Title: Running The Light
Rating: 4 Stars
Many years ago, sometimes back in the late 1980s, I remember going to a comedy club (Swannies Comedy Underground in Seattle). The headliner was a comedian named John Fox. I’d never heard of him.
When his time came, he walked to the stage and grabbed the mike. There was no ‘Hello Seattle, how ya doing’ or compliments on what a great crowd it was. The first words out of his mouth were, “Two firemen were in a smoke filled room butt fucking”.
And it went on from there. There was no observational humor. There were no personal anecdotes. There was no arc. It was all jokes. No joke was longer than probably fifteen seconds. It was machine gun comedy.
And he killed. He owned that room like Jeff Bezos. In hindsight, his jokes weren’t even all that funny. None of them were particularly memorable. He just took over the stage and willed us to laugh. And we did. We were gasping for breath by the time that he was done.
Years later, I think it might have been the mid 1990s, I decided to see comedy. I checked, and much to my surprise, John Fox was once again headlining at the Underground. I remember how much I enjoyed it, so I decided to watch him again. I go the show. Fox is introduced. He comes out on the stage, looking a little bit worse for the wear. The first words out of his mouth were, “Two firemen were in a smoke filled room buttfucking.”
Five or six years later, ninety percent of his act was, word for word, identical. And to be clear, once again he killed. John Fox was one of the classic road comedians.
John Fox died of cancer back in 2012. If you ever listen to Marc Maron’s WTF podcast when he’s interviewing an older comedian, there’s a chance that they might have a John Fox anecdote. When his name is mentioned, you can almost hear Maron sigh and think, here we go. Fox’s antics were so famous that someone made a song about it called The Legend of John Fox (click here to listen).
Why am I writing about this anecdote? Well, speaking of Maron’s podcast, some time ago he had Sam Tallent on. Tallent is a career comedian that knows something about road comedy, given that he performs some forty-five weekends a year at clubs. His debut novel is about seven days in the life of a road comic named Billy Ray Shafer.
As a young man, Shafer drifted into a life of crime. He became a transporter of drugs. Ultimately he got caught with drugs and sentenced to serve several years in prison. There he discovered that he could make even convicts laugh. The warden decided to advertise Shafer’s comedy to prove the rehabilitative benefits of prison.
Given Shafer’s talent, this sideways publicity was enough and he became a very successful comedian. He married a woman that adored him and had two sons. He received large sums of money.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Shafter was not able to keep any of it. Alcohol, drugs, and infidelity took away all of it. His wife divorced him. His two children are no longer in contact with him. All of his money is gone. Only people of a certain age have vague memories of him appearing on The Tonight Show. He’s going from gig to gig, hoping to make enough money just to survive. If he has a dream at all, it’s possibly to get a gig on a cruise line, infamously the last stop in the career of a hack comic.
It’s at this point that we meet him. He has one night stands at bars that don’t do comedy. He has a gig at the bachelor party at a masonic lodge. He has a gig cancelled on him due to a kitchen problem. His lowest gig is the one where his opening act is the owner of a duck. A large bingo like card is laid out on the ground and people bid on which square the duck will shit on. Upon talking to the duck owner, it turns out that the duck owner is making significantly more money than Shafer.
To be clear, Shafer is not a good guy. Shafer does copious amounts of drugs, taking whatever he can from whoever willing to offer it to him. He is constantly drinking as much free booze and free food that he can from whatever venue that is hosting him. He has anonymous, promiscuous sex. He beats people up, even if they don’t have it coming to him. He is robbed and beaten. He wrecks a rental car. Every place that he leaves is in a worse state than when he entered it.
But here’s the thing. Even though he’s a horrible person clearly on a downward trajectory towards ruin and probably death, he really does have a gift. Like John Fox, he is a truly professional road comedian that knows precisely what is required to win a crowd over. The hour a night that he spends on stage is a time where his demons seem to be kept at bay.
The other thing about Shafer is that he might not be irremediable. At times, despite his destructive and addictive behavior, he understands that he once had it all, that he lost it, and that it was all completely his fault. By the end of the novel, he is making tiny steps towards reestablishing some kind of relationship with his ex-wife and one of his sons. Although he found it humiliating, his final performance of the week was a deeply personal act from his heart that, of all people, Norm Macdonald, said was brilliant.
Can it be that there might be a chance of redemption for Billy Ray? Is there a path for him? Considering the downward arc that his life goes through just in the course of a week, you might be able to guess the answer to that. The primary reason why I didn’t give it five stars is that the ending was just a little too pat for me. I saw it coming from a mile away, and yep, there it was.
Even so, I’ve been listening to Marc Maron’s WTF for well over ten years. My favorite interviews are always with long time comedians as they talk about life as a comedian. Comedians are, at least from that sample size, broken people bravely fighting their demons publicly and on stage.
Running the Light tells a great story of a week in the life of one of these deeply flawed people.
dorkenstein 