Barry Crimmins -

Raging (No) Bull

At the Hong Kong Comedy Club, Sat., April 15, 2000

by Susie Davidson (Siouxie D)

It's not a night at the Comedy Connection. The stage is modest, the decor unpretentious. It's a bare bones backdrop for the newish stand-up series at the Hong Kong. Host Rick Jenkins, poking fun at the Harvard Square ambiance which geographically (and outwardly) defined this particular, Crimmons crowd, explained: "We are trying to do something a little different here - these are not comedy shows, but 'opportunities to process issues' ".

"In 1985", he continued, "comedy was like a primal scream. Then as clubs discovered they could make money at it, they got more organized. The Hong Kong is trying to get back to the real, the stripped-down acts. Barry was there at the beginning - he put the heart into comedy in Boston."

At the intro, Barry charged to the stage, already fuming and shouting in a clear transformation from the two mellow, mediocre opening acts. "It's nice to be in a place where I don't get hassled by the acts", he commenced, and went into a spiel about bad improv comics discovered working in convenience stores following their xenophobic onstage jokes about foreign store clerks and cabbies.

Despite moving to Ohio some years back, Crimmins displayed a keen understanding of things local. "I knew I was back in Mass.," he related, "when I crossed the state line and the sign said 'welcome to MA, thanks for driving like a total jerk!' ...The Big Dig - it supplied new jobs for the guys who were working for Joe Malone (who had hernias from carrying money out of the office)."

"And that's my goal for tonight," he continued (in his characteristic, constantly pacing rage), "to make you laugh harder than Joe Malone's head."

Denouncing Boston's car-choked streets, he went on. "Cars make you Republicans - they make you suspicious and hateful of people - trains make people environmentalists - you ride along, and you see beautiful country scenery and also industrial areas - after a while, you decide what you want to choose... It's such a decision to go out in Boston for dinner, you may as well get a hotel near there - I had to plan my shows in advance - let's see, which way should I go; I'll get there around 4:00 to avoid tie ups...." (Don't we locals know it!)

Barry has been absent from Boston stages for several years, except for a lone Passim appearance in 1996. Here, he leapt into form, railing against the stock market and monopolies. "I don't need any stocks," he maintained, "I use an Apple computer because I like to use my computer like I use my brain. I used an IBM and the screen said 'illegal function' - "what? This is my f'in computer! I'm the President of this computer! I don't have to send my sh-t all the way to Washington State to get approved! ... What a shock - they decided that Microsoft was a monopoly! Like Reagan having Alzheimer's and now the latest - the Catholic Church admitted it's made some mistakes! I'm shocked and stunned!"

Back to Boston, he dissected Ted Kennedy's opponent Jack E. Robinson and the Bulgers. "Billy Bulger returned to the Univ. of MA? - 'If you don't learn your lessons now I'm bringing Whitey in to teach you one!' I hear he's going to teach a couple of math courses - Fixing the Lottery 101, Computing the Bidding...."

"I have no idea how to pronounce the kid in Florida's name," he interchanged, turning to national news, "because every newscast pronounces it differently". Going into a more somber tack, he discussed his crusade against child pornography on the web and the confrontations he encountered from some leftist groups. " People are saying 'he is fighting free speech and the next thing you know they'll censor magazines' - I really don't want to fight the Playboy empire, but kids getting raped. Gonzalez is a similar type of thing - he'd be in better hands if Bobby Knight were his foster parent!"

Barry has never minced an opinion, and here he displayed his uncanny, scintillating format of cutting down to the actuality and relaying it in a hysterically witty manner. "Why don't they come out with the truth - it's a hostage situation. Why don't they just say what they want - we want two shortstops, a starting pitcher, and if you don't pay off, you'll never see the kid again, unless you have CNN. It's amazing how freedom loving all these Cubans got when they arrived in Florida. They didn't really care that much about freedom when Battista was running the country, but they got to Florida and then just suddenly - it was an acquired taste, they just developed it. Before, enslaving the entire island for the Mafia to turn them into busboys and prostitutes, well that was a wonderful thing. But once they lost the freedom to enslave them, they catch the freedom bug - "yeah, get on the train, senor, we're heading north!"

The U.S. critiques of Cuba were flattened and squashed by Crimmins. Where America decries Cuban socialism, he raved: "the Pentagon is good socialism - Pentagon - good - like capitalists, but socialists at the same time! They are like capitalists because they are greedy - they're so greedy they have an extra side on their building! The original idea for that was like, 'how can we put a whole bunch more cost overruns into this project? Has anyone ever made a five sided building?' "

Back to Elian, however you pronounce it: "Maybe he should be allowed to stay here. He can rise to that highest level any immigrant young man can hope for in this country - to someday move to New York City and be slain in a hail of bullets by the New York City police department! ... Guiliani, huh? Rudolph Mussoliniani?"

