Excerpt: The Mimic’s Own Voice

It was August when management decided Myles could appear four nights a week, for five hundred dollars, at the Double L. Only five months had passed since his first night at the Hub, but the dizzying ascent affected him little or not at all. He still worked at the library full-time: “You didn’t want to lose your health care.” And though he bought two new suits, two shirts, ties, and a pair of black shoes, the entire wardrobe, save for the shoes, was a package deal at an outlet store for men. If his act didn’t distance him enough from the rank and file comedians backstage at the Double L, his formal clothing put a wall between them, as only a few wore blazers, and then typically with jeans and sneakers. But other than the new clothes, the only significant change in habit for Myles was that now he rode the bus, the 32 Crosstown, to avoid the grime and dust that collected on his trouser cuffs when he biked.

Yet the comics, though respectful — especially after Adams’s review — didn’t quite know what to make of him, and all he knew of them were the patterns and tones of their speech. He writes, “Backstage was the first time you saw what could be called ‘the business.’ Everyone phoning agents or scribbling notes. Drinking, some drug use, much nervous smoking. All this and an atmosphere of paranoia, where everyone suspects his peers of sucking up to management for choice ‘slots,’ or trying to ‘bite a bit.’ One sallow, thin man who’d apparently been there for years would always, after he spoke, draw a circle in the air and a ‘C’ within it, to copyright his jokes.” And, as he felt when he first viewed the tapes with Lewis Denboski, Myles didn’t think anyone was particularly funny. “They were too desperate. They didn’t want just the audience to laugh. They wanted their peers, the bartenders, management, people passing by on the street. You didn’t think you belonged at all.”

From his first evening, though, he was a success. “How could he not be?” writes Melissa Tangier, one of today’s freshest Comedic Studies scholars, and a biracial woman herself. “Original act, sealed with a respected critic’s approval, a far sight better looking than most of the pizza-faced goons.” Myles hated the Double L, which is still standing and serving as the launching pad for the newest comics from the Buckeye State. Empty, it was — and still is — as welcoming as sanitarium. A low and long building, it was rumored to have been initially built as a bowling alley, but a bank defaulted before the lanes were installed. Unlike at Chuckles, here smoking was allowed, which, due to the low ceilings, kept a foggy bank of smoke near the performers’ heads. Myles still tried to maintain a focus on anything but individual faces, so, in that regard, the smoke made it easier to not see the crowd, though it did clog his lungs and dry out his throat. Adapting, he altered his routine: at the end of his thirty minutes, when his throat was raw, his voice raspy, he impersonated the smokers, Cuomo, Blum, and Carlo Tarantella, the up and coming Italian comic from the East. Nightly, Myles received the biggest rounds of applause but performed early enough to catch the ten-thirty run of the #32. This typically left six unhappy comics with the unenviable task of following him. His talents and the applause they fetched created in his peers a good deal of envy; however, none stole from his act, though most would have done so if they knew how or what to purloin. Peter Szok allows that mimicry was a part of many an observational comic’s repertoire, albeit not of specific persons, as no one since O’Meara had strictly been a mimic. Still, King David Blum would imitate a “typical Jew” or “Goy,” and Mandingo’s “tight-ass white guy/bad-ass brother” routine had secured him a Hammy, the Comics’ Guild award for best routine of the year. Yet, when compared to Myles, one would think most of the imitations sounded like a comic speaking in a single “funny” voice and not reproducing upwards of sixteen in thirty minutes, as was Myles’s average at the time. As Clayton Adams III said presciently in his review: “When he reaches the highest stages of comedy, no one, past, present or future, will compete with this remarkable young man.”

And yet they tried. The two most notable incidents, not ironically the very ones that propelled him to the “highest stages of comedy,” involved two of the most prominent comedians of the day: Rhino Stamps and King David Blum. It began in Myles’s second month at the Double L, where, due to the griping of other comics, he was playing the last slot of the night before the open-mic Improvs began, then catching rides home from bartenders and waitresses, none of whom “had comic aspirations.” On a Friday, he wanted to introduce five new voices into his now forty-minute set, one of which was Rhino Stamps’s, whose voice he’d had a small struggle with, due to what he called, “his alternately phlegmy and nasal roar.” He told no one of his plans, though if he did, undoubtedly his more thuggish peers would have failed to warn him of what was common knowledge backstage: that shortly after his performance at the Palace Theater that night, Rhino and his entourage of agent, erotic dancers, and lackeys, would be arriving. (Coincidence dogs each step of Myles’s performing life, one cannot deny. However, some still ascribe to him a bewitching ability to effect reality, which, while there is no concrete evidence, certainly entertains.)

