It's Not Easy Bein' Me: A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs (18 page)

—
MEET WALLY SPARKS, 1996

A
fter
Natural Born Killers,
I went back to comedy. I cowrote
Meet Wally Sparks.

Casting that movie almost got me evicted.

Since the early nineties, I’ve lived in Los Angeles. My new wife, Joan, and I live in a condo in a fancy building near Beverly Hills. Some of the residents are rather prudish.

One of the characters in
Meet Wally Sparks
was a hooker, so we had the actresses auditioning for that role wait in my lobby and then come up to my apartment and audition one by one. A lot of the girls came in character—that is, dressed as hookers. Sometimes two or three girls would be in my lobby.

Some of the tenants got very upset and complained to the building manager and security, “There are prostitutes sitting in the lobby!”

They thought these actresses were real prostitutes, and that I was running them up to my apartment in shifts.

When my wife came home, the head of security and the manager of the building pounced on her. They told her about the tenants’ complaints, and Joan explained that the girls were actresses. That calmed down the manager and the security guy, but I don’t think all the tenants believed her.

It’s been several years since that happened, but some of those people still look at me in the elevator like I should be ashamed of myself.

With my wife, I don’t get no respect. The other night there was a knock on the front door. My wife told me to hide in the closet
.

V
ery often when Joan and I go out, she will drive the car. After I am in the car, I realize I am uncomfortable. My pants are tight on me, so I open them and pull down
the zipper so that I have more room to relax while we drive around.

The problem is when we come back to our building. As we pull up to the entrance, the valet guys who take care of the cars see me pulling up my zipper, like something exciting just took place. They must wonder,
What’s going on with these two?
In fact, I’ve had the feeling for quite some time now I’m the talk of the building.

It’s our night! We’re gonna paint the town yellow!

—R
OVER
D
ANGERFIELD
,
1991

I
put some of my own money into an animated movie about dogs. It had some songs, which I wrote, and I even sang a few. In character, of course. I thought it was a funny movie, but I had some trouble with the studio, and they buried it like a bone.

In 2000, I did
My Five Wives
, which was based on an idea I got because my wife, Joan, is a Mormon. I started thinking that a movie about polygamy could be funny.

At the premiere of the movie, Joan and I renewed our wedding vows. Fabio was the best man and Adam Sandler was the ring bearer. It was a very classy party. The whole night only two fights broke out.

I got lucky with one thing, I’m married and I got a good woman. I got a woman who loves me for my money and my fame and not for what I am. She’s a lovely girl. Her name is Joan. She comes from Utah. She’s a Mormon. I’m very happy with her, very happy. In fact, next week I’m marrying her sister
.

T
he 4th Tenor
came out in 2002, on my eighty-first birthday. In it, there’s a scene in a restaurant where two people who are rather heavy sit down and start eating ferociously. I go over and say hello to them, they don’t even look up. They just keep eating. No matter what I say, they won’t stop.

Finally I say, “When you get to the white part, that’s the plate.”

We had to do three or four takes of that same scene. We did a close-up, a master, we had to repeat it, and through it all, these people just kept eating.

Then someone yelled, “Lunch!”

They were the first ones in line.

This pot should be good. I bought it from a cop.

—E
ASY
M
ONEY
,
1983

Chapter Thirteen

I’m Not Going!

You don’t know who to believe anymore. They say, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” What am I supposed to do? Jerk him off, too?

P
eople always say to me, “Rodney, who makes you laugh?”

When I was a kid, Laurel and Hardy were my favorites, but I also loved the Marx Brothers, Jack Benny, W. C. Fields, and Mae West. I loved their images, and I loved their lines.

One of my favorite lines by Mae West: “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”

When I was fifteen, I was in love with Henny Youngman. His act was laugh after laugh after laugh—
boom-boom-boom.
He’d tell a few jokes, play the violin, then tell a few more jokes. One of his best jokes was: “My wife and I, we’re together fifty years. Where did I go wrong?”

Here’s another: “I told the airline, fly me to Chicago and fly my luggage to Toronto.”

They said, “We can’t do that.”

I said, “Why not? You did it before.”

Youngman was also quick with an ad lib. I was in a nightclub in New York called the China Doll about sixty years ago, and Youngman was in the audience, listening to a girl sing. In the middle of her set, she said, “And now I’d like to take you on an imaginary trip to the Far East…”

Youngman stood up and yelled, “I’m not going!” And walked out.

I admire smart lines from anybody. This is from an Indian comedian named Charlie Hill: “They say Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean. My people were living here for hundreds and hundreds of years. We never noticed it?

“One day the chief took his son to the top of a mountain. As they looked out over the hills and valleys, he spread his arms wide and said, ‘Son, someday none of this will be yours.’”

Another comic I know, John Fox, a very funny guy, has a line he uses when someone heckles him. He says to them, “I’d call you a cocksucker, but I know you are trying to stop.”

Bob Schimmel does a very funny line: “How does a blind person know when they’re finished wiping their behind?”

Forty or fifty years ago, Birdland, a famous, wild jazz club in New York, had a black doorman named Pee Wee. He was a very short guy, but he had a way about him. He was a bit snippy, and he walked around like he owned the place.