Barry gave us a capsulized story about his comedic origins. "Everyone was doing crotch jokes....I wanted to do something different; I was like sort of interested in current affairs, so I figured, I'd do political stuff, not that many people were doing that, and at the time Nixon was President - and you can say a lot of things about Nixon, but nobody ever accused the guy of getting blown - it just never happened! The only sexual thing related to Nixon was that he was like herpes - you know, you think it was gone, but...."

"So, I'm listening to Mussoliniani on the radio," he continued. "He's got this radio spot, he says, 'New York City's program of confiscating the cars of drivers who are arrested for driving under the influence has been so successful, we're expanding the program by confiscating cars of people who are arrested for speeding' - This is true!" "Why were you driving so fast?" he emulated. "I was trying to flee this police state! I was trying to get down to Miami, where they respect freedom!"

Political correctness, the Republican National Committee, dry, humorless leftists, racists - all were whipped with Barry's slag rag in his fast-as-fire delivery. "Martin Luther King Day's my favorite holiday for two reasons," he stated. "Number one, it honors a great man and number two, It annoys bigots to almost no end - it really pisses off these yahoos - "Why is everything closed?" "Martin Luther King Day, Martin Luther King Day!"

"Why would I want to silence John Rocker?" Barry asked. "The guy was nice enough to take his hood off in public and come out and start talking! I'm not the one who wants him to be quiet, major league baseball wants him to be quiet... What major league baseball didn't want was a bunch of people down there at spring training with the Atlanta Braves, who are owned by Ted Turner, who is owned by CNN, who is owned by Time Warner, who is owned by AOL and then they're training where - at Disney! Disney doesn't want blatant racism walking around there on this field, they want subtle racism in their happy cartoons. 'I'm the cwiminal in a Disney cartoon-a hey-a' - they don't need John Rocker around, no-siree!"

Crimmins possesses that gift craved by all performers, the ability to spontaneously quip on anything that comes up during a performance. "I'd like some more water, if you can - you know, fresh delicious Massachusetts tap water." After a couple of requests, he broke out. "Me and my exotic demands - could I please have a glass of water - and just water." A waitress then dropped a tray, and Barry seized the moment. "...So where were we.... You know what, I'm not one of those guys, I'm working and something drops, gravity affected things and 'hey, I'm over here doing comedy and you have gravity working? What's the matter with you? How dare you have gravity working while I'm up here? Supsend the laws of gravity while I'm working! What's the matter with you, drawing attention away from me? This is my job, I'm in an illuminated, elevated place with my Bose amplifier - everyone must pay rapt attention and respond exactly as I say! Laugh, clap or be quiet! No more gravity!"

"Please tip these people; they're working way harder than I am... They can't be out drinking all night like you folks - they do their drinking in the afternoon before they get to work.... That's a thousand year old joke..." (They bring him a huge pitcher of soda water.) "This is great - soda water, you could spill it and nobody cares! Soda water - that's what they use to clean stuff up! The only thing that'll take that out of here is gravy!"

"I drank more water today than I drank during the 70's and 80's. All I did then was have water IN what I was drinking. I'm like Marc Twain - when the others drink, I like to help. That's as close as I get to Twain."

"You know why they call it the heartlands?" he queried the audience, back into his set. "Because the brain isn't there."

He then relayed facts about his roots, going into a dirge about locals in his ultra-conservative upstate New York town complaining about the visiting Clintons' moral deficiency. (Turns out they ran a bar with T-shirts displaying naked breasts and sold horsemeat sandwiches.)

Barry is a longtime vegetarian, and he worked it into the act. "So I'm tired of these books - 'Chicken Soup for the Soul'. How 'bout 'Chicken Soup for the Vegetarian Soul'? That doesn't work too well, does it? ... I'm tired of seeing those idiot books too - you know, 'I'm just beginning to look into this issue, maybe you have like a primer, "how to learn about this stuff" and I could buy a book that isn't printed bright black and yellow' - 'hey, idiot!' 'Look at that idiot who needs a book!' 'He's so dumb, he has to buy the idiot version!' "

"Our chicken soup, it's nurturing, it's good!" Barry pantomines. You know what's next.

"What we've done is taken living creatures and squeezed them until they become water, and liquid, and condensed them, and when they're condensed, we take these animals that first we store in these little cubicle cages and cut their beaks off so they don't harm their valuable flesh we're going to light on fire and eat later, and we store them in these incredibly hateful conditions forever and then we take them and we kill them and we squeeze them and we soak their bones in water and boil then, until it makes this 'nurturing and warming and life-giving substance' - that goes out to my friend Emily the Cow".

