Gene Pompa
written by Annabelle Quezada
When asked if he considered himself a Latin comic, Gene Pompa replied, “I consider myself a stand-up comic. Writer, actor, shit... choreographer, community organizer if you will... Family crisis consultant.. who happens to be Mexican American.”
“I don’t use that term, Latino,” Pompa said. “When I was little, when I was growing up, we were Mexican American or Chicano. So, I don’t really subscribe to Hispanic or Latino. I prefer Hispanic because Latino is grammatically incorrect. Latino is a masculine term. I’m not offended by it, but I was raised to believe ‘We’re Mexican Americans’ so that’s what I became accustomed to.”
As I position my recorder strategically in order to capture every bit of the local comedian’s voice in the noisy, Los Angeles Mexican restaurant, Gene begins by telling me some things about him that I did not know; that his sign was Aquarius, his favorite color is blue and that he’s 6’3” and a former model.
Pompa was born in East LA in the mid 60s. From there he moved to Pico Rivera. “There were no gangsters there then,” he recalled. “They weren’t around yet. They were in their infancy at the time. When my parents were there and going to high school, East LA was more about car clubs than it was gangs. You didn’t get killed in gangs then, even if you had a gang it was very small. They didn’t shoot each other or even stab each other, it was more like Westside Story, but without the singing or dancing.”
“But as the 60s rolled on,” Pompa continued, “it got a little more ominous. I remember my mom and dad talking about the Watts riot, how maybe that was going to be the beginning of this gang infestation happening and Pico Rivera.”
Gene’s parents eventually split up. Early in the divorce his mom worked hard and bought a house by herself in the other side of Pico Rivera, by Downey, which was a nicer area and, at the time, a predominantly white area.
“When I was a little kid,” Pompa recalls, “most of the neighbors in [the older part of] Pico Rivera were Mexican American, but there was one Anglo family. They had a little girl named Lou Ann, who I used to make out with by my apricot tree when I was in first grade.”
I laugh at the Forest Gumpesque scenario he describes, but he continues.
“No I’m being serious, in 1st grade we had an apricot tree, with these railroad tracks behind it. We would either hang out by the railroad tracks and kiss or go to the apricot tree and kiss. Sometimes the older kids would get mad at Lou Ann, because she was kinda snotty, and all the kids would say GO HOME, PADDY! You stupid, Paddy! I didn’t know what Patty was. Why you calling her a patty? Cause you know I kinda liked her, but I didn’t want the older kids to know I liked her. But Patty was sorta an ethnic slur toward white Anglos. So my introduction to racism was actually a Mexican-American perspective that was trying to ostracize Anglos because we were in a predominantly Mexican American or Chicano area.”
“But anyway,” Pompa recalls, “then we went from Pico Rivera to La Mirada, ‘cause in the new part of Pico Rivera, which was more mellow, a kid got killed in a gang, which was unheard of back in the early 70s. So, by the mid 70s, my mom decided we should move to La Mirada. She bought a house in a more affordable part of town. It was predominantly Anglo and middle class. That’s the first time I heard the word “beaner”. I was called a beaner and made fun of for having a Mexican accent. The Latinos criticized me cause I don’t have an accent and I sounded Anglo. The Anglos criticized me because I speak Mexican and I don’t have light skin.”
Gene started doing stand-up in 1990, turning full-time around ‘93. He tried to follow the influence of Steve Martin and Steven Wright; looking serious, saying nonsensical things and avoiding any material pertaining to his ethnicity.
“It wasn’t until later,” says Pompa, “when things started happening and I was going on auditions that I would get pigeonholed or stereotyped Latino ad nauseam. I started coming up with more material about being Latino but that was just because that’s what I was experiencing in my life.”
He dropped out of college when he began getting TV spots and exposure in front of a national audience. “I wanted to be a cinematographer and I also wanted to be an actor. But I thought that being an actor was too precarious, so I’d just be a writer. Like somehow that was more concrete of an aspiration. So, stand-up was sort of a combination of being an actor and a writer. I gravitated toward stand-up, by trial and error like any comic. I came up with a few minutes I thought would be funny and went up on stage. The first time I went on stage was at the Comedy Store. They had an open mic on Monday but I missed the sign up. But I happened to be in the back next to the owner and she said to the MC, about the comic that was performing, ‘‘Give him the light! Ugh! Get him off the fucking stage!’ Then she asked me, ‘What’s your name?’ I said, ‘Gene Pompa.’ She asked, ‘Are you a comic?’ I said I was. That’s when I would always wear a suit, because I used to sell shoes at Nordstrom.
Pompa describes himself as a stand-up by trade who does acting and writing on the side. “I’m doing a movie next month. I’m going to be a movie star!” he exclaims dryly. “It’s with Nick Swardson and Adam Sandler. I play a gay Latino makeup artist named Tomas. I’ve done acting parts on television, but never a movie.”
This part will add to his already solid resume that includes: Conan O’Brien show (eight times), Late Late Show (five times), two half-hour Comedy Central specials, with a third special coming out May 5, and an appearance on Scrubs last season. He also performed on In Living Color in the nineties, but didn’t become a regular.
