Patron of the Arts
written by DC Benny
The Uptown Comedy club in Harlem was the place where I got made as a comic. Fall, 1993. I had moved from Washington D.C. to New York, having first tried stand-up in ‘89 at a Korean moonie bar in College Park, Maryland. At three-ish years in, I figured I was ready.
I had featured one time, which, if multiplied twice, equaled headliner as I calculated. I was unstoppable.
I landed in the Bronx in some shithole with no t.v., radio, or phone. It was a cheap place to crash while I pursued comedy, which didn’t go quite as planned. I couldn’t get onstage anywhere. Lucien at The Strip told me straight out he already had several Spaniards. This is not a joke. He really used the word, “Spaniard”. Like conquistador Ponce de Leon Spaniard. Like Russell Crowe in Gladiator.
Neal Brennan, the co-creator of the Chappelle Show was the doorman at the Boston Comedy Club at the time. He charged me ten dollars to do an open mike, and then bought smokes with the money in front of my face. Cold blooded.
I waited four hours on a Monday afternoon to audition for Al at New York Comedy Club in front of a room of 40 other comics waiting to audition for Al at New York Comedy Club. Nobody passed, but everyone was invited to come back and audition again for Al at the New York Comedy club, as long as they bought two drinks.
Eventually I got an audition at Catch a Rising Star, but right before I was supposed to go up, Joy Behar came in and killed for forty-five minutes. Then, almost everyone left. Then, they dropped checks on the three people who had stayed. Two of the three people disputed the charges on the checks, hotly. I went up for the one person who remained. He didn’t like me. And neither did Louis, the booker. “I don’t know what that was you did up there, kid,” he said to me mournfully.
My friend, Tony Woods gave me some advice to jumpstart my career: “Shorty, you need you a patron of the arts; a nice-looking older woman to bankroll you, like the way Madonna does to that Puerto Rican trainer dude. He wasn’t doing shit before that, ‘cept telling fat bitches in sweatsuits, ‘You got another 10 minutes on the stairmaster.’ You could hook up with Caroline who owns Caroline’s. Go to the Christmas party, say wassup, be smooth, say some funny shit, and then make that move. Make it so she can’t do nothing but think about the dick. Tossing and turning all night. Craving it like a Snickers. And don’t forget to eat the pussy. Strategic cunnilingus has been the building block of many a comedy career ”.
Then Tony told me about a black comedy club in Harlem that auditioned new talent on Sunday nights. It was called the Uptown. This sounded more plausible than slipping roofies into Caroline’s Long Island Ice Tea and hoping to be her Spaniard in shining flip flops.
I decided to check it out. Sunday was my day off my day gig, selling suits for Armani, and I hopped the A-train to 125th.
The Uptown was a hotbed of talent, genius and hackery. You would see some brilliant bits and in the same night someone doing Richard Pryor’s act verbatim.
Miss Brown was the owner, and what she said, went. Monteria Ivey was the warm-up. Kevin and André Brown, Miss Brown’s karate teacher sons, ran the business.
Basically, Monty came up, told everyone the rules, did warm-up, and then the dj played Hip Hop Hooray. Everyone said Hey Ho! in unison and the show started.
The hosts on my audition night was a guy named Flex. Flex was good looking and flexible, as he used to be a back-up dancer for Salt and Peppa, but extremely unfunny. If his act was a log of shit, the jokes were the undigested corn kernels adorning it. Painfully unwatchable, imminently flushable. Once, when he was onstage, I literally saw an audience member get up, go to the hallway where there was more light, and work on his taxes until the first act came up.
The process of becoming a working comic at the Uptown was true democracy. The crowd would choose whether you passed or not, and if you did, you could work at the club, no longer branded as an auditioner or New Jack.
The New Jacks would be lined up on the back of the stage during the show, and Flex would make fun of us. He kept going back to the well my regarding my whiteness, doing the white guy voice/walk as he imagined I did when I went home to my mansion, my wife named Debbie, and my kids I never spanked. I bit my lip and waited for what seemed like forever.
My turn came and I vented in a true 8 Mile moment, opening by referring to Flex’s patchwork sweater an A.I.D.S quilt, before going into what little act I had. When I finished, Miss Brown liked me and told me that I could come by every weekend if I wanted.
She eventually let me be the first white host on the night the rapper Fat Joe was supposed to do a musical set. He was very late, so I did updates of all the fast food places he was stopping by on the way to the Uptown. When he finally arrived, he couldn’t understand why people laughed during his introduction.
My favorite memories are comic-specific bits that everyone would wait for:
– Capital Jay thrashing around onstage, imitating Puerto Ricans, break-dancing at any opportunity, while Planet Rock played in the background.
– The Toothless Lover going into the crowd and using the mike stand as a “weave detector” like the way old men look for change at the beach.
– Faceman’s definition of tragedy; “Father’s day in Harlem”.
– Ruperto Van Der Poole’s Dominican Popeye.
– Rob Stapleton’s crazy uncle coming home from Vietnam.
– Uncle Jimmy Mac mooning a church lady in the audience.
– Crazy Will mumbling gibberish.
– And then there was this new guy who everyone was talking about named Tracy Morgan...
Tracy would come in always wearing a multi-colored propeller beanie hat and just destroy the place, doing original characters, like the guy who lost one nut trying to jump the barbed wire fence while running from the cops. Or the pregnant teenager fashion show. Or the guy getting knocked out and twitching on the ground. Or finding the biggest guy in the audience, sticking his fist in his face, and threatening to “bust his shit” while the propeller spun in the breeze. Hilarious.
Tracy always had a propensity for drama. One night after an impassioned speech about moving on with his life, he renounced his propeller beanie as a gimmick, tossed it into the crowd, and walked off solemnly into the night.
I was at the Uptown every weekend for two years. I got on the job training that was like boot camp at Paris Island. I bombed hard and got my first standing ovation. It made me strong and led to my first tv spot on Showtime At The Apollo, the night where Steve Harvey, the host, got booed so hard, he walked into the greenroom and his high top toupee was crooked. I’ll never forget seeing that hairpiece, soaked in sweat, at a slight angle, next to this phantom sideburn that just stopped mid-cheekbone where it was previously aligned. Harlem never lets you get too comfortable no matter who you are.
I never hooked up with Caroline, and the closest I got to securing a patron of the arts was Miss Brown, who bought me some wings when I was dead broke and always encouraged me when I bombed. Even now, whenever I have a nightmare gig with a shitty crowd, I think back to the Uptown, where the hecklers were professionals. And if I ever suffer from a bout of comedy apathy, I remember the thunderous echo of laughter that would sustain me during the hardest times. I don’t know what happened to a lot of those guys, but every now I do a search on ebay to see if I can find Tracy’s propeller hat.
To see samples of his stand-up, ad work, and where he’s performing, visit DCBenny.com.