Modified On March 18, 2008
This time, it’s Michael Granberry, writing for the Dallas Morning News, in an interview with two-year veteran (that’s not a typo!) Peter Barrera.
The fact that the DMN would profile someone who has been onstage fewer than 200 times is probably not setting right with the comics in the Big D, but we can understand how an assignment editor would salivate over the story– he claims to have lived, until the age of 4– in Bobby Vinton’s mansion! (His mom was the Vinton family’s nanny.) How can you not send out a reporter when that comes across your desk.
What really must frost them, though (and what is pretty revolting as far as we’re concerned) is the nauseating pontificating of the fledgling comic at the end of the piece:
“I would say,” he says, referring to comics, “that 99 percent of us have major issues.”
Having reached his mid-30s, he felt his life needed a wake-up call.
“I wanted to be in the public eye, to be seen, to make people laugh,” he says.
But he would not be entirely truthful if he failed to admit to the deeper, more psychological motivation.
“I want people to like me,” he says. “Like a lot of comics, I’m looking for approval, validation … something I didn’t get as a child. I want to make my kids proud, my wife proud.”
Oh, boy! Here we go again.
A bit further on, we get a two-fer, when a fellow comic lays the Funny Man’s Burden on him:
“I want to go all the way,” he says, “but I have a lot to learn. Ravi told me once, ‘Your jokes are good, but you need to write more material that comes from within you. That’s when you’re really good.‘ “
Then, the big finish, which could have been written by David Seltzer:
He feels the highest highs, he says, “when I hear the laughter. When I tell jokes, and it’s something I’ve created. When I look down and smile and they’re smiling back at me. When I’m standing here after I come offstage, and they say, ‘That was great! That was so cool!’ ”
On the night he opened for Richard Lewis, a couple asked if they could be photographed with him. “I said, ‘You realize it’s not worth anything?’ And they said, ‘Oh, no, it will be. One day, it will be, and when it is, we’re going to have that picture.’
“Do you have any idea how that made me feel? Driving home, I felt like crying. ‘Somebody believes in me! Somebody believes in me!’ I kept saying it over and over. It felt so good, because a lot of times in my life … I just haven’t felt that way, not even remotely.”
I think that last quote was lifted directly from a Lilah Krytsick monologue!