Pat Dixon
written by Ken Carlson
“Man, if you had shown me the life I have now ten years ago, I would have thought, ‘Wow! I have really made it!’” says comedian Pat Dixon. “I have a Comedy Central special. I’m headlining full time, working the clubs in New York, living here. Now, I feel that I’m just at the entry level of stand-up. This is just getting in the door and its been thirteen years. It’s all a matter of perspective. In a way, it’s much better than I thought would happen. In another way, it’s profoundly disappointing.”
Distance. Sometimes, it just can’t be measured in miles, like from Tennessee to New York. Sometimes it’s emotional, like what a person is left with after two broken marriages. Or it can be internal, like how much harder you make it on yourself, how much farther you have go to dig your life out of a hole, when you’re dealing with addiction.
Sometimes it can be measure by experienced, the life we face, day in, day out, once we get out of bed. For instance, take the life of the dishwasher and short order cook. Piles of greasy plates. The oppressive heat. Occasional scalds. Anonymity.
That was the life Pat Dixon had. It’s a long way from the one he has now. He’s closing rooms across the country, had his voice and image plastered all over the internet, and his new smart and staunchly irreverent recording, Goodbye Forever Fatty, is kicking in doors in comedy circles.
“Pat Dixon brings his life experiences (both good and not-so-good) to the stage every night,” says comedian Andy Pitz, “and is completely unfiltered about sharing the truth. Pat has got to be the least watered down comedian I know. He says whatever he is feeling without trying to soften or sweeten it to make it more audience-palatable. He just doesn’t care and it’s wonderful to watch because his work is so undeniably funny that even if it makes some people squirm, they are almost always laughing when they do it. I honestly feel that Pat doesn’t see any other option than to be absolutely real with his material. I make it a point to be in the room when Pat does a set, as do a lot of other comics.”
“You have to maintain an emotional connection to your material,” says Dixon. “It’s impossible to do that if you don’t get up there enough. What I’ve learned lately is, you can be connected to your material and act, without doing a one-man show that touches lives. You can just have knock-knock jokes, if you really mean them and they’re important to you. My mission is to talk about stuff that I want to talk about, say what I want to say, without any regard about ‘Will they get it?’”
Bitches Be Stoopid (DAAMN!!), the title of Pat’s one man show, which he performed recently in New York, and Goodbye Forever Fatty, his second album, taken at face value by their titles, become easy targets for those who label his material as derogatory towards the opposite sex. While some of it may be unflattering, as his voice drifts from folksy to lewd, much of the message deals with the absurdities of life and struggles in relationships. Certainly if you listen to the laughter of his fans, many of whom are women, who howl in faux outrage, it’s not a problem. Obviously it hasn’t bothered CBS or Comedy Central for his television appearances, where his blend of Vegas-smooth and twisted mischief play well. When asked if anyone had complained to the point of it being a concern, Dixon mentioned a surprising source.
“I get it from my manager – ‘You’ve got to stop offending women.’” Dixon responded slowly, “I don’t offend the women. That’s a huge overstatement! You can say, ‘Well, they’re 51 percent of the audience!’ No, I don’t offend 51 percent of the audience. Trust me. I offend a very vocal 1 1/2 to 2 percent of the audience who think all entertainment is supposed to be directed specifically to them. The kind of people who say, ‘Well, we didn’t like him. Don’t bring him back.’ They don’t say, ‘I didn’t enjoy the show. I think I’ll go to another.’ This is what I’ve been encouraged to change.”
“But, you know,” Dixon continues, “if I don’t make them angry, I’m not being true to myself. There’s a certain number of people who enjoy what I do because it’s the kind of shit that’s going to make them mad. Those are the people who are going to come and see me. Beyond that, my not making them mad is not going to make them come out to see me. No, they’ll go see the warm, cuddly guy next time he’s in town. So, fuck it. I hereby write them off.”
“I’ve always looked up to Pat for his ability to combine sarcasm with his intelligent, edgy and dry sense of humor,” says comedian Carmen Lynch. “Pat is perfect for comedy. He’s opinionated, yet not afraid to share those thoughts with his audience, going further than many performers out there today. Not only does Pat have the talent, but the capability, to take his audience with him no matter how personal his subject matter may be. It’s so refreshing to see a guy in a suit speak with such eloquence about his experience with ‘fat chicks’. What a delightful contrast. Pat will catch you off guard, surprise you, and if you find yourself being talked about, you should be flattered.”
“Stand-up comedy? I’ve been doing it thirteen years,” says Dixon. “I started back in March of ‘96 after my wife left. We had gone back and forth a couple of times, had a couple of geographical fixes. It didn’t work out. She left and within a week I was doing stand-up. The open mikes became my home.”
