Comedian Tom Cotter discusses stand-up comedy, the bastardizing of Scooby Doo by Scrappy, and his involvement in a new reality TV show.
What should people unfamiliar with you expect from one of your performances?
I’ve been told that I’m a rapid fire, one liner type of guy. People say that I put two hours of material into a forty-five minute show because I go so fast. It’s annoying for some, but it seems to work.
Is this a style that you arrived at through experimentation?
It’s born out of insecurity. I started in Boston and everybody was rapid fire, except Stephen Wright. They had thick Boston accents, talked very fast, and that’s where I started comedy. So those are the people I emulated. I don’t like lulls in my act, so I’m already in the next joke by the time you’re just getting the last joke. There’s very little dead air in my act.
When was the first time that you performed stand-up?
I was at my college. I did it at a muscular dystrophy telethon talent show at Denison University in 1986 when I was a senior. I had fun, got bit by the bug, took six months to start writing, went to an open mic night, and out of the ten jokes I did at the open mic night maybe two worked and the rest crashed. But I was already addicted, so I was coming by every couple of months to try it, and that became every couple of weeks, and then every week.
What inspired you to perform the first time?
I had just lost the election for the president of the DCGA, the Denison Campus Government Association, and during the whole campaign I presented myself as a goody two shoes that spent all his time in the library. I was doing a lot of what they called face time, kissing a lot of butt, and when I lost the election, I said, “Screw it. Now I can tell people how I really feel.” My whole act was inside jokes about Denison. I made fun of the faculty, the staff, the fraternity, the athletics, and everything about the school. The buzz around the campus was that I had shocked a lot of people with things that I said.
What were you studying in college?
I was a political science major in a pre-law course of study.
Were you incorporating humor into your daily routine?
Yeah, I was the class clown all the way through prep school and college. We didn’t have after school punishment; we stayed Saturday mornings in my school. I went to the same school from fourth grade until twelfth grade and it was kind of an uptight, Quaker school, and I spent almost every Saturday morning because of something I did the week before. I was always the class clown and when I was in college as well. I guess I’ve never grown out of it and still am a ham.
What were the first few years of performing stand up like?
Brutal. I would drive from Boston to Burlington, Vermont for $25 and it didn’t even cover the gas. No hotel room just because I wanted stage time so badly. Doing a lot of bachelor parties, which is the kiss of death because after a stripper they want nothing to do with you. Just doing a lot of horrible gigs. Open mic nights where you’re basically background music. Where the people in the audience get angry because you’re an impediment of their sports viewing pleasure. Lots of hostile crowds.
What were you doing to support yourself at the time?
My day job was a private investigator. I started out as a cop in Nantucket, but I hadn’t done comedy since my one night in college. By the time I wanted to do stand-up, there wasn’t much going on there comedy wise. Nantucket is not a comedy Mecca, as you might imagine. So I fled to the big city. I became a private investigator.
It wasn’t glamorous Magnum P.I. with the Ferrari and the hot chicks. It was liability and workers’ compensation fraud. Lots of surveillance of scummy people.
Like Jack Nicholson in China Town?
No, that was much more glamorous. I was the guy that would wait outside your house to make sure you were using a cane. I didn’t even get to do domestic cases with husbands and wives cheating on each other. Hypothetically, if you were in a car accident and claimed you couldn’t walk, I’d park outside your house for three days to make sure you didn’t have any activities inconsistent with your injury, like gardening or walking up stairs. I photographed you like the evil peeping Tom that I was and then go and testify in court that you were a liar.
Were those experiences useful?
I’ve never written a joke about my days of being a private investigator. I have jokes about being a cop, but I haven’t performed them on stage. Maybe they’ll be in a book one day.
Ever wear a disguise?
No. Sometimes I’d borrow another person’s car so that they didn’t have the same car following them. It had tinted windows, so they never saw me. I was like a ninja.
Can you compare performing stand-up to something a normal person has experienced?
It’s unlike anything else. It’s immediate feedback. It’s either good or bad. It’s like a solo sport. You’re out there alone, like a wrestler. If it goes well, you get all the accolades, but if it goes horribly, it’s all on you.
What changes have you noticed in comedy since you’ve started out?
I really think it’s better. Lenny Bruce was ground breaking, but I don’t laugh when I listen to his albums anymore. It’s supply and demand. There are so many more comics around now, so you need to stand out. I think it’s tighter and more polished in the upper echelon. Headliners that have been around for a while are better.
What makes something funny?
There’s the old story of a guy dressed up as an old lady walking down the street falls into an open manhole. That’s not funny. But a real old lady falling into an open manhole is. I don’t know what it means, but I like that story. It’s funny when it affects you in a way. If it makes you blush, guffaw, or just makes you lose control of yourself. Some laugh at travesties and misfortunes, some laugh at themselves.
When you have an audience, you have to hit all those marks. That’s why I always make fun of myself because then I show that I’m not holier than thou. If I make fun of myself up front, I show that I can take a punch and then I can punch other people.
Now that you have children, what have you noticed about children’s toys and entertainment compared to when you were growing up?
