Up until today, The columns I've written for SHECKY!
have all centered on the experiences of a standup
comic working the road. Thus, the column's name,
"Road Worthy." This month's column will
be deviating a bit from that standard, as it will
focus on my recent experience as a standup comic
working at sea. Yep, you guessed it; today we
explore the world of cruise ship comedy.
This is not my first time to dabble in the forbidden
art of cruise ship comedy. In 1994 I spent
ten days working aboard cruiseships, coincidentally
for the same cruise line I worked for this past
week (The cruise line will remain nameless. You
may have noticed in past columns that I usually
omit the names of the clubs I'd been at and the
comics with whom I'd worked. I do this for
three reasons;
#1. I want the column to center on the life of
the road comic, warts and all. A lot of club
owners might not take kindly to having their seedy
underbelly exposed and mentioned by name,
and my column in SHECKY! has not made me quite
famous enough to where I can afford to piss club
owners off. But that day draweth nigh, and when it
does, oh, when it does, there will be
weeping and wailing, and photos of squalid comedy
condos for all the world to see!
#2. I don't want the column to appear to be a
public forum for me to use in order to suck up to
club owners and advance my own career. My professional
ethics would never allow me to do such a
thing. I do my sucking up in person, thank you.
#3. Some of the participants in the shenanigans
featured in the column have wives, kids, and
probation officers that might not take kindly to
the public revelation of a given individual's
road behavior, so in many cases, names are omitted
to protect the guilty..
I performed on three different ships on my `94 run,
and all the cruise directors gave me good
enough reviews to be invited back. Unfortunately,
the cruise line wanted me to give them a
two-month commitment. Two months confined on cruise
ships is a long damn time for a landlubber. For
a variety of reasons, namely to protect my sanity,
I had to turn the offer down. That cruise
line no longer asks that kind of commitment from
comics, with some runs now being as short as
three days. That kind of commitment my sanity and
I can safely make, so I decided to give it
another try.
It probably took about a year from my submission of a
tape to the line's entertainment director
until the actual booking of a gig, which was a three-day
trip from Miami to San Juan, Puerto
Rico. The cruise was a seven-day cruise of the Eastern
Caribbean, but cruise lines often make
it a habit to take the comic off the ship at the next
port following the completion of his
onboard performance obligations. The company may send
you to board another one of their ships,
or they may fly you back home. Either way, you're outta
there, which is probably the best
policy to protect innocent passengers from the
sociopathic behavior often exhibited by bored
comics who have nearly unlimited access to alcohol
but absolutely no access to either ESPN or
The Man Show.
The cruise line's entertainment director books all
the entertainers aboard all the ships, as
well as all of their travel itineraries, so when he
says he hasn't had time to look at your
tape, he really hasn't had time. After several months
in tape limbo, my tape was seen and I was
approved to work aboard their ships. Fooled `em again.
But that was only half the battle. Then
came the wait for him to find a spot in the schedule to
fit me in, which is not as easy as it
sounds. Cruise ship work can be a sweet deal. Unlike road
clubs, the ships pay for all your
travel, provide all your meals, as well as pretty decent
pay. When comics get in the cruise
ship loop, they usually stay in the loop. Since the
passengers/audience are fresh every week, a
comic can work the same runs every week using the exact
same act for years. Fortunately for me,
the planets finally came into alignment. I happened to
call the entertainment director's
office just as there was an opening, and right after one
of their regular comics happened to
mention my name to the guy. Thank you, comedy gods.
The gig was on short notice, so the entertainment office
overnighted the plane tickets to me.
The next day I flew to Miami and boarded the ship. One
of the more charming characteristics of
cruise ships is that most of the crew don't speak a damn
lick of English, and have absolutely
no idea what the hell is going on when it comes to
entertainers coming aboard. In other words,
you may spend an hour or more sitting on your suitcase
in the crew gangway until someone who
does speak a damn lick of English can find someone who
does know what the hell is going on and
sends them down into the bowels of the ship to take you
to your cabin. Thank God I'd brought a
fat book to read, although a slim, unabridged, cruise
line issued version of "Handbook for
Entertainers Who Don't Want To Sit On Their Suitcase
in the Crew Gangway for an Hour"
might have been more appropriate. Finally, a Swedish
woman in an officer's uniform showed up to
take me to my cabin on the crew deck. She was able,
through the use of broken English and
enthusiastic mime techniques, to communicate to me
that I had one show the following night at
midnight, and that I could eat from the buffet on the
Lido deck. Then, as quickly as she had
appeared, my Swedish angel vanished. Hmmm. Must be the
magician's assistant. I now had 24 hours
in which to figure out which one of the ten shipboard
lounges and showrooms I would be
appearing in. I guess that's how they keep comics from
getting bored with all that time to
kill. In the mean time, I'm starved, where the hell's
the Lido Deck? "Hey buddy! Donde el
Decko de Lido, por favor?" Thank God for high
school Spanish.
Two of the good things about working a cruise ship
run are that your cell phone won't work at
sea and that you've got a lot of time to kill.
Two of the bad things about working a cruise
ship run are that your cell phone won't work at
sea and you've got a lot of time to kill. It's
nice to be able to put that damn phone down for
a day or two. Unfortunately, some club bookers
have the retarded habit of doing an entire year's
worth of booking on one randomly chosen
afternoon, and that randomly chosen afternoon
always seems to be the one when the "No
Service" display is the only one your
recalcitrant little electronic connection to the
world is willing to give. (Hard to blame the
phone. No one wants to work when they're on a
cruise.) It is possible to make ship to shore
phone calls, but it's really expensive. By the
time you spent 20 minutes on hold listening to
some lame guitar act's tape in order to get a
club booker on the phone, you'd have to sell
more T shirts than K.D. Lang at Lilith Fair, at
the low paying gig he finally gave you, just to
break even. Oh well, I didn't want to go to
Minot in February anyway.
