her act, after words were exchanged, she attacked him with fists.  He hit her back just once, and broke her nose.  Police were called, there were witnesses supporting Bert's story, she was arrested, and in the end he declined to press charges. (The ticket, and no laughs at the club were enough punishment for her, he told me.) The incident became the talk of the town, was incorporated in various versions into other comedians' acts, though Bert wisely chose to remain silent on the subject. The nose eventually healed.