So with no idea that Rhino Stamps sat in the VIP section, flanked by fans and drinking complimentary bottles of champagne, Myles entered the stage. As was his custom now, he simply announced, “I’m Douglas Myles,” as if what he was going to do should be obvious to all in attendance. Witnesses claimed — as the encounter was written up in the Dispatch then put out on wire services — that Stamps took no notice at first. Though an exceedingly large man — over six feet tall and three hundred pounds — the nickname he’d gotten from Blum stemmed more from his prominent and upturned nose (“Schnoz,” Blum assuredly would have said) than his considerable size. As well, his subtitle, “The Heckler’s Nightmare,” suggested behavior not unlike that of his massive, four legged, African namesake. Rather than dispatching the drunken calls of “You suck” with such clever retorts as, “Hey, I don’t criticize your drinking,” Stamps would charge off the stage at a frighteningly fast pace and pull up mere inches from the heckler, then say, “I’m a little deaf. Would you mind repeating yourself?” At the time, critics said it was for this alone that the crowds came, as Rhino’s other material was pedestrian and derivative, focused on an essentialist argument about men and women and fairly crude observations about bathroom habits. The latter could be seen if the heckler, for drunkenness or courage, withstood Stamps’s first assault, as after whatever response the heckler made, Rhino would rear back and bellow, “I’ve taken shits bigger than you.” Customarily, no one found out what might be Rhino’s next statement.

That night, however, as Myles progressed from Cousin Ezra’s gags about tossing cow pies to Mandingo’s “tight-ass white guy/bad-ass brother” debate (no easy feat: mimicry of another’s imitation), Rhino suspended his drinking and silenced all around him. One wonders if the comic had any idea his voice would soon issue from the mouth of the slim young man in a slightly ill-fitting suit. He had little to say about the incident. He neither spoke to reporters or other comics in the ensuing days. In less than a year, he would be in his own hometown, Chicago, performing solely at his new club, Rhino’s Jungle, where each night he and his fans enacted a version of the heckler routine to thunderous applause.

On stage, after impersonating Oz Paradise, Mr. Motormouth, and moving to the smokers, Tarantella, Cuomo and Blum, Myles launched into Rhino’s male/female routine, his voice alternating perfectly between nasality and being clogged with spit as he uttered such forgettable lines as, “My girl complained I didn’t take her to see any chick flicks, so I brought home a movie we’d both like. You know what it’s called? Chicks Who Dig Chicks Volume Eight!” Stamps’s entourage looked to their meal ticket then to the mimic, he as still and as thin as the microphone stand before him, his perfect recreation of Stamps’s voice causing more laughter and applause than the original routine ever earned. Myles’s final impression was, to the crowd, an obscure one, later discovered to be of Simpkins, who ended every show with the lines Myles spoke that night: “All of us have a story to tell, but some of us have a lot of voices to tell it with. Thank you for listening to mine.” A curious reference to his “Masters Act,” to be sure, but as well a sign of what was next to come in his career, the wonderfully dense “History Lesson.” Yet even if any in the audience had heard of Simpkins, they wouldn’t have paid attention, as Rhino Stamps, at full gait, was lumbering toward the stage. Witnesses nearby said they could feel every reverberation of his feet thumping the floor. None, though, saw any fear betrayed in Myles’s features. He wrote nothing about this incident, unless one considers the following sentence: “You made enemies, but not intentionally.” That night, while he saluted the crowd, he started to exit, then paused. He turned around as Rhino Stamps was landing on the stage, then leapt forward to meet him nose to nose, behind the microphone stand, and actually beat Rhino by a few seconds in saying, “I’m a little deaf. Would you mind repeating what you said?”

