On Feb. 3, 2001, as Joe Thomas was being processed out of the Pinellas County Jail, he passed by a break room, where a guard spotted him. "Hey, Joe," the guard called out. "You leavin' for good? Do Michael Jackson one last time."
Thomas grinned. "OK," he said, "but next time you're gonna have to pay for it."
At that, the 23-year-old did a dead-on Jackson leg kick and a quick moonwalk, then chirped "Heeee hee." The guard cracked up at Joe Thomas' freedom dance after six months in lockdown.
Flash ahead three years. Thomas is at the home of his close friends Scott and Angela Ogden, working on material for a five-minute amateur set the following night at Side Splitters comedy club in north Tampa. Since he was little, Thomas — Joey to his closest friends — was always the funny kid, the class clown who still managed to excel in the arts magnet program at Gibbs High School, the guy who could slay 'em at parties, the young man who scored by playing an obnoxious weasel on the syndicated Jenny Jones show.
Until now, though, he has never performed a proper stand-up routine, the kind you do on stage by yourself in front of strangers.
"You gotta do Michael Jackson," says Scott, a part-time filmmaker nine years his senior. "You've been doing him so long, and the guy's in the news."
Thomas looks reluctant at first but warms to the notion by limbering up with a few Jackson poses and yelps. The audience of five cracks up. His friends yell out ideas. Within a few minutes, he's built a short sketch based on how Jackson would act in the courtroom.
It's pushing 10 p.m. and Thomas, fighting off a headache, has done his act six times. His living-room audience, fueled on beers, hurls critiques and ideas. They cheer and cajole. Thomas patiently soaks it all up. Collectively, the ad hoc brain trust fine-tunes bits about what would happen if the Queer Eye guys picked the colors for terrorism alerts, about a Pakistani gas station owner hawking his own CD, and a send-up of West Side Story. The Michael Jackson bit stays.
Thomas leaves, heading back to his wife and two small children in northwest St. Petersburg. The fan club remains, discussing the act's merits and whether their young friend will succeed tomorrow night.
"We'll see," says Jason Dudney. "I'm not convinced. His characters are good, but his transitions are weak."
Scott disagrees, saying Thomas is a lock. Opinions fly around the room, building to a din. "By the way, all of you," says Angela, and everybody looks her way. "This is his first time."
"Joey'll blow people away," Scott says, " … because he's Joey."
What is it about standing up in front of people and being funny that scares the shit out of us? A lack of laughs, for starters — that queasy silence from the crowd that says, "Dude, that was lame." What do you do then? Laugh nervously? Run? You press on with the next shaky bit, probably, and risk the same moribund response.Bombing in a stand-up routine has to be one of the ultimate embarrassments, so much so that most people, funny ones at that, would never consider trying it. They'd rather have a tooth extracted on a prison bus rumbling through the desert.
Yet there are always those intrepid souls willing to lay their wit and personality on the line. Side Splitters never lacks for a quartet of amateurs willing to do five minutes. The Improv in Ybor City gets a couple dozen folks to pay $25 ($10 if you bring 10 friends, who get in free) for the privilege of doing three-minute routines during its monthly open mic nights.
Who are these people, the ones Teflon-coated from rejection? No surprise that comics and would-be comics come in all stripes. On a Saturday afternoon, five days before his amateur debut, Thomas attends a workshop headed by Maurice Jovan, Side Splitters' house emcee. Two other aspiring comics show up. Dotty Casper, a 77-year-old widow and grandmother of 11, had attended a Side Splitters show on a whim a few months back. The club announced the stand-up workshop and she thought it sounded like fun, even though no one had ever told her she was funny. Now, Jovan is immediately drawn to her spunk. She has that intrinsic surprise factor. A newbie at 77, an old lady with a cane. She opens by feebly climbing on a stool to reach the microphone. She wears enormous black cataract sunglasses on stage.
Another workshopper is fresh-face preppie Chris Cate. A recent graduate of Auburn University, he's new to Tampa and has a job teaching English as a long-term substitute at Wesley Chapel High School. He wants to break into TV or film and sees stand-up as both an opportunity and a means for professional development. Cate does not possess a naturally funny persona, but Jovan thinks he has potential as a writer. "Although he obviously needs to work at it, I think he brings a fresh perspective," the emcee says. "I don't hear any clichés in his work. And he works very clean, which is extremely rare these days." (Cate's most promising bit is one about bargaining with God to win the lottery. "But then my ticket doesn't have a single number," he says. "It has letters: F. U. Signed GOD.")
And then there's Joe Thomas, streetwise, hip, with a plethora of characters, voices and impressions, and the ability to "beatbox" — popping out a rhythm with his mouth against the mic. Jovan watches Thomas essentially stumble through his presentation but sees instant potential. "You have a real presence," he says. "Comedy is not just jokes. It's your personality."
Joe's got that.
But during the dry run, Thomas' eyes too often fixate on the ceiling, he paces aimlessly, his body movements lack purpose, and his segues sag. He also commits a cardinal sin of stand-up: He says "anyway" several times. "Anyway" is not just a useless bridge between bits, it's also an apology. It's the verbal equivalent of a heavy sigh. You might as well be saying, "Anyway … that sucked. Here's something else that sucks."
