Modified On August 8, 2012
… we were unnerved.
Charlie Sheen kicked off his tour this evening.
When USAToday’s allegedly live tweeting of the Charlie Sheen opening night abruptly ceased just before the show was to begin, we sensed something was amiss.
And further inspection of some status updates on Facebook led us to conclude that something had gone terribly wrong with the “My Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat Is Not an Option” tour.
Facebook, Entertainment Weekly and even the New York Times blog is now abuzz with blow-by-blow accounts of the disaster that is the Charlie Sheen “standup” tour.
From EW’s InsideTV, at 10:03 local time:
The show is now an unmitigated disaster. People are leaving early. Attendee Chris Acchione, a self-described Sheen fan who traveled all the way from Toronto for the show, says his entire row walked out early. “He’s making a fool of himself,” he says. “Is there a bigger loser in the world? He’ll be [begging] Chuck Lorre for his job back by the end of the week.”
Scroll up and there’s an entry at 8:03:
The comedian has been literally booed off the stage.
Most outraged Facebook accounts of the conflagration left out the identity of the opening act. The opening act would no doubt have preferred it remain that way.
By 12:37 AM, the NYT, via the blogging of Time film critic A.O. Scott, informs us that the guy taking the bullet is none other than Kirk Fox.
Very few of the theater’s 5,000 seats were empty at the beginning, and the noisy, well-lubricated crowd gave a hostile welcome to the opening act, the stand-up comedian Kirk Fox.
Fox is a funny guy. He’s currently being eviscerated as a decidedly unfunny guy. We would hope that he might have figured, in the back of his mind, when he was offered this gig in the first place, that this very public, very fast-spreading disembowelment was a very real possibility.
One particularly excruciating detail (which we’ve seen in two different places on the WWW) is that headliner Sheen popped out onstage in the middle of Fox’s set and implored the crowd to give his supporting act a chance. Ouch! It’s never a good situation when the head has to come out and try to soothe the audience. By that time, it’s lost. (See video below.)
It’s a nightmare.
Obviously Sheen knows nothing about standup or standup comics, because that’s the worst thing he could have done.
Was Fox booked for the entire 20-city tour? Will he stay on as the opener? (Who could blame the tour producers for throwing him overboard? In the past, an opener could survive such an ignominous debut, but in this day– with Facebook and Twitter and blogs– the stench of that first, disastrous outing will not easily be outrun.)
Who among us would have passed on the opportunity to do a few minutes up front and then bring on one of the most notorious, internet-created celebrities of the moment? Imagine the collateral press that would come your way merely by being a part of this traveling media circus? Oh, the stories!
Of course, when you sign on to such a strange mission, you gotta wonder if it will all turn to monstrous shit in a heartbeat. And, in this case, it did.
We’ve all been booed at one time or another. Or at least had a decidedly hostile reaction to our set. It’s disheartening. Demoralizing. But the check clears. But, once in a while, the debacle is so giant, so public that it inspires awe and pity.
In hindsight, we’re wondering: How could anyone expect a comedian (Fox) to appear in front an arena full of people who looked fondly on Sheen’s Youtube antics– who characterized them as “funny” or even “hysterical”– and somehow make them sit still and respond in the appropriate way? You’re called upon to quell the riot that shows up to see a drug-fueled, whore-mongering megalomaniac in a theater or other venue that is only suitable for standup under the most ideal circumstances… where’s the possible upside?
We comics are almost always optimistic. And our optimism perks up a few clicks when a paycheck with a lot of zeroes is waved around. We see those goose-eggs and we immediately begin to see our way clear to doing a killer set in front of even the most doomed situations. So firmly do we convince ourselves that it might go right… we are almost (almost!) stunned when it goes straight down the dumper with lightning speed.
And then we feel like total idiots. Because, deep down, a certain, rational part of our brain knew, with unerring certainty, that the whole thing was going to go exactly that way.
Perhaps Fox’s DVD sales will spike. Perhaps the “as long as they spell the name right” axiom will kick in.
He’ll always have the stories.