The current election follows. "No matter how humble your beginnings were, so long as your father was at least a Senator or maybe even the President of the United States, you can someday run for President of the United States.... It's like a legacy election- 'If you don't vote, you got nothing to complain about!' "A choice between the Republicans or the Democrats - from the pretty far to the right to the extreme right."

"The Presidency is kind of loopy", Barry pronounces. "I mean, what kind of nut runs for the Presidency? Really, think about the process of just going through the 'I looked at the entire world and there's one thing sorely lacking - I'm not in charge!' 'Well, let us form committees that will worship you, egomaniac!' "

"Nuts", he told us, "have become the swing vote in our country's campaigns. "Reagan consolidated that nut vote - Reagan Democrats - that means nut! Nut! Self-loathing sap vote - you know, nuts! Reagan - 'Trees pollute more than cars do' - 'Hey you know, that guy's making sense!' "

Barry was rolling. "By 1992 Perot came along, and just took that nut vote over... Perot, I mean, only in the United States could you have a third party and it actually narrowed the choice, but that's what happened... I mean Perot is like a babbling nitwit, but because he had money, people acted like he knew what he was talking about - he just blabbered....You had Clinton, the pawn of big business, Reagan, the big business pawn, or you had Perot, big business."

"They're talking about putting Reagan on Mount Rushmore - now if they do that, they'll have to give Lincoln and Jefferson blindfolds!"

"Giving Reagan credit for ending the Cold War is like giving Pontius Pilate credit for Christianity. (Reagan rasp:) 'Tear down that wall - I want to visit the rest of the S.S. graves.' "

"Bill Bradley, he was the most progressive guy in there, and he's a disciple of Henry Kissinger's - he digs Henry Kissinger's foreign policy. Remember Henry Kissinger, in the Gulf War, when they called him to see if there should be a war 'hey, check with Henry Kissinger and see if there should be a war', that's like check with Pete Rosell and see if there should be a football game! Henry didn't let us down - 'We must be very cautious or war will be averted...the eventual extermination of a thousand innocent civilian lives will be needlessly spared...We must give atrocities a chance....' "

Gore was not spared either. "Gore has the charm of a wall-to-wall carpet salesman, combined with the natural ease of Ed Sullivan." McCain? "I'm sick of everyone thinking that just because somebody's a veteran, they're an expert on foreign affairs. Think about when you've seen groups of sailors on leave roaming around - did you ever say to yourself, 'now, that guy looks like a great candidate for a future Presidency!!' ?"

Barry raged about the "rotting piles of stupid nuclear weapons" in varied American states. "Get rid of them, tell me what your plan is for getting rid of them. If you want to help the economy, spend whatever money it takes to get rid of that sh-t, and believe me, the economy will be humming for centuries! I hate that stuff - I hate it when it takes 2000 years to put out the garbage! It's really terrible when you forget pickup day - 'Oh d-mn!' "

The war on drugs and U.S. jail systems were the next target. "People hate living in this world because nitwits like Al Gore are in charge, and they'd like to forget about it for a minute, so they use things to not make them feel so bad...20% of the prison population in the world - We got 5% of the world's population - land of the free?

And he got serious, which is a banquet in the Barry Crimmins monologue. He doesn't just complain, he offers simple solutions, and he makes sense. "We should make the jails lawful places, where people who are in jail learn that laws are not only there to follow, but they're also there to protect you - So when you're in jail, you're not going to get raped, you're not going to be beaten up, you're not going to have to deal with gangs, you're going to be safe, you're going to learn that behaving in a civil fashion is a good idea - But jails are the most lawless places in our society, and that we're building them at a record rate means only one thing - we're going to become way more lawless over the next several years, it's gonna get worse and worse and worse....

"We're building prisons way faster than we're building schools ... We have a war on drugs, we don't have a war on despair, we're celebrating jail rape and acting like that's a good idea and a good idea to teach people - I mean, that's really screwed up - we gotta stop doing this, we gotta stop being cowards!" I hate this prison, drug war crap - I mean legalize drugs, illegalize despair!"

We have always needed more Barry Crimmins'. He's the thinking man's jokester who yet conveys deeply-held, intimate convictions about the things that deserve a heck of a lot more attention. (Fittingly, Jimmy Tingle, another cerebral political jester and 60 Minutes II regular, was in the crowd.) Barry deserves his own stage on National TV. This show inexorably proved that he still blazes in high-key comedic glory. Let's hope there are no further lengthy impasses for this impassioned, ethical crusader of the low-tech stage.