As I said earlier, time to kill and lots of it.
Even the biggest of cruise ships is rather
confining, though. You're pretty much stuck in a
giant, floating hotel, with no courtesy van to
drop your bored ass off at the mall. There is a
fully equipped workout room on the ship. So
I've been told, anyway. I don't think I've ever
been so bored I felt like lifting heavy stuff
over and over. You could go jogging on the deck,
but that takes too long. Besides, I prefer to
work smart, not hard. I carefully study the lounge
chair seating arrangements on deck, and when
that Mimi- from- the- Drew Carey Show- lookalike finally
gets her big ass out of that lounge chair
that has the perfect viewing angle on those four thong-wearing
Italian college broads who've
wisely invested daddy's money on breast implants
(are those saline- or soy-filled?), that's when
I do my best Carl Lewis-sprinting-for-gold
impression to get to that chair at least one step
ahead of the rest of the balding, middle aged
horn dogs who so sadly think they've actually got
a snowball's chance in Hell with those chicks.
Some of you may be thinking, "Gee, Dave,
two or three days with no phone interruptions and
no place to go. What a perfect chance to hole
up in your cabin and get some writing done."
Yeah? Well, I did that already. Besides, didn't
you hear me say there's big-boobed, thong-wearing,
Italian college chicks in lounge chairs
on the deck by the pool, McFly? That's why
they put batteries in laptops, Poindexter. Can I
help it if my muse has the libido of a
19-year-old frat boy? Hey, if you want to spend
all day in your cabin putting the finishing
touches on that "Differences between Calculus
and Linear Algebra" piece you so sadly
keep telling yourself is gonna get you invited to
Aspen next year, please be my guest, you
freakin' headcase. I've got a divorce that's going
to be final in a few weeks, and I need to
brush up on my long-dormant thong-wearing,
big-boobed Italian college broad harvesting skills.
If that's OK with you, Mister "I write
three hours a day, every day, just like Jerry
Seinfeld used to do."
Finally, after two days of hanging around the ship:
Showtime. I only had one show on this run.
Midnight, in the ship's main showroom. A huge room
that could hold at least 1,500 people, it was
used for the big Las Vegas-style after-dinner shows.
This place was perfect for standup
comedy. A large stage, floor- and balcony-level seating,
zillion-dollar sound system, spot
lights. Every seat faced the stage. Quite a change
for a guy who does most of his shows in
smoky comedy clubs housed in strip malls, with a
tiny stage thrown in the corner of what was
once a furniture store. The show was billed as
"Midnite Madness! R rated comedy show in
the main showroom with comedian Kid Dave Miller!"
Cool! My very own show. No brash emcee
trying to shock the crowd. No pompous feature act
systematically mangling every premise under
the sun before proudly delivering some feeble,
scatologically oriented punchline. Just me! Uh-oh.
Just me? What had I gotten myself into?
People, I hate to brag, I really do, but this
may have been the best show of my life. I'd like
to take all the credit, but on this particular
night, the deck was heavily stacked in my favor.
The showroom was perfect. The cruise was a seven
days in length, which meant every one in that
show room had spent at least 600 bucks to be there.
The usual hooting cadre of free pass-winning
trailer park idiots were nowhere to be
found. We were at least 60 miles from the
nearest microwave tower, so all cell phones and
beepers were rendered useless. No one had to go
to work the next day, had to get the babysitter
home, had to worry about driving home drunk. It
was midnight. The old people and kids were in bed.
There were only three places to be on the
ship at that time of day: in your cabin, in the casino,
or at the comedy show in the main showroom.
It was formal night on the ship, and the audience of
1,000 plus people was dressed to the
nines. All the women had just enjoyed a romantic,
dressy evening with their significant other.
All the men knew without a doubt that if they could
stay awake long enough, they were gonna get
laid. When I asked the cruise director how clean he
wanted the material, he replied, "It's
billed as an R-rated show, say whatever you want."
The planets were truly in alignment on
this one, and they were all revolving around a
microphone that was about to spend the next 50
minutes in my hand. Thank you, God.
On stages all across America at that very moment,
standup comics were cursing the day they got
into comedy. Saturday midnight shows in comedy clubs
are a kind of medieval torture, dreamed up
by club owners as punishment for comics who dare
complain about the conditions over at the
filthy condo. The midnight crowds are usually composed
of drunk on their collective ass,
imbeciles who've downloaded free passes from some
unemployed carnival worker website. These
buffoons would rather yell at the comic and fling
their own fecal matter at each other than
listen to a comedy show. Any joke that takes place
above the waistline is a waste of breath
with this people. But that night, on a cruise ship
somewhere east of the Bahamas, I had a crowd
that was made up largely of upwardly mobile,
professional people, dressed up in their very best
party clothes. People with jobs, teeth, manners.
They had all spent a lot of money to be there,
and expected the show to be good, and it was
(I am, after all, Kid Dave). The show rocked! I
swear, if I ever get my own HBO special, I'm
taping it onboard a cruise ship on formal night. I
wouldn't change a thing. Well, I might make the
show a little earlier in the evening. That
would give me a little more time for post show,
"Damn, you were funny!" drunk chick
harvesting (I'm single again, remember?). On
land or sea, some things in comedy never change.
Now, where are those thong wearing, big-boobed Italian
college chicks? I could have sworn I saw
them laughing at the midnight show!
See ya on the road,
Kid Dave
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