Bill Gorgo will have better weeks. During this one, the loudest applause he hears will be for someone else, the wildest laughter will come in response to another guy`s jokes and some of the funniest things he says will be in the car or at dinner, not on stage.
Gorgo is no stranger to tough gigs. The Chicago resident has worked shot- and-a-beer joints out West and biker bars down South. Tonight ranks among the toughest-Great Lakes Naval Base in Waukegan. This isn`t funny. This is comedy.
”They like the dirty stuff,” says Cindy Nelson, the 22-year-old special-events director at the base. ”I`m sorry to say it, but that`s their mental level.”
Every 30 seconds, the doors to The Helm Room swing open, and a blast of music spills into the hallway.
”OK, let me go off in a corner for a couple minutes and write some
(raunchy) jokes,” Gorgo says. He slides into the room, buys a Coke and leans against the bar.
Beneath a thick head of black, wiry hair, Gorgo`s face shows the worry of all of his 43 years. He is a fish out of water here, a lakefront liberal in jeans, white sneakers and a brown leather jacket surrounded by 19-year-olds. A poster promoting the series ”Canned Comedy”-paid for with money from recycling the base`s aluminum cans-is stapled to the bulletin board in the hallway. Alongside it is a black-and-white glossy of Gorgo taken a few years back. It looks like his naive younger brother.
The Helm Room is enormous, with the acoustics of a warehouse. There are about 200 people here now, 10 men to each woman, but the place could handle 1,000. Most are sitting near the stage at small cocktail tables with red, Frisbee-sized ashtrays. From there it`s a 15- or 20-yard portage across the linoleum back to the bar.
A mirrored ball hangs over the stage, directly above where Gorgo will stand. A waist-high railing at the front of the stage crudely separates the performer from the audience.
Gorgo paces with clammy hands, sweating what he calls the variables.
”I`m up here dancing on a high wire by myself,” he says, his voice low and scratchy like fine sandpaper. ”You`d think they could get the sound right.”
Nevertheless, every comic lives and dies by whether or not he is funny, and he knows this. ”You can`t blame it on the economy,” he says. ”It`s a very personal job that way.” As both a practical matter and a point of pride, he writes every word he says on stage.
To say how many comics or comedy clubs there are at any given moment would be like trying to count wildflowers in a field. Even after a slight retrenchment following the `80s comedy boom, full-time comedy clubs are more popular than ever, and then there are the countless restaurants and saloons with a propensity for ”comedy night.” In all, it`s a safe bet that Bill Gorgo is one of 10,000 or more men and women staring into his soul this Monday night 20 minutes before showtime, praying for the sound of laughter.
Over the course of a year, a couple hundred of these-the ones you see on talk shows-will play the best clubs. A dozen or so will make hourlong specials for cable. Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal and Eddie Murphy will star in movies. The rest will earn a living in places like this.
Cindy Nelson has hired two comedians for tonight`s show, and because he is the more experienced, it would normally be Gorgo`s prerogative to go on second. But the other comic is a woman, and as he looks out at the sea of men drinking from pitchers of beer, he says, ”I`d have to be a maniac to follow a woman in this room.”
There are scattered boos as Nelson walks on stage. ”Hey, listen!” she says, wagging a finger at the crowd, ”I`m not going to tolerate any of what went on last week. Now, from Chicago, please welcome. . . .” Gorgo drapes his leather jacket over a chair near the stage and walks forward into the white light.
He begins with regional bits, making fun of the places he has been.
”Ever been down South?” he says. ”After a few days in the South, you start to miss things-little things, like English and front teeth.” He has his first laugh, but there are also a few groans from Southerners. The Northerners like a joke about UFOs always landing in places like Arkansas so the extraterrestrials can study inbreeding, and they like his comparison of grits to spackle.
There are a few random ”- – – – you`s!” called out from the crowd, but he dismisses them with deadpan ”thank you`s.” The microphone is loud enough, but the acoustics are so tinny you have to listen closely to hear. The lights are trained on one spot, so he can`t move more than two or three steps in any direction. Meanwhile, people in the back of the room feel no compunction about wandering and talking.
The time passes quickly though, and at 8:58, 30 minutes on the button, he tells a final joke and walks off stage. They give him a nice round of applause.
The woman comic takes the mike, and the crowd screams like wild. She is nervous at the outset but soon tells a couple of jokes with anatomical references, and the sight of a woman gesturing as if possessing male genitalia has them slapping the tables with laughter.
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Gorgo pulls his little Mazda onto the tollway headed south. He lights a cigarette and drives with one hand. He took the stage more than 300 times last year, but he still gets nervous before a show and still carries his performance with him when he leaves. Driving and talking calms him down. The next best thing to doing comedy is talking about it, he says.