At the time, Dixon was working as a dishwasher/short order cook at a diner called The Rebel, in Tennessee, close to where he grew up, near Chattanooga. He admits to a certain fondness for aspects living in The South, like its food, but never felt comfortable there. “I think most people have a certain ambivalence about where they came from, particularly if they end up in New York,” says Dixon. “I never really fit in there. I don’t know why. My parents are very southern. They sound very southern. I wasn’t really comfortable with them either. Go figure.”
As Dixon turns 39 this year, he admits the days of his being a hot, young comic are long over; pointing out many young upstarts who appear to be in their teens. But that doesn’t take anything away from his appreciation of what he went through to get to this point.
“There are many different paths in comedy,” says Dixon. “I did every open mic I could. People in New York have to bark and bring to start. I never did that, but I did drive 2-3 hours to get five minutes of stage time. Within about a year and a half, I was frequently on the road, working as an MC in places like Myrtle Beach or Florida, all over the Southeast. Then I was middling full-time in ‘99. I kept doing that and entering contests. I would do pretty well in them, like the Comedy Central Laugh Riot contest or Aspen, and that’s how I met the people at Comedy Central, got Premium Blend and a special. I won a contest in Atlanta back in ‘98. It was a cattle call with hundreds of comedians. There were real veterans there, been doing it ten or fifteen years. I got lucky, had a great show, and won. After that, a club owner in Chattanooga took me seriously and helped me get a lot of road work. That helped me get rid of my day job. That’s a pretty big thing.”
Dixon’s lived in New York about three and a half years. It didn’t take him long to see how different the comedy scene was from other parts of the country. “When you go to the Comedy Cellar there’s a ridiculous amount of talent,” he says. “It’s the same way at Gotham, same way at the Strip, same way everywhere. It never really struck me as odd. I guess I just expected that here Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Dave Chappelle would be showing up from time to time. You hear about it and it actually happens.”
While Pat Dixon’s success in stand-up is undeniable in the commercial sense, it doesn’t cover everything that it’s done for his life. Dixon, like his material, like his past, is complex. His tone is light but his drive is serious. He’s found a home in New York. Though he jokes that he’ll never be a New Yorker in the truest sense, “I’ll never speak like a New Yorker, or be Jewish or Gay or Puerto Rican,” he has become accustomed to it.
He’s been seeing the same girl for a couple of years, a fellow comedian, which is a point of connection for them and many of his friends. “Almost everybody I’ve met in stand-up has been cool and supportive, as far as comedians go; bookers as well,” says Dixon. “That’s not to say there’s not another side to it. It’s like any business. But, almost all my friends are comedians. Recreationally, professionally, I have more friends in New York than the rest of the country put together.”
“The same thing I like about it, is the same thing I don’t like about it,” Dixon says. “When I’m waiting to go on stage, and the guy before me is horrible, and the audience is howling at them, laughing at everything, because he’s a likable person, it’s just – I begin to detest the audience and know that they’re going to hate me. I hate the feeling that on some level I have to change or adjust or compromise what I’m going to do because they’ve already been subjected to some fuckin’ retard who has won them over. That’s an annoyance; the feeling that – I do this [stand-up] so I can do what I want to do. Oh, you can’t do exactly what you want to do because it’s not going to go over? I’m going to do what I want anyway. You have to bridge that, which takes some skill. In a way it helps you grow. In a way it just pisses you off.”
“Pat Dixon is uniquely dark,” says comedian Andi Smith, “and hysterically smart. The good kind of funny. He called one afternoon offering condolences on my recent break-up. After informing him that my boyfriend and I were just fine and it must have been a rumor... He hung up on me. A true friend.”
“I don’t consider it,” Pat says about his material, “particularly dark because I’m trying to make a connection with them. A lot of people don’t see it that way. I’ve never fully gotten on board with it. People want you to lighten up. I went through a thing where I wanted to be cleaner, less offensive. But it’s so goddamn hard to not say that shit, whatever it is. I don’t consider it dark. It is what it is.”
