Sphere of Influence

I have purported my love for such figures as Rasputin and Socrates in past postings, but the three departed heros from the generation before mine that I admire the most are Andy Kauffman, Richard Pryor, and Amarillo Slim. There are a lot of differences between the three, but the one resounding similarity is that none of them gave a fuck. They were all great showmen, and they werent afraid of who they offended along the way. Instead, they chose their own path and brazenly told anyone who didnt like it to go fuck themselves. They were living proof of the fact that the only way to truly be yourself in the public eye was to shove their inner demons in the public’s eye.
I was first introduced to Andy Kauffman by his appearances on Comedy Central reruns of Saturday Night Live. Shit did that bit where he played a recording of the mighty mouse song, and only sang the part “Here I coooome to save the day”, then patiently waited for the chorus to reappear. Shit was fucking dominant, and the more I learned about him the more I wanted to see. He went on a tour of college campuses, mainly so that he could meet up with any females sending him fanmail and bang them. Therin, he did a performance at a school which was suppossed to be a stand up routine, but all he did was read “The Great Gatsby” in its entirety and nothing else. He had this character Tony Clifton, where the whole point was to piss off the audience. Dude wouldnt even tell jokes, he would just insult the audience and say things like “women will never be as smart as men”. As he started to go crazy later in life he proclaimed himself “Intergender Wrestling Champ” and went on a tour of the south beating up women from the audience at pro wrestling shows. When challenged by then champ Jerry Lawler, he took out ads where he basically shouted at the camera “What you dont understand is that I am much smarter than you people, Im from hollywood, you are from memphis tennesse. You people are too stupid, you shouldnt challenge me, Im from hollywood.”
Richard Pryor was from the same mold as Kauffman in that he didnt care who he pissed off, but he did it with honesty. He wasnt afraid to discuss his problems with freebase cocaine or racism on stage, and he found a way to make it funny. Comics like Eddie Murphy and Dave Chappelle owe a lot of their swagger to Pryor, and I have never heard of a stand up who didnt list him among their favorites. When he did that bit on SNL where he went back and forth with chevy chase on racist terms, it pushed the envelope to the point that people were afraid to laugh. I think its hard to grasp how cutting edge his shit was at the time based on how mainstream it has become since, but the shit he said on stage was borderline sacrelidge. If Pryor had come up in the current climate, he might well have done lines in front of an audience just to let those fucks know that he wasnt fucking around.
Amarillo Slim made his money gamblin, not entertaining, but he could have done either. He had a quick mouth and a quicker sense of how to turn someone into a sucker. Dude won bets beating Minnesota Fats at pool with a broom, Bobby Riggs at ping pong with a skillet, and Evel Kneival at golf with a carpenters hammer. I once won ten bucks beating a high school classmate at ping pong with a brick, but slims shit was putting the gross domestic product of small countries on the line and taking the shit down almost every time. Dude had more balls than anyone Ive ever read about who lived to his age, and he is as responsible as anyone for poker’s current popularity. He wasnt afraid to put in a fix, make book under the governments nose, or hint at the fact that he’d had men killed by saying that shits that crossed him met with misfortune. If any of these hot shot young guns who plaster their face all over the travel channel had to deal with the shit slim did, they’d have quit poker long ago and they would go back to their straight lives clocking in at a job for the man rather than face the dangers of road gamblin.
No matter how original anyone thinks his shit is, we are all a product of our influences. Slim himself admits that he built off of the lifestyles of Titanic Thompson and Johnny Moss, and Im sure that Kauffman and Pryor owed some debt to people like Redd Foxx and Dean Martin. Im not sayin that I hold a candle to any of their legacies, but I certainly keep them in mind when people tell me that shits a bad idea to broadcast my indiscretions as though they are something to be proud of. Being true to yourself has more to do with understanding where you come from than understanding where you’re going.

Sphere of Influence

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