Most gasped, but some laughed, chalking up, as one witness said, “the first round to Myles.” Stamps stepped back, as if his opponent weighed more than one-sixty-five in hard soled shoes, then composed himself by hiking up his trousers and sneering to the audience. He opened his mouth in time to hear his voice say, “I’ve taken bigger shits than you,” but his lips hadn’t moved. The speaker, of course, was Myles, and the audience response was total: a standing ovation with applause, whistles and praise so rich, a bartender said, “You’d think no one had ever heard a joke before.” Once the jubilant wave of noise had crested, Myles offered his hand to Stamps, who, shoulders slumped, exited the stage.

The coverage occasioned by this triumph took the name of Douglas Myles, for the first time, beyond his hometown, into the larger world of professional comedy. The story was repeated in entertainment pages of newspapers, discussed on morning radio programs. He sat for a photographer’s portrait — his first since his senior year of high school — for a planned cover of The Jester, the still-thriving monthly magazine chronicling comedy in all its permutations. The cover was to pair his image with Stamps’s, but it never went to press, as things were happening so quickly, the never materialized feud between these principals was surpassed by event of even greater import.

For within two weeks of the encounter with Stamps, Myles would receive a call from the producers of the H.H. McCormick Show, an hour-long program that featured equal parts politicians, sports figures, actors and comics, in a simple format: the towheaded Manhattanite, H.H. McCormick, wearing horn rim glasses and polka dot bow ties, talking with guests before live audiences. Said Carlo Tarantella, only three months distant from his second appearance, “You could tour the best theaters year round and not get as much buzz as fifteen minutes with McCormick.” On learning of Myles’s invitation, the Double L’s management team were beside themselves to have another of “their boys” ascend to that level, especially since it had been three years since Speedy Gonzales’s debut on the McCormick Show. They prepped Myles on how to dress, telling him to eschew his stage wear for an open collar so he would look less “uptight.” One suggested spectacles. Another mentioned he’d look more forceful with a goatee. All demanded he mention the name of the Laughter Lounge as many times as he could. As for the comics he was leaving behind, only a handful of whom would attain anything like regional or local celebrity — hosting late-night movie shows, appearing at street fairs, opening malls with bikini clad beauty queens — they did prepare, on the night of his last performance, the classic ritual of shaving cream pies on paper plates and cans of silly string, only to learn he had been collared by the management team for another prep session.

His appearance, scheduled for a Friday, required he fly, a first for the twenty-one year old, whose only experience with mass transit, other than bus rides, was a train trip to see his Aunt Glendora, a woman who lived in Philadelphia and spoke with a “slow, sputtering hiss.” Nervous on the day of the flight, he was picked up by a driver hired by the Double L management, and he wore his old suit with a new tie. About wardrobe he’d decided to ignore the cash register voices, though he’d assured them he would mention the club at every opportunity. Aboard the plane, he was not recognized, and he sat bolt upright in coach from gate to gate, refusing all meals and beverages save for a bottle of water he’d brought on board. He writes, “You could say it was from the flight, but that wouldn’t be true. You were fearful of leaving the Laughter Lounge for a Manhattan audience and the millions watching. You were prepared to be sent back quickly to the silos and cornfields of home.”

Understandable, to say the least, is this fear, especially when one considers how close he was to attaining fame of which he’d never dreamed. Peter Szok asserts, “The real surprise, considering he’d been performing for only six months, two of them professionally, is that he even got on the plane.” But, as it turns out, his fear was warranted, not because he’d face for the first time a television audience — presumably more sophisticated than the folk of his hometown — but because he had not been told by the producers that he’d be sharing the stage with another comic, none other than King David Blum, making his sixteenth appearance — a record for comedians and only two less than a senior senator from the Empire State (once considered, due to his voting record, quite the comic himself). As inter-office memos show, Blum, a law school graduate who’d earned millions through a carefully managed stock portfolio, was contacted first by the producers, and, in an interesting move, considering his reputation, Blum forewent his thousand-dollar appearance fee. (Myles received five hundred.) All evidence points to the production staff seeking a rancorous thirty minutes (which would become a full fifty, bumping retired rear admiral Elliot Alcorn to discuss his new book the next night). They sought squabble, clamor, if not outright evisceration, pitting the novice against the seven-time comic of the year. To make matters worse for Myles, Blum sought vengeance, as it was well known among insiders (Myles, a novice, black, and a Buckeye, couldn’t have been more outside) that Blum harbored a special affection for Stamps, the uncertified rumor being Stamps had once served ably as Blum’s bodyguard. To most, this made sense, as Blum’s press releases always alleged his self-dubbed “toxic material made as many enemies as it did fans.” As well, there was his naming of Rhino, and their many appearances together on tour and television. About Blum, Myles said, in the interview before the ambush, that he was “easily one of the best,” though in the manuscript, he writes, “What you could never understand about Blum, after you discovered the lachrymose quality beneath his insults and the emphasis he put on second syllables, was whether he believed in anything he said.”