Despite the tentativeness of Thomas' workshop performance, Jovan sees raw talent. He encourages the aspiring comic to hit the stage ASAP — the next Thursday night. Thomas, he says, is ready to pop his open mic cherry.
'I think 90 percent of people who do comedy are wounded in some way and looking for some kind of validation," Jovan says later. "Why else would you put yourself out there on a daily basis if you didn't need that affirmation from a crowd?"And so it is, at least in part, with Joe Thomas.
"We grew up real poor," he says of himself and his three siblings. "Basically, at one point in my life, me and my brother Dana's bedroom was a screened-in porch. Everyone was fuckin' miserable. It was like a Kafka book."
Joey took to making people laugh. He was a short, chubby kid who got teased so much he'd sometimes come home from school in tears. "Then I realized if I was better at making fun of them, I could shut 'em the fuck up," he says.
When Joey was around 9, his oldest brother Jeremy would host huge outdoor parties at the family house in unincorporated Pinellas County. Jeremy's band would play on the front porch. One night, Joey challenged Bear, Pinellas Park High School's preeminent beat-box specialist, to a contest. The little chubby kid kicked ass.
At Largo Middle School, a slimmed-down Joey did a show on the school television station, riffing on bits from In Living Color. His home life became intolerable, though, and he moved out at 16. While attending the arts magnet program at Gibbs, he worked 35 hours a week and couch-surfed between his older sister Heather's apartment and other places. He left school a few credits short to work as a sandblaster in Cleveland. Bad idea. He came back the fall semester and graduated, then started doing audiovisual work.
He put his creative side on hold. In '98, he asked his stepmother to fund a trip to southern California, where he intending to break in as an entertainer. Thomas landed a job with an AV company, but it quickly folded. He never knocked on any showbiz doors. "I pussed out and came back home," he says ruefully. "I wasn't ready yet."
A high school friend, Erica DeMaro, who had done a Playboy pictorial and a movie, told Thomas that Jenny Jones was looking for a bully to work over guests and the audience. Thomas appeared five times simply as "Joe" and berated former ugly ducklings whom had been transformed into silicone-enhanced "hotties," spewing off-the-cuff insults like, "She was on her back so much she was sponsored by Serta," and "You can get more intelligence from a pigeon on crack."
Joe stalked the stage in hip-hop clothes and sunglasses, basking in the catcalls. Jones loved him. She paid him $300 a show and flew him to Chicago. One time he got to bring along his new girlfriend Allison. The people back home were juiced up about seeing their pal knock 'em out on the sleazy talk show, but Thomas saw it basically as a "go-nowhere situation."
He'd struggled on and off with bipolar disorder, and in May of 2000, with job stresses squeezing him and a newborn son keeping him up nights, Thomas cracked. A guy he didn't know called him and taunted him, said he was gonna fuck his girlfriend. Dude was talking about Allison, the mother of his child. Thomas went looking for the guy with a weapon. He's thankful to this day that he never found him. Thomas did enter the bar where his foe worked and threatened some folks there. "I wasn't seeing any of the good things in my life," he recounts. "I was sick of all the bullshit. I guess I thought that going after some guy would change things."
A few hours later he was arrested, already despondent, already feeling awful about scaring innocent people. Thomas was convicted of first-degree felony burglary, entering a dwelling with intent to commit a crime.
He got five years. Then he got lucky. Because the court did not see him as a hardened criminal, Thomas was permitted to serve his time in the county jail. His sentence was changed to one year, with four more on probation. He worked menial jobs seven days a week and was thus credited with a day off for every one served. He got out in six months.
"Jail is either a personal hell or a place of tremendous personal reflection and insight," said Thomas, whose probation was cut to two years. "You're surrounded by people you don't trust, you don't like. You have to learn who you are, what got you here and what can keep you out. I thought about that stuff everyday, that this was not me, that I wanted to be positive. I'll never go back there again."
About a year after his release, Thomas married Allison. He landed a job fixing medical equipment (wheelchairs, hospital beds and such) and bought a townhouse near Tyrone Mall. He's a doting and patient father of Zachary, 3, and Jasmyne, almost 2. "His son was born and then he went to jail," says Joe's oldest brother, Jeremy. "Six months without his newborn son. You gotta think that weighs heavily on him."
In fact, it was just recently that Thomas felt he could reintroduce a comedy career into his hectic life. "I think the time is right," he says.
Common sense says that Joe Thomas is a long shot to become a professional comedian. Yet the notion is not as farfetched as you may think. Thomas has something important going for him: He's naturally funny.True, the stand-up comic job market has shrunk a lot since its heyday in the late '80s and early '90s. That's when most medium-size markets, Tampa Bay included, had about a half-dozen clubs at any point in time, not to mention other bars with comedy nights. Jovan, the emcee, got his start during this period; there was so much action, he could do amateur sets six nights a week.
