Gabriel Rutledge
written by Jonathan Shipley
He looks like a lesbian. “For a guy, I’m a five. For a lesbian, a solid nine.” These were some of Gabriel Rutledge’s remarks on a recent Tuesday evening at Jazzbones in Tacoma, Washington – home to glass artists and methamphetamine users. It’s Ha Ha Tuesday and Rutledge is headlining.
The last I saw of Gabriel Rutledge was kicking me in the face, literally kicking me in the face, in a rather spirited game of tackle football at an empty field at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. We went to high school together. My dad taught him U.S. history. We performed halftime shows in the marching band. He, a drummer. Me, trombone. We got in hot water over our risqué news stories for our school newspaper. “You were helping me on that story when they kicked me off the paper? You were a bad influence on me!” “I was,” Rutledge laughed, thankfully mullet-free today. He, and the rest of the Cougar Marching Band drummers were a corps of proud mullet wearers.
He’s 35 now; still lives in Olympia, near the old Olympia Brewery (“It’s the Water!”), now derelict, empty and cobwebbed. He’s married, with two young kids, a boy and a girl. His humor is self-depreciating and wickedly honest. “She’s okay with it,” when asked about how his wife feels about their lives being displayed on stage for giggles. “Not thrilled…but okay.”
“It’s almost not a choice,” he said of being a stand-up comic. “It’s a passion. An addiction.” His habit formed after graduating from Capital High School. Not knowing what he wanted to do – as a kid he’d thumb through the phone book thinking to himself, Hmmm…that’d be an interesting job – he was a drummer for bands you have never heard of. Honestly, you haven’t. Bunny Foot Charm ring a bell? No.
“I started stand-up because I had no back up plan.” He made some cash as a pizza delivery guy for Pizza Time. Then, he delivered Mexican food for Peppers Restaurant in Olympia. Married for eleven years now, with several years of full-time stand-up under his belt, he’s reached the rung of middle lower class. “Why stop now?!”
It started, his stand-up career, with hour-long drives to Seattle for open mic nights at The Comedy Underground. “I was just trying not to shit myself.”
Inspired by the likes of Mitch Hedberg, who he opened for on a couple of occasions, George Carlin, and the countless not-so-famous Seattle headliners who took him in, he did open mic every week for six solid months. “The first time I had ever been in a comedy club, I performed.” His advice for those wanting to start doing stand-up? “If you want to do it, try it…but don’t be afraid to quit.”
Rutledge certainly hasn’t quit. His performances have long since refined from those open mics to his first paying gig ($50 to host said open mics) to sparsely attended performances at sparsely attended casinos in sparsely populated towns. “Oh, there’s a town called Concrete!”
Pretzels – funny.
Octo-mom – Funny a few weeks ago
Pegasus – Not funny
Touching on those universal themes of sex, love, marriage, kids, and more, the audience at Jazzbones – a joint between a swanky Italian restaurant and a liquor store - was raucous, chatty, fun. The Army guys in the bar laughed loudly. Twenty-something hipsters chuckled with their dates, beers in hand and appetizers cooling on the table. Young fellows in black with sharp ballcaps and sharper facial hair, propped themselves outside, listening in with cigarettes in hand. Those who couldn’t find a table chuckled up on stools near the sushi bar. “Well honey,” Rutledge jokes about his growing weight, “we’ve eaten ourselves into monogamy.”
Skittles – Funny
Cancer - Funny
Winner of the Seattle International Comedy Competition, Rutledge has performed all over the states, including at the HBO Comedy Festival in 2007. “It was like fantasy camp,” he warmly reminisces. He’s done shows for an audience of 1,600. He’s also done a show for two. Painfully, he says, “Yeah, I’ve done two a couple of times.”
Traveling ten to fifteen days a month, he concedes that his schedule is difficult with his wife and kids back home in Olympia. “It is hard and it is not normal. Women like normal.” At the same time, the days in which he is home, he’s there for nothing but his family. He has no responsibilities beyond that – spending time with his family. That, and perhaps scribbling jokes on Post-It Notes. “I have a lot of Post-It Notes that I don’t even understand. One says, ‘Gum.’ WHAT!?!”
On stage his energy upticks from a solid seven to a ten as he carouses around the stage focusing on topics like “three bagging,” a term coined by women who say they’d have sex with a man if he had three bags on his head due to the fact that the man is as ugly as sin. Between paper and plastic? Rutledge responds to his own question, “Paper breathes better… That’s what my friend told me anyway.”
Bulk Foods – Funny
Dogwalkers – On the fence
Unibrows – Funny
Not really an actor, and not really wanting to transplant his family from the friendly confines of Olympia to New York or Los Angeles, Rutledge still sees himself doing stand-up, five, ten years down the road, all without those things that “regular workers” have, 401(k) plans, health insurance. “Taxpayers of Washington: Thank you for my health care,” he declares.
“The best thing on stage is a new joke that works. The worst thing is an old joke that doesn’t work.” Rutledge works. Hard. Crude without being crass, honest with flourishes of embellishment, he involves the crowd in his show without letting them dictate it. In other words, he knows what he’s doing and is a long way from those early days of open mics and longer still from the last time I saw him, a mulleted high school band geek causing me emotional trauma in Capital High School’s Vice Principal’s office.
For more on Gabriel, visit GabrielRutledge.com.
Jonathan Shipley is a writer from Seattle.