As a surprise guest, Blum was not backstage when Myles arrived, spirited to the studio by a driver and now feeling everyone could detect his provincial background “like manure on your soles.” He balked at makeup, asking the artist if the foundation were designed for whites. Nodding, she prepared to smear his face, but he ducked, saying, “I want to look like me.” Glassy-eyed, he stared at the intricate workings of backstage while steered by an aide to the Green room. The schedule he received (found in the same accordion file as the manuscript) detailed that he’d appear with McCormick for fifteen minutes, then get ten for his act, which, strangely, he’d already decided would be absent of a Blum impression, as he’d selected comics whose best jokes could be repeated over public broadcast. Mr. Motormouth, Mandingo, and Dena Cuomo would be his subjects, Carlo Tarantella if he had time left. (Though this is only known from his telling it to a production aide who asked. It should be noted that Myles on occasion diverted from the plans he shared backstage, one notorious case being his first performance of Hernandez’s “Impromptu,” on a night he claimed he’d do an abbreviated “History Lesson.”) However, the schedule was false, as he’d only get ten minutes with McCormick before Blum would “bust in,” as one producer wrote in a memo, “and tear this kid a new one.”

Though the first few minutes of the interview are only a prelude to what the producers — McCormick was in on it, too — planned as their “main event,” it is interesting to view those questions and their halting but thorough replies. He mainly discusses gigs in his hometown but when McCormick asked about his background, Myles is careful to say, for what is likely the first time in public, “I’m black.”

“Really,” a bemused McCormick says, shuffling through his index cards. “I never would have guessed.”

Myles, who appears washed out and sickly with his lack of makeup, nods at this and says in a voice as artificially comic as those of the one-liner royalty, “If I had a dollar for every time I heard that.” He then tells of his performance before Rhino Stamps and his act in general (mentioning twice the Double L), his inflection even, his hands locked on his knees. The audience is strangely silent, laughing little, for once finding humor in McCormick’s asides — his stale jokes usually elicited groans. An assistant producer, later on, would say that in the production booth the staff began to openly pity the young man, as in person he seemed far more defenseless against Blum’s imminent assault. But they could do nothing, as McCormick was reading the last question, the cue for Blum: “Is there anyone you can’t do?”

After a silence of seconds, Myles licked his lips, and, in the “reedy Yankee lockjaw” of McCormick, repeated the question. No applause sounded, but if one looks carefully at the video, one can see it was not due to disapproval but to shock, as the faces appear as blank as slate, and not a few fans clasp hands over open mouths. One must slow the video’s speed to detect this, as, in seconds, the camera shifts to Kind David Blum, smoking a cigarette, bounding past McCormick and standing before the audience, his arms lifted, palms open, as the audience, to a man, stands and claps with a zeal like that heard in Pentecostal churches. Blum, who was forty at the time and handsome as a matinee idol, if a little gray, makes a point of shaking McCormick’s hand, then stares, arms folded across his chest, at Myles, who gamely offers his trembling hand. At this point, Blum spits out the cigarette and stomps on it. He jabs an index finger at Myles and shouts, “You ready, punk?”

As the crowd begins to roar lustily, the show cuts to commercial. If the overt staginess of the first segment is not evident, the image displayed on the return to taping is obvious: a split screen of Blum and Myles with the legend “Tale of the Tape” below their chins. After a bell’s tolling, the show’s announcer, Jack Walker (himself a mildly successful former social critic) intones the ages, weights and heights of each man, concluding with their “records”: Myles, one and oh; Blum, “never been beaten.” As well as this played with the audience and the viewers (the ratings share grew steadily over the course of the evening until it seemed every TV household tuned in), critics, the next day, saw this as a reason to take the H.H. McCormick Show to task. “No way,” wrote a reviewer in the Post, “the production staff could have done this off the cuff. They set that kid up.” Yet, as every critic would mention, their initial disdain for the show and sympathy for “that kid” was on its way to a sudden transformation.