I saw him get into an argument one night with a customer. They exchanged some heated words, and the guy said to Pee Wee, “Don’t you bug my ass, you half-a-motherfucker.”

We all like different types of shows on television. I like a show where anything can happen.
The Howard Stern Show
does it for me. I wish I was Howard Stern. He has a way with women. Whatever he tells them to do, they do. He says, “Pick up your dress, honey. Higher, higher. I want to see your ass. Higher.” They do it. Girls don’t listen to me that way. I go out with a girl, spend all kinds of money. She won’t take off her gloves.

I tell ya, my wife and I don’t think alike. We got problems. I want to go see a marriage counselor and she wants to go on
The Jerry Springer Show.

A
show that really makes me laugh is
The Jerry Springer Show
. It’s much funnier than all the sitcoms with their piped-in laughter. The show is real, the people are real. There’s nothing better than something funny that’s spontaneous, something that comes out of the moment, instead of out of a script.

I want to go on
The Jerry Springer Show,
but they turned me down. I got all my teeth
.

F
or some people, the thrill of gambling is better than sex. If you don’t believe me, just hang around the slot machines in Vegas for a while. A woman wins five dollars and she screams like she’s having an orgasm. If a woman was being attacked in a casino with slot machines and she was yelling and yelling, the guard wouldn’t do a thing.

He’d just think,
Another winner
.

People go crazy to make money. I guess they wanna see how much they can die with. But like Redd Foxx said, “I never saw a Brinks truck following a corpse.”

People think that the more money you have, the happier you’ll be. Then why does Connecticut, the richest state in the country, have the highest suicide rate? So if you want to live a long time, stay broke.

I tell ya, in Vegas you gotta go broke. They got slot machines all over. Even in supermarkets. I bought a container of milk—cost me $238.

Here I am in Vegas making a few extra bucks holding up a couple of billboards
.

Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.

B
ack when I was selling aluminum siding, I was in a customer’s house one day, chatting up the lady of the house, who was standing there with her dog and her two small children. I said to the woman, “Cute dog.”

“Yeah,” she said, “he’s very cute.” Then she pointed to her children. “If it wasn’t for them, I could spend more time with him.”

Children have their own way of looking at things. I was walking on the beach one day when a group of kids came running toward me, asking for my autograph. So I signed something for each of them, and they ran off.

The last kid was a little girl, ten or eleven years old. As I was signing my autograph for her, she said, “You’re doing pretty good today, huh, Rodney?”

I said, “Yeah, I guess so.”

She thought I was out there trying to sign as many autographs as I could.

I shouldn’t tell jokes about my wife. She’s attached to a machine that keeps her alive…the refrigerator.

I
’ve learned a lot of things. One is never have dinner at a friend’s house. From the husband you hear things like,
“My wife’s the best cook in the world.” My last dinner at someone’s house did it.

My friend and I sat at the table while his wife was serving the food. There were some chicken wings on a small plate. I started nibbling on one of them while waiting for the main dish. Then I said to my friend, “What’s the main dish?” He said, “Chicken wings.”

I was in shock. I said, “Chicken wings?”

He said, “Is something wrong?”

“No, I love chicken wings,” I said. “Little crushed bones with pounds of fat rolled around them. Why, chicken wings, that’s my favorite.”

My wife can’t cook at all. In my backyard, the flies chipped in to fix the screen door.

Y
ou always hear that you get wiser as you get older, but the longer I live, the less I understand.

In my travels and with all the years I’ve spent hanging out in clubs and bars, I’ve spoken to many married men. I’ve learned that when they do something that is considered wrong, they justify their actions with some twisted reasoning. And I’ve heard all the reasons they give to justify cheating.

I’m sure you’ve heard the standard ones: “As long as
my wife and kids are provided for, then I can do whatever I want.”

One guy was good at mathematics. He told me, “Whatever I earn, two thirds goes to the family and one third goes to me.”

Or, “I cheat to see if
all
women laugh during sex.”

And, “I cheat so that I can get a decent breakfast.”

I’ve had married men tell me, “I never come on to a girl.
That’s
cheating. But if a girl comes on to me, that’s not cheating. And if I knew a girl before I knew my wife, then that’s not cheating.”

One guy told me he never cheats on his wife—or his mistress.

And we’ve all heard this classic justification for cheating. A guy’s wife could be a wonderful person, a churchgoer who helps the poor, and he makes a tramp out of her with the implication: “Who knows what
she’s
doing?”

I tell ya one thing, my wife keeps me in line. No matter how many guys are ahead of me.

T
he best justification for cheating I ever heard was from a guy I met at a hotel in Las Vegas. We were sitting at the pool, and his wife and two kids were splashing around in the water.

I said, “Your wife is a lovely woman.”

He said, “Yeah, she’s good. I love her. My kids, I love them, too. I tell ya, I’ve got a beautiful family.”

I said, “Do you play around?”

He said, “Oh yeah.” He told me that when he plays around, he does it for his wife. “If I didn’t play around,” he said, “I’d be miserable to live with.”

I went out with a hooker. She told me, “Not on the first date.” So I saw her again. This time, she drove a hard bargain. She said, “The sex will be seventy-five dollars.” I said, “I only have fifty dollars.” She said, “Okay, I’ll do it for fifty. But I’m telling ya, I’m not making a dime on you.”