“In Chattanooga last week,” says Dixon, of a fellow comic on a recent road gig, “when I was watching this guy. He was very popular with the southern audience. He’s from Birmingham. I started in Chattanooga so I know what that room is like. He was middling for me. He’s a really great guy, but his comedy is what appeals to that very particular audience. To them, if they like you, they’ll go with you anywhere. And they liked him. He’s just folks. They were just sold on this guy. What was going through my head was, ‘I fuckin’ hate these people.’ I was trying to get out of that mind-set and onto something positive, more of a ‘Oh, they’re just having fun. They’ll have fun with me too!’ It’s not an easy place to go to but it’s where I have to go to succeed. Because an audience sees the anger you have, and the condescension. It’s impossible for me to conceal that. If I’m actually thinking that they’re a bunch a mouth breathers, then that’s going to read. It always does. A friend of mine who’s been doing comedy longer than me, told me [comedy club audiences], ‘Collectively, they’re a genius. They have great instincts. They smell insecurity, anger, condescension, all of it.’ Frankly, I don’t do a good job concealing it anyway. Once I feel that way about an audience, I’m pretty much cooked.”
For Dixon now, the plan is to keep doing what he’s been doing, but on a more successful level. “I want to broaden my audience, find the people who are into me,” he says. “I know they’re out there. I do this podcast, Keith and the Girl (KeithandtheGirl.com). It’s out of Queens. They have the most devoted fans out of anyone I know. A large number of fans have Keith and the Girl tattoos. It’s not even that unusual. One guy, maybe some others have Keith and the Girl brands, which seems a bit extreme to me. Keith Malley and his girlfriend, Chemda, they do the show every day. The more I do it, I find more fans from that. It’s a comedy podcast, but it’s not just about putting material out there. They get about a million downloads a month, which for a podcast, is outlandish. I’d like to tap into a fan base like that, that’s loyal and cool and smart.”
Dixon also promotes himself through standard radio programs, primarily from what he calls his unbiased movie reviews. “I’ve been doing it for about five years now. I started doing it in Atlanta. Then Kansas City. Then on Bob & Tom. I still do a call-in in Columbus, Ohio,” says Dixon. “It’s an unbiased review because I don’t see the movies. Whatever’s coming out that week, I talk about it without knowing anything about it. How can you talk objectively about anything if you’ve already seen it? It’s an outlet for comedic material. It’s fun. I think, well, if people hear it two or three times, they’ll come out in droves. But with morning radio you have to be on all the time. Constantly! It’s amazing the amount of saturation that’s required for people to get it together and come out. There’s a payoff. I think now I have at least a few fans who come out as a result of it.”
Dixon’s also workshopping his one man show, Bitches Be Stoopid (DAAMN!!’). He describes it as funny, mainly autobiographical about women and addiction. Dixon quit drinking in 2000, saying he was drinking a lot and using it as a “huge stage crutch”. That experience also has brought him into theatres with a tight group of recovering comics on the Comedy Addiction Tour (comedyaddictiontour.com). Naturally, he’d like to make the leap from clubs to playing theatres more.
“It’s more money for less time and effort,” he says. “People are there to see you and they’re not fucked up. But, getting better creatively is pretty important to me as well. I write everyday, an hour or two. It’s really important to me. I’ve never been a promotional kind of guy. If anything, I’ve let that slide, never been good at that. It’s the more important skill, let’s face it. In terms of becoming successful, nobody gives a fuck if you write a new joke. But if you’re a really good promoter, you can get people to come out to see your show over an over again. I’ll Twitter and Facebook. I’ll sell my CD. It was actually #6 in Portugal for one week. How the fuck did that happen? That week, Dane Cook was #7. By the next week, it was gone. A Portuguese tour, (he jokes) why not? Where is Portugal anyway?”
“One of my failings for a long time – I’ve underestimated the audience,” said Dixon. “I’ve spoken to the dumbest part of the audience. It wasn’t a conscious decision. It’s a survival mechanism. You take the easy ones [jokes]. You’d rather have the better ones, but they’re more effort. I could do this shit that everybody will laugh at. I’ve always had the idea that the audience was stupid. The audience will act stupid, stupider than they are. I don’t know what it is, but at a comedy club, nobody comes there thinking, ‘Smart comedy’ unless they’re there to see someone specific. You get bachelorette parties, people who just want to celebrate; not going to a nice, funny show. I’d like find a way to extend the audience’s attention span and speak to them in a more engaging way. Then I end up going up and doing the five easiest jokes I know. I’ve got to conquer myself first. It’s as easy or as hard as you want to make it.”
“It’s [his career in comedy] the fulfilment of a childhood dream for me. I thought it always looked like a cool thing to do,” says Dixon. “It’s exciting; the self expression, the attention, I don’t know what it is. Sometimes it’s just a paycheck. Sometimes it’s something else all together. Mostly, I get to do whatever I want. Comedy is a great lifestyle for me. I feel it’s a life I’ve chosen, rather than a life I’ve just fallen into, to some degree.”
For more on Pat, visit YouAreTheEnemy.com.