My Point...And I Do Have One

education in general in how to handle themselves in front of an audience were a little bit peeved. And they were right to be: I was constantly blown away by the act who came before me.
    “A title like that really sets you up. You know how people try to pick fights with The Heavyweight Championof the World? People try to pick fights with The Funniest Person in America, too. And they’re usually a lot easier to beat up.
    “My Uncle Punch would use the title sarcastically. ‘Well, if it isn’t The Funniest Person in America sitting with us for Thanksgiving.
    “Or, ‘Well lookie here, it’s The Funniest Person in America visiting me in the hospital. I guess you wanna apologize for hitting me in the head with that turkey drumstick.’
    “I don’t think they have the contest anymore. They stopped after a couple of years. Where are the other people who won? I don’t know. Maybe some of them are in Congress. Who knows?”
    “Aunt Ellen,” Tony asked as he scratched the cobra tattoo I had gotten for him that day at a cute little parlor frequented by longshoremen, “was it like winning the Miss America contest?”
    “It wasn’t like Miss America.” I laughed. “There were no tough questions like ‘How would you use your title as The Funniest Person in America to help world peace?’ And the talent portion of the show was … being funny. Clearly that was my talent as The Funniest Person in America. There was no bathing-suit portion, funny or otherwise, and I very rarely wore the crown, except when I was at home. Sometimes, I’d wear the banner and the crown, but not out. There was no song, ‘There she goes, the funniest person in America.’ Some people may have sung that song, but I didn’t hear it. The tape from Georgia did win Miss Congeniality, but I don’t think it did the comic from Georgia—a very nice man—any good.”
    I realized then that I had gotten away from the scary part of my story. To quiet the children down, I spent about an hour teaching them to blow smoke rings from their cigarettes. Then I turned off all the lights in my house (it took just a second; all I had to do was clap loudtwice), held a flashlight under my chin, and said, “Now that you have some background, here are some really scary stories of bad gigs.
    “One bad place I played was a marine base in front of three hundred marines. It was all men. I walked onstage and they were all screaming. They wanted me to take my clothes off, basically. They were naming parts of my body they wanted to see (some parts I hadn’t even heard of). They would not shut up, and I was trying to talk to them. ‘Hey, how is everybody doing?’ I was trying to gain control. But these marines were just screaming at me. And I stayed up there for maybe three minutes. I realized that they were never going to shut up, and I walked offstage.
    “I told the guy in charge, ‘I can’t do this.
    “He said, ‘Whoever booked you was stupid because these men are animals, and we want them to be animals. We train them to kill. We don’t want them to like art. We don’t want them to appreciate art.’
    “ ‘I just want my hundred dollars. I just want to go home. But, thank you for calling what I do
art
.’
    “He kept telling me how stupid it was that I was there. Naive me, I thought these guys would be happy to see a woman, happy to hear comedy. They should have booked some stripper or something. They didn’t want to hear ‘The Phone Call from God,’ or ‘Aren’t People Stupid?’ or ‘Don’t You Hate It When You Taste Something That Tastes Bad … and People Want You to Taste It?’
    “They’d yell, ‘I’d like to taste something.’ They were just horrible. No matter what I said, everything was a sexual connotation. They weren’t clever. There were no double entendres. They were barely able to master the single entendre.
    “ ‘Who here is from out of town?’
    “ ‘I’ve got your out of town.’
    “ ‘What do you mean by that?’
    “ ‘You want me to be mean?!’
    “ ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, do you?’
    “ ‘No.’
    “But you learn from these situations; you grow from them. You learn that no matter how good you are, there are certain places you walk into and there’s a certain energy in that room that you cannot change. It’s like having Guns ’N Roses open for Perry Como. There’s no way that the audience is going to say, ‘Well, this is sort of good.’
    “Like in Vegas, I would