But for a full fifteen minutes, Blum dominated, subsequent to McCormick’s question: “Have you seen his act?”

Stalking the small stage, playing to the crowd, Blum said, “No, but I’ve heard about it.” Knowing Blum, the staff had shifted to a seven-second delay to censor him. (Blum, a veteran of the show, likely expected this.) While the transcript expurgates all the obscenities, the video itself captures them all. There’s no need, however, to repeat each one, nor is there need to reproduce the entire monologue, for, as Owen Delaney, the editor of The Jester, summed up in his column: “He essentially said, in a variety of ways, with enough blue words to make a sailor blush, that Myles wasn’t funny and he had no material of his own.”

Considering his very attempts, at Al and Lewis Denboski’s behest, it seems Myles might have agreed with that accusation in part, but in the next segment, titled “Round Two” — the first round scored as Blum’s — Myles, finally given an opportunity to speak, quietly says, without any joking, “My favorite of the masters was Arthur Simpkins. And he always tried, in his act, to provide variety. He had a set number of voices, but he was always adding or changing the order. And I think from him I’ve seen how you can keep things fresh, rather than saying the same thing over and over again.”

McCormick taps his cards against his desk, the audience murmurs, and Blum fires up a new cigarette, then blows the smoke at Myles. He says, “Listen, I’m no Rhino Stamps. I love the big ape, but you’re not going to make me look like a yutz. I know your little fucking plan, kid. I know you’re going to mimic me, and feel free, I’ve got a funny voice, I talk like a Jew, or maybe you call us Yids back where you come from, or Kike, or Heb, whatever. But talking like me won’t shut me up. Just try, just try.” The camera is tight on his long, sweating face until another commercial comes on. Remaining in the program are twenty-five minutes, excluding station breaks, and upon the return to the show, the score is two rounds to zero for Blum, another signal, according to Hector Cruz, the famous critic from the Times, that the show’s producers were biased toward Blum, as, “If anything, with Blum’s uninventive bluster . . . and Myles’s intriguing and calm reply, that ‘round’ should have been scored a draw.”

Here, though, despite its “expletives deleted,” is where the show’s transcript best illustrates the performances, as the video, complicated by swift cuts and blurry focus, makes for vertiginous viewing. After another salvo from Blum, in which for two minutes, with deliberate, football-cheer syllables, he chanted, “Not Funny,” McCormick steps in:

McCormick: What do you have to say to that, Mr. Myles?

Myles (in own voice): Repetition isn’t truth.

McCormick (shaking his head): Care to elaborate?

Blum (walking by, blowing smoke): He’s scared. I’ve taken away his one (expletive deleted) joke, that’s not even a (e.d.) joke in the first (e.d.) place. He can’t copy me, the little pisher, so he just mumbles.

Myles (in own voice): I meant that saying something many times doesn’t make it true.

Blum: Then say something funny! Prove me wrong. I bet this yutz couldn’t even tell a (e.d.) knock-knock joke without (e.d.) it up.

McCormick (tugging ends of tie): You really haven’t said anything like a joke. Care to share one?

Myles (in Blum’s voice): Then the Jewish kid says, “Of course your priest’s a genius, you guys tell him everything.”

(Audience gasps and laughter)

Blum: I haven’t told that one since my (e.d.) mitzvah.

Myles (in own voice): You have told it before.

Blum (turning to McCormick): Mac, don’t you see. This is my point, exactly.

Myles (eyes closed, in Blum’s voice): Mac, don’t you see. . .

Blum: Shut the (e.d.) up. Jesus. That’s all he can do. What are you, some kind of freak? I had a cousin, named Arnie, he . . .

Myles (interrupting, in Blum’s voice): Had this photographic memory. Trouble was, he stuttered.

Blum: So you know my old (e.d.). So (e.d.) what? Any slob with a record player remembers that bit.

Myles (in Blum’s voice): And by the time he’d, duh-duh-duh-duh, s-s-s-say wh-what was on his muh-muh-mind . . .

Blum: Jesus, are you even listening? Hello? (Waves hand across Myles’s face.) Anyone home?

(Audience laughter)

Myles (in own voice): You’re right. That bit isn’t funny.