The comedy club craze was spurred in large part by cable TV; you could see funny folks on the tube and then catch them up close for a reasonable cover charge. In time, the scene became oversaturated. Former club comics like Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno, Tim Allen and Roseanne Barr became superstars on network television. These big names ceased playing small venues, or no longer toured at all. With a deluge of new cable channels, the amount of programming skyrocketed, and the talent pool diluted. By the mid '90s, the trend had significantly flagged and the clubs started to dry up. Recently, Jovan has seen a resurgence in live comedy but suspects we'll never return to the mania of a dozen years ago.
Yet he envisions opportunity for guys like Joe Thomas. Comedy clubs, which subsist to a large degree on regular customers, need fresh faces. Jovan paints a scenario where Thomas could make it into the professional ranks:
He has to continue working open mic nights, but consistently develop new material. As Thomas gains more confidence onstage, he'll get the crowds rocking and build a buzz in the clubs. At that point, he should be able to land a guest shot, about a 10-15 minute unpaid performance. Once he builds a half-hour of good material, he'll be ready to "feature," the comedy equivalent of being an opening act. Feature acts generally work seven shows over five days and make between $500 and $750 a week.
At this point, he has some decisions to make. Does he want to grind it out on the road, the obvious choice? "If you get to the point where you're a feature act, you can pay your bills — late," quips Bobby Jewell, Side Splitters' owner and an occasional stand-up. Thomas says he won't trade in family life for one as an itinerant comic. So does he try to parlay his skills into another medium like TV or film? Does he content himself with occasional feature appearances or perhaps push for a regular job as a club emcee? Perhaps he aims for a gig headlining on cruise ships, a standard move for new pros.
Such questions are premature as Thomas prepares to do his five minutes along with three others at Side Splitters' amateur showcase. It's time to kill 'em, or die, or something in between. The small group of friends and family that has shown up give Thomas plenty of breathing room as he waits in the lobby, smoking Camel Special Lights. They don't coach or cheerlead. Joey looks ready.
Thomas is slated to go on fourth. His three predecessors draw mostly respectful chuckles from the crowd of about 70, sometimes earning an occasional guffaw or knowing laugh. Game as these beginners are, they are not hard acts to follow.
Jovan takes the stage and says in a brassy bellow, "I think this next guy is gonna go far far far far. This is the first taste of it. You'll be witness to it. Give it up for what I think is the very funny … Joe Thomas. Let him hear it!!"
The crowd breaks out in jovial applause as Thomas does a goofy trot to the stage with the theme from Peter Gunn blasting over the P.A. He grabs the mic, waves an arm and hollers in a grave voice: "TERRORISM!" After a pause, he says, bored now, "So, uh, anyway, how you guys doin'?"
He earns a few chuckles and hasn't even told a joke yet. He continues, "What color do you think the alert is this week? Is it orange, red? What if the Fabulous Five, those guys from Queer Eyes, were running the government? They'd be like arguing over the swatches for what color they're gonna do."
Thomas transforms into a stereo typical queen.
"I really like fuchsia."
(Whining) "You always want fuschia, O'Kaaaay? I want purple."
(His voice lowers) "And let me tell you something: Some low-cut camos would really look good with that gas mask, OK?"
The crowd gives up a solid laugh.
"Anyway," he says with a little sigh (ouch), and goes into a set-up for a Pakistani rapper routine. The guy behind the gas station counter is selling everything — fried chicken, crab cakes, gold — as well as his own hip-hop CD. Thomas launches into a funky beatbox groove, and in an ace Indian accent says, "No, slow that shit down, man. I can't rap to that man …"
The audience breaks up. Thomas resumes the beat, slower this time, then raps in the same accent, "Well, I'm Pakistani/ The pot-belly sheik who stuck his beep in your granny/ I don't do it for the money/ No, I do it for the fanny/ Some people say I look like Sadaam/ And I say it's uncanny."
Healthy hoots and hollers accompany a generous dose of laughter.
Thomas moves into his take on West Side Story and finishes with Michael Jackson in the courtroom. It's the weakest piece in his set, little more than a few poses and a bit of singing.
Thomas abruptly raises his arm and says, "Anyway, I'm Joe Thomas." Jovan returns to the stage, gives Thomas a quick hug and says to the crowd, "Kid's gonna be goin' places, trust me."
Typical showbiz jive? Not so, says Jovan.
"He didn't kill, but a couple of his jokes killed," Jovan says later. "He did about as good as you can for a first-timer. If he's not featuring within six months, he's doing something wrong. You can see his stage presence is already there. He just needs to keep writing new stuff. He's got to get rid of the 'anyways.'"
I tell this to Thomas. His response is surprisingly nonchalant, but not in an arrogant way that says, "Hell, I knew that." It's as if he doesn't want to get too excited or too impressed with himself.
"I wanna be better than I was [that night]," Thomas explains. "I'm more focused on my next time. I'm worried about not having enough material. I'm concerned about the product. I'm not gonna be giddy 'til I make it."
Joe Thomas signs up for another Side Splitters amateur night two weeks later — with a bunch of new stuff.
To see Joe Thomas' first amateur set online, go to http://www.stpetemag.com. Footage and upload courtesy of Danny Breckenridge. Senior writer Eric Snider can be reached at 813-248-8888, ext. 114, or at eric.snider@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Apr 7-13, 2004.