My Dirty Life in Comedy

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CHAPTER 1

CANADIANS ARE ALWAYS SORRY

How to begin my book? Since I’m not a celebrity, I knew I would have to grab my readers’ attention with something impressive. I was born in Toronto, Canada. Trust me, this is impressive! I’m in good company. Some very famous Americans are Canadian. Jim Carrey, Ryan Reynolds, Howie Mandel, Catherine Ohara, Mike Myers… and the list goes on. Canadians say how much they love Canada but can’t wait to leave. If you wanted a career in show business, you had to head to the US. Good old Canada, it doesn’t get the respect it deserves. Most Americans think of Canada as an extension of the US. Nope, it’s a totally different culture. Canadians say sorry and Americans say fuck off. When I left Canada, I quickly replaced sorry, with fuck off so I would fit in.

Growing up in Canada was a daily test of survival. If you could get through a winter without dying, it was an accomplishment. The key to living in Canada is to embrace the Canadian winters. Enjoy being a Canadian. Take a nice, long walk during a snowstorm, get some frostbite, go to a few hockey games, drink some Canadian beer with a big bag of fries covered in gravy. You need to build a layer of fat if you expect to stay alive. When I was a kid, I had to walk to school no matter how cold it was. We had school buses, but sometimes it was so cold, they wouldn’t start. My mother would dress me in a huge coat, then wrap a couple of scarves around my face so I could barely breathe, stuff my hands into giant gloves, and make me wear two pairs of socks, and enormous boots. The last touch was a TUK! What’s a Tuk? It’s a knit cap. Canadians had to give it a name no one would understand. Every kid looked like a frozen zombie, walking to school in the winter. The only time school was canceled was if a kid froze to death. For me, school was the best place to learn comedy. My English teacher encouraged me to be a comedian. She would yell at me for talking and making jokes in class. Lois. What are you—some kind of comedian? Is there something funny you want to share with the class? She put me on my career path. I was a comedian in the making!

If you are born into a great family, congrats! My sister and brother are the best. And my mother was just fabulous. But my father the worst human imaginable. He was an angry abusive man who hated his family. This is a truncated summary of his psychosis. We wondered why my mother married such a monster. It remains a mystery. My mother, Mary, was smart, funny, and a very talented artist. I was the youngest of three. My older brother, Rex, became a film director. and my sister, Val, an accomplished writer and comedic actress. We used comedy to escape from our miserable childhood. There was always the urge to kill my father, but none of us had the nerve. Plus, we were little kids. My brother had the funniest take on it—he said, We were all too short. I left home when I was fifteen and moved in with another kid, who also had a terrible father. Not sure how we rented an apartment at that age. I guess we had jobs, I have no clue. This time in my life is a blur. Once a week, my mother would bring groceries and beg me to come home. I felt safer living away from home and vowed never to return. I missed my mother, but my father was so dangerous. Some of the funniest people I know come from horrible families. Somehow funny flourishes in the most hideous environment.

When I was 16, I did stand-up for the first time in the basement of a church in Toronto. Mark Breslin (founder of Yuks Yuk’s comedy empire in Canada) set up a comedy stage, so after you confessed your sins, you could sneak downstairs and listen to comedy. It looked more like an AA meeting than a comedy room, not to mention the crucifix hanging behind a small stage in the middle of the room. There were a few folding chairs, a very cheap mic, a stool and a dull spotlight. The priests always came to see our shows. They were our best audience. After every joke, you could hear them say, Oh, good Lord! I read my jokes off a sheet of paper. And for some reason, did my act in bare feet. I guess the crucifix was an inspiration. When I got my first laugh, it was like a drug—I wanted more. I was hooked.

There were no comedy clubs in Toronto at this time. I had to find a real club. I was getting in trouble for saying fuck in the basement of a church. It was time to head to the US. New York City was the place to go to, if you wanted a career in stand-up. You just had to be willing to risk your life. In the late 70s, the city was very dangerous. There was so much crime. Son of Sam was shooting people. Times Square was strewn with strip clubs, pimps and drug addicts. New York was the murder capital, not the nice tourist city it is today with a Starbucks on every corner. But the comedy clubs were amazing. The New York audiences were tough. But if you wanted to be a great comedian, this was the place to develop your comedy chops. The 70s produced some incredible comedians: Gabe Kaplan, Rodney Dangerfield, Rita Rudner and many more. When I told my sister, I was going to New York, she told me to have fun, then added, You will probably be murdered. This was her way of showing her love for her little sister. Val was good friends with Danny Ackroyd before he was on SNL. They were a comedy team in the late 70s doing a lot of local theatre and radio in Ottawa. My mother loved Danny. When he and Val got together it was always dinner and a show. He would sit at the table then roll his eyes back revealing the whites. Then the two of them would do one character after another. Val would do Debbie, a high school cheerleader character, or Bill a macho guy. You never knew who was going to show up for dinner. I was the little sister, so I was teased all the fucking time. But what little sister isn’t! Val and Danny made fun of my forehead. Not that it’s freakish, but I guess they thought it was big. Danny was relentless—Lois, you could turn a truck around on your forehead.

