While other boys were outside shooting hoops or throwing spirals, we, a drama fag and a music geek, sat holed up in a bedroom for hours on end, recording our little audioplays and laughing ourselves sick.
Now, I'm sure lots of other little boys (and not a few girls) played with tape recorders during this same period in American culture -- after the invention of cheap, lightweight boom boxes and before video killed the radio star. But the difference is, Mike and I were truly, hysterically funny. Our humor was rude, ribald and politically incorrect to a shocking degree. This was no-holds-barred comedy, limited only by our 10-year-old imaginations. We had a devoted audience of two -- ourselves --and we killed every night.
God, I miss those.
Our greatest creation was called "Degenerate Hospital," a parody of the most popular soap on the air at that time. The cast of main characters was as follows:
Dr. Sexfiend
Dr. Wimpy
Nurse Easy
Nurse Tightswalker
Tyrone, the orderly
Shakespeare it was not.
To give you some idea of what we were up to, here's one bit of dialogue I remember:
TYRONE: (voiced by me in horribly offensive Step-and-Fetch-It dialect) Damn, Nurse Tightswalker. Your tits are gettin' smaller every day!
TIGHTSWALKER: (voiced by Mike in a sort of fusty, Margaret Dumont voice) I know, Dearie. I shrink them in the washing machine.
I cannot tell you how funny we thought this was at the time, and I confess that it still makes me giggle all these years later.
I also recall now that anytime Nurse Easy, our slutty femme fatale (voiced by me, of course), entered or exited a scene, Mike did a high hat-cymbal sound effect like "tss-t-t-tss-t-t-tss-t-t-tss..." to emphasize her curvaceous presence.
Drs. Sexfiend and Wimpy's personalities were fairly self-explanatory. Mike was the lecherous Sexfiend, using his regular speaking voice, and I did Wimpy as a sort of Elmer-Fudd-meets-Huckleberry Hound.
The plot escapes me entirely. I know that all the guys wanted to bang Nurse Easy, and that Tyrone was always having to clean up after patient accidents. ("Scuze me, I gots-a go clean up a big pile 'o shit!" was his trademark exit line.) I seem to remember there being a murder committed -- this was a soap opera, after all -- and Mike recalls an interrogation scene in which I, as Dr. Wimpy, say: "Dr. Sexfiend, kindly state your first name," which, for some reason, broke him up completely. Beyond that, my memories, like the tapes themselves, are gone.
Mike and I were not above blatant plagiarism from a variety of sources. We were both devotees of "Mad" magazine, and many of our jokes, including the title of the piece, were ripped directly from those pages. I got the name "Tightswalker" from Valerie Perrine's character, Miss Teschmacher, from the original "Superman" movie. And certainly the rampant sexism and racism we employed in our humor was a product of our white, upper-middle-class, early 80's environment. (Curiously, neither I nor Mike, who was and is as straight as a line, thought to inject any homophobia into "Degenerate Hospital." Even our sissy character, Dr. Wimpy, was a red-blooded hetero.)
But what strikes me most looking back on our little tapes is how fucking creative we were. Mike and I worked entirely without a script or outline, improvising every line and plot development off the top of our heads. Our characters, while little more than cheap stereotypes, had distinct, recognizable voices and personalities. We kept things moving, too. Anytime a scene began to drag, another character would pop in and change direction. And while we often broke character -- bursting into laughter so severe that we'd end up in tears -- the beauty of audiotape was that we could simply stop and re-cue the tape without breaking the flow.
Above all, we were fearless. There was never any thought to what we should or shouldn't say, or of what others might find offensive or silly or simply unfunny. We entertained ourselves, and that was enough.
How I wish I could be that kind of comedian today.
Homo on tape. ♥
9 comments:
Beautiful blog as always. Thank you.
In most ways you are still that person. I loved watching TV and you breaking into mimics of the different people on a show. Tim Gunn, Shecky etc. On or off the stage a comic you are and always crack me up.... I have laughed more reading your blogs and to make me laugh outloud while reading is no small thing.
I enjoyed reading this because it brought back memories - my father used to keep a big tape recorder on top of the refrigerator in the kitchen. He would tell jokes (was always playing Spike Jones records) and would turn on the tape recorder without us knowing. It was always fun to hear him tell a joke and we kids (I'm the oldest of 6) cracking up hysterically, right along with him and my mother. He's been gone since 2002, and your posting reminded me of how much I miss him. Here's to the imagination (and talent) of 10 year olds.
great memory nicely told. There is a book in you dying to get out!
Now that your not performing on stage...time to write a book proposal!!!!!
I love this. And what about the stories w/ gimple in sunday school class?
...The murder victim, if memory serves, was Nurse Easy. And the perpetrator was the Narrator, who was so sick of all of the characters he planned to pick them off one by one. And, as an epilogue, you (Adam,) in a sort of John Houseman voice, informed the listener that the Narrator was now at Overlook Hospital, psychiatric ward.
Good times. And incidentally, we were fairly sure that my parents found and listened to the tapes, although they never said so directly. But they did look at us funny for a time afterward.
"MIKE"
great blog. This reminds me of my childhood best friend at the time. We were huge SNL fans, so we would come up with these little comedy skits and put them on tape. I wish I could find them. Imagine if youtube was around back then huh?
Hot pic ;)
OK, Mike, I don't mean to toot our own horns, but how fucking awesome is it that we had the narrator be the killer? What 10-year-olds even know what a narrator IS? We were meta before we knew what meta was!
Thanks for adding that -- I would have never remembered it.
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