CHOLO COMEDY

My heart was flopping around like a Sunfish in my chest cavity. Damn, I’m belted in Gracie jiu jitsu! I fantasize about putting vatos in flying heel hooks like a teenager dreams about twilight trysts with vampires! Why in the hell is my heart pounding like this? Don’t look at that table!

“Um… okay… Hey, my name is Bill… I’m white…. okay, moving on….”

My logical left brain kept trying to rotate my body counterclockwise, away from the seething mass of testosterone and tattoos.

“Hey, motherfucker!”

“Fuck you!”

What? Were these cholos directing their epithets towards me? Why? I couldn’t understand it. I guess I can be pretty offensive to Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and any other variant of pigmentation on the planet, but I had barely said a word yet…. Was I about to get jumped onstage… again?

***********************

Offstage, about 5 minutes earlier, I had arrogantly planned to verbally lacerate the table of three rowdy and disrespectful cholos. They had not only been loud, but they had made thinly veiled threats to the two previous comics, terrifying half the audience in the process.

Not only were these dudes empirically scary-looking, but the symmetry of their positioning alone was daunting. At the head of the table farthest away from the stage sat the most colossal cholo. He looked like a Latin Jabba the Hut — a Jabba el Cabana, if you will. Flanking him on either side were two stoned-faced and rail thin thugs, faded prison tats on skinny necks, faces ravaged with either chicken pox or knife scars. To add to their mysterious gargoyle-like stillness, they had black baseball caps with ruler-straight brims pulled down low over their eyes. They looked like MLB pitchers hiding their tells in the bottom of the ninth.

From the safety of the wings of the club, I visualized myself getting onstage and acting out he following scenario:

“Hey guys, let me ask you a question…. You got any guns?”

“Nooooo.”

“You got any knifes?”

“Noooo.”

“Then shut the fuck up!”

The collective reaction, whatever it might be, would be immediate. Everyone in the audience (sans the three amigos) would guffaw and cheer. Or their collective sphincter would knot up tighter than an ice road trucker’s lug nuts.

Jabba was drinking a fruity blue drink, so then I would follow it up with this:

“Look at you, your face says ‘FUCK YOU!’ but your drink says ‘FUCK ME!!!’”

Then the audience would explode and I would be body surfed out of the room in celebration after such a swift dismantling of this awful heckler.

I cockily smiled to myself as I hid in the confines of the comedy club curtains.

Suddenly, Manny, the comic onstage, said something that didn’t resonate well with Jabba and I saw it…. a uniquely Mexican phenomenon — the “thousand yard smile.”

See, whenever you make most race-oriented jokes, the litmus for your standing is usually clear: a smile. Having spent my entire adolescence in a predominantly black school, I learned that once you get an African-American man to laugh, things are pretty much cool. You chuckled at my ‘Once you go pale, you never have to post bail’ joke? Awesome. Now please laugh louder to cue the uptight white people to laugh.

However, for many Mexican-Americans, the smile is a much more nebulous mode of expression.

For example, one night I was doing a 1:20am spot in Times Square. In the front row, there was a group of thick Mexican-Americans, plaid sleeves folded over their chests.

I went into my bit about the debatable ethnicity of Adam and Eve:

“Eve definitely wasn’t white — a white Eve would have said, ‘I don’t think that apple’s organic!’ …. and an asian Eve would have eaten the snake!” The cholos roared. Hey, it’s not that funny, but people seem to love to laugh at Asians, particularly Asians.

I was certain they’d love the tag:

“I’m not sure about Adam. Maybe he was Latino, fellas…. I mean, it was the perfect garden — somebody had to trim the hedges!”

Crickets.

The Latinos kept smiling, but their eyes stopped dancing, becoming beams of fixed and scary intensity. One of the guys in the front row, smiling Cheshire-wide, started in: “Oh, yeah, that’s real funny, Gringo. Hahaha. Yeah, we’re landscapers. Maybe you can make me laugh even more after the show in the alley.”

Why are you smiling? I thought, as I looked at him. It suddenly struck me that he wasn’t smiling at all, he was baring his teeth.

I shook off the comment and finished the show, but I closed up certain that I was going to be flattened into a tamale. Like a man, I hid in the bathroom afterward.

Remembering that moment, I studied the way Jabba was eyeing Manny at the end of his set. Jabba had the exact same pissed-off expression, that “thousand yard smile”….

The MC whisked Manny offstage and then, almost instantaneously, ushered me on.

I took one step onstage and the arrogance immediately flew out of my body (apparently it went outside to smoke filtered cigarettes and discuss Sartre). The bright spotlights from the grid overhead bore down on me as I made my way to the mike stand. Everything was making me feel very, very… white.

“Um… okay… Hey, my name is Bill… I’m white…. okay, moving on….”

“Hey, motherfucker!”

“Fuck you!”

I flinched. I shouldn’t have said I was white, I thought. Was that racist of me?!

After my slight recoil, I glanced over at the table and noticed that the two skinny cholos were standing up and furious! And they were facing… each other?!!! Huh?

“Fuck you, cabron!”

There was a shove. The two cholos were fighting!!! Skinny cholo #1 slapped skinny cholo #2 in the face. Jabba stood up to mediate and/or referee and the three went off to the far side of the club, throwing furniture out of their way as they did.

“Anybody in a relationship here?” I asked everyone and no one. Maybe I was asking the universe. I’m not sure.

Groups of people started to quietly but swiftly flee the scene.

“I actually just got dumped by text recently. I got it while I was driving…”

I slowly sat on the stool onstage and looked out into the confused and semi-paralyzed audience members remaining as fisticuffs ensued in the wings.

“…She was in the passenger seat.”

One heavyset white girl 4 rows in tittered. That was all I needed. A modicum of validation was all I need, even as the slapping and yelling transpired not 20 feet away from my right ear.

More people got up to leave.

“She was right there!… She should have at least called like an adult.”

Another lone titter in the blackness.

Damn, I thought, a huge smile on my face, I love this job….

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