McCormick (over crowd noise, fanning himself with cards): Ouch, hey, we’ll be right back.

Blum: Don’t break for commercial! Don’t you (e.d.) dare. I (e.d.) made this (e.d.) show! You (e.d.) owe me. Don’t (e.d.) with the King. They call me the King . . .

Myles (in Blum’s voice): Because anyone who messes with me, Jew, Gentile, Black, Asian, even the noble Native, anyone who messes with me gets crowned. Boom!

(Standing Ovation)

Blum (facing the audience): But that’s mine, don’t you get it? You’re laughing at a trick, a gimmick, not what he says. Jesus, you’re all a bunch of, a bunch of . . .

Myles (in Blum’s voice): A bunch of hyenas, you’ll laugh at anything today.

Blum: That one I’ve never said, putz. You got it all wrong.

Myles (in own voice): But you will say it next week.

At this point, Blum says nothing. He doesn’t even open his mouth. The audience mumbles and moans in the way that usually attends an unanswered schoolyard challenge. When the taping resumes, Blum is no longer on stage. McCormick and Myles shake hands, McCormick apologizes to the rear admiral and promises as entertaining a show tomorrow. The applause deafens.

Had any other comedian been enlisted to provide Myles’s comeuppance, the last line of their exchange might have eventually faltered, as most, when surveyed by The Jester, replied that they’d have avoided the stage for a week, allowing the public to forget Myles’s prediction (our national attention span as short as it is). But King David Blum was not called king for nothing. Few had a mild response to his act, so he was met at every concert by fans and detractors alike, all of them now turning out to see if the upstart from, as Blum called it, “the fucking prairie,” knew more than the comic’s voice and routine, but as well the workings of his mind. In the manuscript, Myles writes briefly about his return home and the party at the Double L (he left early to catch his bus), and the attention he received from the local media. No mention, however, of Blum, who was defiant toward every reporter who asked him if he were at all worried or if he felt the contest, as scored by most critics, was a majority decision for Myles. “Those hacks,” he said in Des Moines. “They’re all a bunch of would-be comics, but they didn’t have the chutzpah or the talent. They’ve been after me for years.” A night later, in Lake Charles, at their famous outdoor amphitheater built in the shape of an oyster shell, he told the crowd, “I don’t know what show they were watching, but all I remember was him stuttering and shifting his eyes. He needed to duck, because I was shooting with both barrels.” (Never mind that the stammering was from his act, King David had his reply.) Then, in Houston, during a radio interview: “Everybody comes after the big guy. That’s what I did when social critics were top dogs. I took out Finkel and ‘Streetfighter’ Archibald on an episode of Archibald’s show. Now? I’m still standing. I don’t know where whatshisname is.” On the eve of a week’s passing, in El Paso, at the Rodeo Pavilion, he said, “Clock’s ticking. The day I rely on Mr. Xerox for material, that’s the day I hang it up.”

For those present the next night in Albuquerque, at a brand new theater called the Rialto, the night was a curious one, filled with deep blue skies, distant thunder and flashes of heat lightning. Apparently, Blum’s afternoon nap — he would complain the next day — had gone longer than he’d expected, as a desk clerk at the hotel forgot to place a wake up call. As a result, Blum arrived at the Rialto logy and late, as well as suffering, he later declared, from a slight head cold. The pins and needles of his twenty-four-hour medication hadn’t dulled when he entered the stage to a packed house. The biggest distraction of all, though, came from a certain patron, seated somewhere near the front, toward Blum’s right, who kept saying, “Do the ‘Photographic Memory’ routine from Dirty Mind.” Until his death — and it’s worth noting that Blum performed until lung cancer silenced him permanently at the age of sixty-one — until then, he insisted that this concertgoer and the hotel desk clerk were in Myles’s employ. “Just like the fraud Hernandez,” he’d rail, somewhat inaccurately. “The guy even copies his sabotage.” What is certain is that thirty minutes into the show, Blum, sweating more than usual, looking grayer, paused in the middle of his classic routine about goys at a seder — “Do what with the crackers?” — and addressed the man: “My Christ, you’re persistent. That bit’s older than the hair on your balls. Jesus. You people. You’re like. Well, you know what you are is.” And before he could blink, he finished what Myles said he would, and for perhaps the first time ever at a King David Blum show, neither the spectators nor the performer had anything to say.