It's Not Easy Bein' Me: A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs

It’s Not Easy Bein’ Me

A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs

Rodney Dangerfield

Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.

I dedicate this book to my wife, Joan
,
and to all the girls who let me sleep over

Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.

Contents

Foreword
by Jim Carrey

Introduction

Chapter 1
I Was a Male Hooker

Chapter 2
How Can I Get a Job Like That?

Chapter 3
Plans for Conquering the World

Chapter 4
Very Naked from the Waist Up

Chapter 5
I Needed $3,000 to Get Out of Jail

Chapter 6
Why Didn’t You Tell Me You Were Funny?

Chapter 7
Some Show Business on the Side

Chapter 8
I Am Not High!

Chapter 9
Can I Have Your Autograph and More Butter?

Chapter 10
Let the Good Times Roll

Chapter 11
A Night with Lenny Bruce

Chapter 12
Stuck in a Bag of Mixed Nuts

Chapter 13
I’m Not Going!

Chapter 14
Three Lucky Breaks

Chapter 15
Turkeys in Wheelchairs

Chapter 16
My Heart Started Doing Somersaults

Chapter 17
End of the Line

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Publisher

Foreword

by Jim Carrey

T
he book you are holding in your hands—or clenched in your teeth, maybe?—is the amazing life story of one of my all-time heroes, Rodney Dangerfield.

I’ve read it twice—the first time, quickly, to see what he said about me, the second time to learn about his amazing life.

Rodney is, without a doubt, as funny as a carbon-based life-form can be. Watching his act is like watching a boxing match on fast-forward. His biggest problem is that he fires off his brilliant one-liners so fast that by the time you’ve recovered from one joke, you’ve already missed the next three. Rodney is a walking encyclopedia of stand-up comedy, spanning the generations, from nightclubs to websites, from Ed Sullivan to Conan O’Brien. And through it all, for more than fifty years, he has remained high, I mean really hip.

In addition to performing his own comedy, he has given a big boost to hundreds of comics. As the owner of Dangerfield’s, his nightclub in New York, and through his HBO specials, he has always been a young comedian’s best friend. His eye for talent is unmatched, and he never took the safe way out. He fostered plenty of mainstream comedians, but his heart really went out to the edgy performers, those men (Sam Kinison) and women (Roseanne) who had a hard time getting booked when they were starting out because they weren’t “user-friendly.” He even helped discover a young impressionist from Canada who dreamed, at one time, of being the next Rich Little. (For those of you who are moving your lips as you read this, that young impressionist was me.) More than twenty years ago, I was performing in a small club in Toronto when I got my first gig opening for Rodney at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. That was a very big deal for me, a huge break, and someday, I’m going to thank Rodney for giving me that break. Someday.

After that run in Vegas, Rodney took me on tour with him for a couple of years, and we had a lot of laughs, and a lot of bad airplane meals. One day, though, I decided to change my act—I wanted to stop doing my impressions and start being myself onstage. Well, things got pretty weird for a while after that. And by “weird” I mean that I was bombing night after night. But I stuck with it, mainly because I could always hear Rodney laughing in the wings. After a show, he’d say to me, “Man, those people were lookin’ at you like you were from another planet!” But I
was making him laugh, so I knew I was onto something. A lot of comedians, even a star as big as Rodney Dangerfield, would have dumped an opening act that wasn’t making his audience laugh, but Rodney stood by me, told me to keep on doing what I was doing.

He, of course, knew something about sticking with it. He struggled for decades before he reached the top of his profession. I don’t know if anybody remembers the era of the comedy club—they were quite popular places at one time, but you can only see them now in the Smithsonian, I think—but I did stand-up in clubs for fifteen years and sometimes the only thing that kept me going was the thought that Rodney had dropped out of the business when he was thirty but had come back and made it when he was in his forties. Made it big. In a business that almost always values youth over talent, he was—and still is—absolute proof that it’s never too late to make your mark. You may have to quit for a while and sell some aluminum siding, but you don’t have to give up your dreams.

Most people don’t know this about Rodney, but he is also a very sweet and generous man. We’re talking about a guy who has dozens of people walk up to him every day of his life and say, “Hey, Rodney, I’ll give you some respect,” as if he’s never heard it before, and not once has he cold-cocked anyone. That alone is an incredible achievement. I know because, apparently, I’m smokin’!

Rodney has written thousands of great jokes, but for
me, his funniest line is his classic setup, “I don’t get no respect.” That’s almost an inside joke because from me, and from all the hundreds of comedians he has helped and inspired, and from anybody who digs great comedy, he gets nothing but love and respect.

Introduction

H
ere I am, eighty-two years old, writing a book. According to statistics about men in their eighties, only one out of a hundred makes it to ninety. With odds like that, I’m writing very fast. I want to get it all done. I mean, I’m not a kid anymore, I’m getting old. The other night, I was driving, I had an accident. I was arrested for hit-and-walk.

I know I’m getting old, are you kiddin’? I got no sex life. This morning, when I woke up, vultures were circling my crotch.

Hey, you know when you’re really old? When your testicles tell you it’s time to mow the lawn.

It’s hard for me to accept the fact that soon my life will be over. No more Super Bowls. No more Chinese food. No more sex. And the big one, no more smoking pot.

Many years ago, my wife and I were living with a
friend of mine in Englewood, New Jersey. He had a big house, and we all shared it for a while.

One night I came home late and I was hungry. I saw on the kitchen table a big, beautiful German chocolate cake. Right away, the plan hit me. I smoked a joint and then I started drinking skim milk and eating chocolate cake.

Before I knew it, I had eaten half the cake.

I lit a cigarette, sat back, and relaxed.

I looked over at the remaining cake. I noticed the chocolate was moving. I didn’t believe it. I looked closer. I saw there were thousands of red ants stacked at the bottom of the cake, crawling all over. But there were no ants on the side of the plate where I had eaten the cake. I knew the ants hadn’t stopped at that imaginary line.

I realized I had eaten an army of red ants.

I called the hospital. They told me not to worry, it would all come out as waste. Funny. That’s what a lot of people told my mother when she was pregnant with me.

Jump forward ten years. I’m forty, broke. My mother is dying of cancer. I owe $20,000 to an aluminum-siding company. My wife is sick. I’ve got two kids. I need money now. What am I gonna do?

Hey, wait a minute.

To tell this story right, I gotta go
way
back.

Chapter One

I Was a Male Hooker…

Most kids never live up to their baby pictures
.

R
oy and Arthur was a vaudeville comedy team. Roy was my father; Arthur was my uncle Bunk. On November 22, 1921, after their last show that night in Philadelphia, Phil Roy got a call backstage, where he was told, “It’s a boy!”

My father drove that night from Philadelphia to Babylon, Long Island, to greet his new son, Jacob Cohen. Me. (My father’s real name was Phillip Cohen; his stage name was Phil Roy.)

I was born in an eighteen-room house owned by my mother’s sister Rose and her husband. After a couple of weeks, my mother took me back to her place in Jamaica, Queens, where we lived with my four-year-old sister, Marion, my mother’s mother, my mother’s other three sisters—Esther, Peggy, and Pearlie—her brother Joe, and a Swedish carpenter named Mack, who Esther later married. The whole family had come to America from Hungary when my mother was four.