A lot of it is remarkably the same, but it’s so much more politically correct. When I was a kid, one of my favorite characters was Speedy Gonzales and that’s almost all but removed from every network now because it mocks Hispanic Americans. Why is that offensive, but Pepé Le Pew the sex crazed skunk that sexually assaulted other characters is still on the air? So, much more political correctness.
The Wiggles weren’t around when I was a kid, and that’s a scam. Talk about feeling like the oldest guy at the concert. It’s stupid. It’s not educational; it’s just stupid songs. I like the educational kind of stuff like Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street.
I was a Scooby Doo guy and that went right into the crapper when they introduced Scrappy Doo. He was like the little, annoying Joe Pesci type dog that they brought in to ruin the show when it was perfect. I used to get annoyed when they’d bring in The Globetrotters or Don Knots. And the movie was an utter abortion.
What do you think of the trend of turning old shows and video games into movies?
Eh. I’m old school. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Some of these are series from the 70′s and 80′s that were weak then. Dukes of Hazard, I don’t know why they did that other than to show Jessica Simpson’s cheek implant. It was a bad show and, I haven’t see it and never seen it, but I’ve heard it’s an even worse movie.
Anything you’d like to see turned into a movie?
Hogan’s Heroes was my favorite growing up. It was a classic show with General Burkhalter, Colonel Clink, and Hogan who you found out afterward was a kinky sex guy, and Richard Dawson, who was a drunken philanderer behind the scenes. Any show that makes a Nazi prison camp into a comedy is genius, but that’s the only one.
Since you have children, are you looking forward to doing a career day?
Not really, no, but I won’t be embarrassed. I’m more fearful of my kids seeing my act and asking me a question that I’m hard-pressed to answer and end up warping their minds. I don’t want to have to pay for counseling. A lot of my act is innuendo and I don’t want them to ask questions about a thinly veiled penis joke.
We just put our kids into preschool for the first time. It’s a Catholic pre-school, which brought back all sorts of Vietnam flashbacks of rulers and everything for me. I was talking to one of the nuns and she wanted to know if I were interested in doing a benefit show, and I told her it was probably not a good idea to have my act involved with anything remotely related to religion. So I probably wouldn’t want to talk to kids about getting into my field and the horrible, poverty-stricken life I lived for six or seven years before things started to go well.
Do you find that, in terms of careers, young people rank stand-up comedian on the same level as rock star or astronaut?
I don’t know. Comedy Central is enormously popular among college kids, so maybe they aspire to be comedians. I aspired to it. Kids should know what they’re getting into before they get into it. You don’t automatically start out as Jerry Seinfeld or Ray Ramano. You have to grovel for years and years. There are so many freebies and horrible shows. You’ll have no money and will have at least one day job. I wouldn’t wish that upon my kids.
Anything else you’d tell an aspiring comedian?
Write and get on stage as often as you can. It’s more difficult now. When I started, there were open mic nights every week and you could get on every time even as a brand new comic. Now, at least in New York City, if you’re a new comic you have to network much more than I did to find out about random coffee houses. Or, if you want to go to a comedy club, they have these bringer shows where you have to bring so many paying customers. So you have to harasses friends to sit through open mic comedians, and it takes a lot of chutzpa to get people to endure that. And I would never have done it and would have quit by now if those were the rules when I started. People shouldn’t think that they’ll be a rags to riches type. There’s a lot of pain for the pay off.
What projects are you currently involved in?
My wife and I have a show coming out on the WE network, women’s entertainment, which is a- yes, very emasculating for me by the way- called Two Funny. There’s a website twofunny.com And it’s coming out in February or March. It’s a reality show about two married comedians that are starting to do stand-up together. We’ve been working on that, we brought our kids on the road, and we went to Montréal, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. We filmed six episodes and they’re being edited right now.
Tonight, I’m on my way to Boston because I’m filming a Comcast show at the Comedy Connection. That’s part of the Boston Comedy Festival and that will air wherever Comcast is in control. They have their own comedy channel where they show that.
Does your character live through the series?
Yes, he does. It started out more focused on Kerri, since it’s Women’s Entertainment. When we started filming, the producers really got into the interaction of the whole family rather than just Kerri and me, the annoying stupid husband on the side.
So, would you finish having a meal and they’d say, “Let’s make that meal funnier.”?
Reality is not reality, as we learned with Last Comic Standing. With this, if the boom mic isn’t in the right spot or the lighting is off and I fall down the stairs, they’ll ask me to fall down the stairs again.
It was influenced a bit by Curb Your Enthusiasm, which is all staged. The dialog is often improvised, but it’s all staged. The first episode, we do a lot of set-up stuff that’s supposed to come across as reality but looked stage. So we filmed a lot more of real situations that might lend themselves to being funny, like taking the kids to a petting zoo or a twins festival that we went to after being at Montréal.
Do lots of comedians appear on the show?
Yeah, in the first episode there’s Lewis Black, Greg Geraldo, Jeff Ross, and a bunch of people since we were in the Delta Hotel during the festival.
Any final message for our readers?
Stay in school.
Visit tomcotter.com to see some footage of Tom’s act and get tour dates. Also, check out twofunny.com for info on the upcoming series.