Once when I was sleeping, Val drew a picture of the Empire State building on my forehead. Being the youngest can be lifelong torture. Val and Danny remained friends after he got SNL. So, when I planned my trip to NYC, Val asked him to take care of me. I guess she didn’t want me to get murdered after all. Danny got me a small part on SNL as an extra. I was so excited. This was the first time leaving the comforts of Canada. When I arrived in New York, I was in awe, staring up at the buildings and almost getting hit by taxis. The days before booking.com, you would show up at a hotel and hope it wasn’t a dump. I didn’t have a lot of money, so I stayed at a scary hotel in the Lower East Side. It was rundown, bordering on dangerous. The guy at the front desk kept reminding me that he had a master key to all the rooms. There were two drunk men sleeping in the hallway near my room. And cockroaches everywhere! It was not a five-star hotel.

Danny picked me up at the train. I could hear him yelling my name in the middle of Penn Station. LOIS! LOIS! He took me to The Empire Diner for lunch—one of his favorites. Everyone was rude but the food was great. Then he introduced me to the cast of SNL as Val’s little sister, with the big forehead! I watched a rehearsal, then Lorne Michaels put me in two sketches as an extra. I was nervous as hell. I had one line in a scene with John Belushi. I was a passenger on a bus. He asked if the seat beside me was taken. My mouth was so dry but somehow, I managed to get my line out. Yes, it’s taken. This was my big television debut. After the show, Danny took me to his office and handed me 600 bucks from a trash can under his desk. That was where he kept his cash. I guess he hated banks. He told me to stuff the money in my socks. If someone looks like they’re going to rob you, you just hit them with that giant forehead. Okay, enough of the forehead jokes. I walked around New York by myself for the next two days. I went to a comedy club on the Upper East Side, but lost my nerve to go in. I stood on the street listening to the comedians on the stage. I returned home on the train but couldn’t wait to go back. I told my friends I was an extra on SNL but the show was new. Five years later, they were impressed. It was back to performing in the church until I could return to New York.

It never occurred to me that I would need a visa. I just walked into the US like millions of others. I was an illegal alien for many years. This is the beauty of being young and fearless. I had no clue how hard it was going to be to live in the city. A friend of mine was going to visit her brother, Don, in New York. She asked if I wanted to come along. Of course, I said yes. The three of us were crammed into her small car with no air conditioning in the dead of August. I wasn’t sure I was going to survive a twelve-hour drive with her and the giant girlfriend. I don’t mean fat, I mean tall. She was a roller derby girl with huge arms and legs that filled the back seat. But she was very nice. We drank beer and chain-smoked all the way to New York. Finally, the Manhattan skyline came into view. We took a wrong turn and ended up in the Bronx. Then we got a flat. I really thought we were going to die. Two guys stopped to help us. They looked like they had just escaped from prison. My friend offered them a couple of beers and twenty bucks. One of them raved about how prison turned his life around. I got a degree, learned to mediate, and met the love of my life. Apparently, crime does pay.

Her brother’s loft was in the Bowery—not a great neighborhood in the 70s. Now the neighborhood brownstones were super expensive. We had to park twenty blocks away. Even back then there was no place to park in Manhattan. Walking through the Bowery was just dangerous. If you got lost, you could follow the burning trash cans. A sort of 70s version of GPS. We looked so Canadian, it was a miracle we weren’t robbed. A couple of hookers offered to walk us to Don’s loft. They felt sorry for us. We gave them cigarettes, but they wouldn’t take any money. They gave us some advice: Girls, be careful. There’s a lot of scumbags in New York. Just don’t make eye contact with anyone. After that, I always trusted hookers.

Don’s loft was a fifth–floor walk-up on metal stairs, so every step echoed in the stairwell like thunder. His place was huge and full of rats and roaches. Sounds like a British pub. ‘The Rat & Roach’. Don was an aspiring fashion designer. There was an immense table in the middle of the room with a pile of materials and four sewing machines. To describe him as eccentric would