Carolla - In fifty years well all be chicks: -- and other complaints from an angry middle-aged white guy

Copyright 2010 by Lotzi, Inc.

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

eISBN: 978-0-307-71739-9

v3.1

This is dedicated to everyone who paid retail for this book.

CONTENTS

GET
IT
ON

For far too long Ive stood idly by and watched a problem in this country get worse and worse. Im talking about the pussification of America. Weve become self-entitled, thin-skinned, hyperallergic, gender-neutral, View- viewing little girls. What we used to settle with common sense or a fist we now settle with hand sanitizer and lawyers.

Masculinity by any definition is disappearing. My fear is that in fifty years well all be chicks. Ive written this in hopes of a course correction. If just one person reads this book and demands a salad with a hard-boiled egg and without goat cheese; if just one person reads this book and decides to change his own oil; if just one person reads this book, slips in a supermarket, and doesnt call an attorney, then Ive done a horrible job and my family is going to starve. I need to sell a shitload of these things.

A LITTLE
BIT ABOUT
THE AUTHOR

I grew up in Los Angeless San Fernando Valley in the seventies. I was a product of separation. I would have been a product of divorce, but divorce involves filling out paperwork and paying a county clerk sixty bucks to file it. And since there were no assets to divide, and no dog to argue over, that just left me and my sister. And the chances of my parents having a custody battle over us are about the same as two vegetarians having a custody battle over a pork chop.

The reason it took so long to write this book is that in an earlier part of my life I was a jock and a builder that lived a very blue-collar existence, not the kind that would inspire a book. I was always funny and had interesting ideas, but between the Los Angeles Unified School District and the un-unified Carolla family, I never heard the words Thats funny, you should write that down. In class my jokes and wisecracks just earned me the label of disruptive, and at home my jokes fell on depressed, distracted ears.

My only salvation was football. I finally found something I was good at. I started playing at age seven. Football for me was an island of camaraderie and discipline in a world of depression and chaos.

My family was a devastating combination of cheap and poor. When youre cheap, poor is a great excuse. Its like if a guy is really lazy and in a wheelchair. He wouldnt have helped you move even if he was able-bodied. I was splitting time between the dilapidated shack that my mom was squatting in (it was her mothers second house, which she bought for ten thousand dollars in 1951) and my dads one-bedroom apartment in a crappier part of North Hollywood. We were on food stamps and welfare. My mother was severely depressed and unable to keep up the house. Thus it was always a source of embarrassment for me. I slept in a converted service porch that was a little smaller than a prison cell and that housed the water heater, the washing machine (no dryer), and the electric meter. We were the only house in the Valley where the meter reader did his job from inside the house. It was very Green Acres . The house was a hundred years old with one bathroom, no air-conditioning, a lawn that was dead, and a roof that was sliding off. The final insult came in 71 when the earthquake took the chimney down into the neighbors yard and never was replaced. The house didnt even have a garage to hide my moms pile-of-shit car.

To compound my embarrassment, I couldnt read or write. As a child of the seventies, I spent first through fourth grade attending an alternative school. It offered a practical alternative to learning. It was pretty much one long ceramics class with a little acoustic guitar and some face painting mixed in. By the time I entered the L.A. Unified School system, even though I was entering the fifth grade, my reading level was at zygote. This was a great source of shame for me. It was a secret I kept like a survivor of incest. Except I was raped by a potters wheel. Happily, my dirty little secret dovetailed nicely with L.A. Unifieds dont ask, dont tell policy. My only salvation was sports and a sense of humor.

By my senior year at North Hollywood High, Id managed to make the All Valley football team and was offered a number of scholarships to midsize colleges.

Why didnt I just take the SATs, fill out the paperwork, and take the free ride to a good university? As I mentioned above, reading and writing was not my strong suit and to be fair to my parents, Im not sure if they knew about the scholarship offers.

Cal Poly Pomona no longer has a football program.

The next five years were a montage of carpet cleaning, crappy apartments, and ditch digging. One night, sometime in my early twenties, I decided to honestly assess myself. I came to the conclusion that I was good with my hands and had a good sense of humor. Since I was working with my hands at the time and miserable, I decided to pursue the latter. I decided Id give myself until my thirtieth birthday to make something happen.

The first time I tried stand-up comedy was at an open-mic night at the Comedy Store. I wont tell you how it went, Ill just tell you the story of what happened a couple hours after my first time onstage. After the show, I went back to my friend Jaynees house, and before we headed out again she said she wanted to check her messages. It was the old-school message machine that would keep recording when somebody picked up. I stood next to her while she checked her messages, and one of them was from her friend Kim. It started with Hey Jaynee, its Kim. How was Adams show? Then I heard Jaynees sister picking up the phone: Jaynees not home yet, but I was at the show. Kim said, How did it go? At that point Jaynee reached for the pause button, but I told her to let it go. And then I heard an honest, long, horrible evaluation of my stand-up potential. Imagine a seasoned hooker describing a roll in the sack with a fourteen-year-old virgin, and you get the idea. I was demoralized. I learned two important lessons that night. Just because all the guys are laughing on the job site doesnt mean you can walk onstage and achieve the same result, and Jaynees sister is a bitch.

You have to understand, this is the mid-eighties: There was no Comedy Central, no FX, no YouTube. The only outlets for comedy were stand-up, Saturday Night Live , and that stupid sitcom with Cousin Balki.

A friend of mines mom suggested I take improv classes at the Groundlings. That came easier to me, and I enjoyed the collaborations. When I was done with the basic class, they said, Youre funny but youre raw. And the only way well let you move up to the next level is if you take an acting class, which I did. I enjoyed doing group improv immensely. It combined the camaraderie I missed from football with comedy, and for the first time I was exposed to smart, funny, articulate, educated people. It was quite a pleasant culture shock going from the poverty, addiction, and illiteracy of the job site. Although it always made for funny conversation with the other idiots I was swinging a hammer with.