Hello Larry,...
It's me, David Cross.
Recently I was shooting something for my friends at "Wonder Showzen" (the funniest, most subversive comedy on American T.V. at the moment) and when we were taking a break one of the guys on the show asked me if I had seen some article in something somewhere wherein you were interviewed to promote your new book "Please-Git-R-Done" (published by Crown Books $23.95 U.S.) and they asked about your devoting a chapter to slamming me and the "P.C. Left". Since I stopped following your career shortly after you stopped going on stage wearing a tool belt with cable wrapped around your neck (around your appearance at "Laffs 'n' Food" in Enid, Oklahoma Aug 23-26 1999?) I said I wasn't aware of the article. They went on to tell me that you said basically (and I am not quoting but paraphrasing their recall) that I could kiss your ass, that I've never been to one of your shows (true) and that I didn't know your audience (untrue).
SO, I went and got your book, "Gitting-R-Donned", and excitedly skimmed past the joke about that one time you farted and something farty happened, on past the thing about the fat girl who farted and finally found it.
Well, needless to say I farted. I farted up a fartstorm right there in the Flyin' J Travel Center. I fartingly bought the book and took it home with an excitement I haven't experienced since I got Bertha Chudfarter's Grandma drunk and she took her teeth out and blew me as I was finger banging her while wearing a Jesus sock puppet in the back of the boiler room at The Church of the Redeemer off I-20 (I don't care who you are, that's funny.)
Anyhoo, I got home and read the good parts. It seems that you were pissed off at Rolling Stone magazine,
and I can understand why. You made some good points in your argument as well. I agree that there is an eliteism and bias in the press and too often a writer will include asides to show the readers how smart he or she is and how "above it" they are. But come on! Surely you can't be surprised, or worse, hurt or offended by this. You even say in the book that you knew what you were getting into (Rolling Stone being all "lefty" and whatnot). Certainly I'm not surprised that they took a ten minute phone conversation with me and chose to print only the most inflammatory paragraph within it. That's what they do.
But I want to address some of the things you write about me in "Git-to-Gittin'-r-Done". In response to the Rolling Stone article, but first let me say this; you are very mistaken if you think that I don't know your audience.
Hell, I could've been heckled by the parents of some of the very people that come see you now. I grew up in Roswell, Georgia (near the Funny Bone and not far from The Punch Line). The very first time I went on stage was at The Punch Line in Sandy Springs in 1982 when I was 17. I cut my teeth in the south and my first road gigs ever were in Augusta, Charleston, Baton Rouge, and Louisville. I remember them very well, specifically because of the audience. I remember thinking (occasionally, not all the time) "what a bunch of dumb redneck, easily entertained, ignorant motherfuckers. I can't believe the stupid shit they think is funny." So, yes, I do know your audience, and they suck. And they're simple. And please don't mistake this as coming from a place of bitterness because I didn't "make it" there or, I'm not as successful as you because that's not it at all.
Since I was a kid I've always been a little over sensitive to the glorification and rewarding of dumb. The "salt of the earth, regular, every day folk" (or lowest common denominator) who see the world, and the people like me in it, as on some sort of secular mission to take away their flag lapels and plaster-of-paris jesus television adornments strike me as childishly paranoid. But perhaps the funniest (oddest) thing in your book is you taking me to task for being P.C. Have you heard my act?! I'll match your un-P.C.ness any day of the week my friend.
I truly believe, and have said onstage amongst other things that, orthodox Jews are bar none, the most annoying people, as a group, that walk this earth. I absolutely refuse to say the term "African-American".
It's a ridiculous and ill-applied label that was accepted with a thoughtless rush just to make white people feel at ease and slightly noble. I also believe that in the right setting that, as unfortunate as it may be, retarded people can be a near constant source of entertainment (fact!).
Larry, whether northern, southern, straight, gay, male, female, liberal, conservative, Christian or Jew, I've walked them all. It didn't matter if it was a room full of "enlightened" hippie lesbian wiccans at Catch A Rising Star in Cambridge, MA or literally hundreds of students at the University of St. Louis (a Jesuit school) or a roomful of the cutest, angriest frat boys in Baton Rouge all threatening to beat me up, I un-P.C.'d the shit out of them.
That's another thing that bothers me too. I honestly believe that if we had worked a week together at whatever dumb-ass club in American Strip Mall #298347 in God's Country U.S.A and hung out that week and got good and drunk after the shows, that you and I would've been making each other laugh (I imagine we would have politely disagreed on a few things) but not only would we be laughing but we'd often be laughing at the expense of some of the audience members at that nights' show, and you know it. I'll address your easy, bullshit sanctimonious "don't mess with my audience" crap further on. But for now, let's "Gittle-R-Ding-Dong-Done!"
Okay, here's what I said in the RS interview: "He's good at what he does. It's a lot of anti-gay, racist humor -- which people like in America - all couched in 'I'm telling it like it is.' He's in the right place at the right time for that gee-shucks, proud-to-be-a-redneck,
I'm-just-a-straight-shooter-multimillionaire-in-cutoff-flannel, selling-ring tones-act.
That's where we are as a nation now.
We're in a state of vague American values and anti-intellectual pride." ...
(continued...)