“You know what the great thing was about In Living Color, honestly? All the sketches they gave me... none of them were Latin flavored. I played a rocker, I played a surfer, I played a stoner, I played a cop. Oh, and then I played a cholo but that one didn’t go to air, so.”
He reminisces on some of the other sketches that never made it to our television sets. “One that we did was called “Black Blocker Sunglasses”, and that one didn’t go to air either. That one was me and Jim Carrey where the idea was, you know those blue blocker sunglasses that blocked out the sun? The black blocker sunglasses would block out black people. I played this surfer stoner guy that puts on the glasses on this infomercial and I go, ‘Whoa, gnarly! The black dudes just vaporized!’ And then uh, Jim Carrey comes in as George Bush, the first George Bush, and he goes, ‘Look Bob, no little brown ones, just a thousands points of white.’ And then [Carrey continues], ‘What about all the other minorities we don’t want to look at?’ So I’m like, ‘I’m glad you asked, we also have Jew blockers.’ Then the censors at the time, this was in ‘93, they said that it was inappropriate and that it couldn’t pass muster with the FCC.”
“So Keenan [Ivory Wayans] who was the creator and the show runner at the time,” says Pompa, “his argument was ‘Hey, these are Jewish writers and black writers that wrote this sketch. We have license to be self deprecating and make fun of ourselves, to push it through!’ But that one didn’t go make it. Now, fifteen years later, Chappelle, Sarah Silverman and whoever else can do whatever now and no one will blink an eye. But at the time yeah, such racial content was thought to be highly controversial.”
Naturally, when you’ve been in the business as long as Gene has, you notice changes in styles and performers. Fortunately, some of those changes have been for the better. “One thing I do like,” he says. “Back in the mid 90s alternative comedy movement. It was very segregated of course and a lot of times they were preaching to the choir. It was these hipster comics doing offbeat material, but they were playing to a crowd of hipsters so it was easy to get a laugh. A lot of comics felt, not offended by it, but thought it was a little pretentious, a little self-aggrandizing and self-righteous. It was always white comics playing for a white crowd. They acted as though they were spoofing racism but they took a big laugh on it, so it was in fact racist. You fast forward five or seven years later and there was this new generation of comics that came up that I really like – guys like Nick Swardson, Owen Benjamin, Demetri Martin, Al Madrigal. Those comics and that generation of comics are more organically progressive without being pretentious, which is very refreshing.”
“Now it seems like they aspire to be smartly funny,” says Pompa, “but for a while there, it seemed like, comics were very smug, and trying to act like what they were saying was over the audience’s head. It wasn’t over the audience’s head. It simply wasn’t funny. If it’s funny it’s going to illicit a response and the response is laughter. The bottom line is you gotta get a laugh out of it. Once in a while you have a couple of jokes that are legitimately funny. You know they’re funny. You know you’re gonna sell ‘em. Once in a while, the audience just doesn’t get it. But those are few and far between. The best new material should be accessible, make the audience laugh, and have some intelligence to it.”
That connection between being funny to make a point and being funny just for its own sake isn’t lost on Pompa, whether he’s discussing his own work or even a legend like George Carlin and his last special. “He fancied himself an intellect and liked to pontificate on social and political issues,” said Pompa. “but once in a while he would just do a joke to get a big laugh.”
“It’ll be a silly joke,” Pompa continues. “He was going on a tangent, I think it was pedophilia or something, and he’s on the phone with someone. His friend’s trying to convince him that pedophilia to a certain extent is OK and trying to justify it’s right. (Pompa laughs in the retelling) At the end of the conversation, he says to the other guy on the other end of the line, ‘OK, well, thank you reverend.’ I love that he stuck that in there to get the laugh. Even though he said some other ‘intellectual’ and thought provoking stuff that’s equally funny, it wasn’t beneath him just to say something silly that gets this nice big giggle from the audience. I think that’s refreshing sometimes.”
Pompa’s own act, much like his life, takes a simple path according to what makes him happy. He’ll start with rough ideas and thoughts, then structure them into sentences and paragraphs.It’s drawn from his real life with a focus on awkward situations and incidents.
Pompa’s a self-proclaimed and proud family man, a term he tailors to suit him. “I am a family man,” he says, “in terms of my daughter. I love my daughter. My wife, I just like her. Married life is not really for me to be honest, but that’s beside the point because I have a child and I owe that child a good home life. This is how I look at my life, seriously. I feel like I have two roommates. I have my daughter, my favorite roommate, who I love. Then I have her mom. The only thing with my daughter is that she doesn’t pay any of the rent, or mortgage, and then her mom- who I don’t like as much, but pays half the mortgage.”
“I like my real life. I’m one of the more normal comedians out there. I don’t have any weird addictions. I only drink chardonnay,” he claims, despite the fact that an hour ago he ordered a margarita,
“I smoke a little bit of pot; I don’t have major drug issues. I’ve been married to the same woman for 14 years; we have a daughter together. [My life is] pretty conventional. I can come home at five or six in the morning and she doesn’t worry about me because I don’t cheat on her.”
Annabelle Quezada is a writer from Los Angeles.
For more on Gene, visit myspace.com/genepompalicious.