Gorgo came to comedy after 10 years as a high school math teacher in Chicago and 10 more running his father`s trucking company here. He is divorced now; his former wife and daughter live in the suburbs. He lives in Lincoln Park with two roommates, both of whom are comedians. One still has a day job. He looks back on everything pre-comedy as ”a former life.”
The trucking company had been his father`s dream-20 trucks, local cartage, hauling hot-water heaters and steel. But shortly after he bought the company, his father developed kidney disease and was on dialysis three days a week. He needed his son to run the place, and Bill dutifully stepped in.
But shortly before his father`s death, the old man told him he knew the trucking business was not Bill`s dream and that when he was gone, Bill ought to pursue his own dream.
”You don`t have to catch it, but you better chase it a little,” his dad had said. ”If you don`t, I`m gonna come back and – – – – with you.` ”
He was 39 years old in October 1986, the first time he stepped on stage. That`s about all he remembers about it. ”The first six months, I had no stage awareness,” he says. ”It was like walking into a blackout.”
For 18 months he worked small clubs and bars, serving as emcee for two or three other comedians, gigs that brought him $25 or $50 a night. He substitute-taught in Chicago public schools to make ends meet.
In the mid-1980s, political satirist Aaron Freeman and another legend among Chicago comics, Jim Wiggins, opened a place on Lincoln Avenue called The Clout Club. Wiggins is nearly 50, and his comedy origins date back 20 years to a time when there were only two places within the city limits that comedians could work-Mister Kelly`s, a famous Rush Street nightclub, and a place on Lincoln called Le Pub. Among the comics Wiggins started out with were Marsha Warfield, Tom Dreesen, Ed Fiala, Larry Reeb and Judy Tenuta.
Though the Clout Club lasted barely a year, it became a salon for comics-”a mental gymnasium,” Wiggins would call it, and Gorgo honed his craft there. Wiggins became his mentor and brought him along to the point where he was ready to go on the road.
Since then, he has had ample opportunity to learn on his own. His strings of engagements sound like bus schedules: Columbia, Manhattan, Topeka; Goshen, Elkhart, Frankfurt; Kalamazoo, Lansing, Flint, Saginaw. Occasionally, established clubs own a condo where the comics stay. Otherwise, it`s a motel out by the highway. ”You basically just hope the office doesn`t smell like
(ethnic food) and that the switchboard doesn`t close at 8,” he says.
In one recent eight-day stretch, Gorgo performed in Indianapolis, Rockford, Mishawaka, Moline and Green Bay. He`ll drive as far as Atlantic City or West Palm Beach for a week-long gig.
In the last 18 months, Gorgo has made the transition from emcee to feature performer, the second act in a three-comic show. For a full week at a good club such as Zanies or The Improv, he could make $800. More frequent are the Thursday through Sunday gigs that bring about $500.
If a feature comic has an off night, he can be bailed out by the headliner, but the star has to be good every night. A headliner`s weekend take could be as much as $1,000; in a good year, including other bookings such as conventions, a headliner could gross $75,000.
”If you want to talk to someone who knows comedy, you should interview Wiggins,” Gorgo says. ”The only problem is, you`d never find him. He`s living out of his car in Vegas. I`ll bet you five bucks you don`t find him.” The city lights come into view, and Gorgo is finally winding down. He has tomorrow off, and Wednesday he has to drive to Peoria, where he`ll appear on a radio program Thursday morning and then play a local club through the weekend. The following morning he calls to provide a phone number for Wiggins`
girlfriend in Las Vegas. ”I couldn`t take your five bucks,” he says.
The voice on the answering machine belongs to Wiggins himself. It sounds like an empty barroom at 3 a.m. Makes Gorgo`s sound like velvet. Wiggins is on the road. Leave a message.
At 8:19 Thursday night, Gorgo takes the stage at the Jukebox Comedy Club in Peoria. This is the club`s grand opening, and the parking lot is packed. The owners have done a great job converting a garage and auto-parts house into a bright, open bar with a dark, intimate comedy room in back.
Gorgo looks the same as he did in Waukegan-jeans, white sneakers and a blue-and-white sweater-but he walks into a room that`s a world away. About 150 people are sitting at crowded tables with vinyl tablecloths and red candles. Waitresses carry drinks, bottles of beer and pizza. The stage is in the corner with a small set built on it. It is well lit, and the sound is terrific. Everyone has paid a $3 cover to get in, the air is filling up with smoke, and the people are ready to laugh.
The room is free of Southerners, so there is only laughter when he does his stuff about the South. He tells a joke he didn`t do at Great Lakes: Rose Kennedy`s tips on living to 100-don`t let Teddy drive. They love it. Tonight is going to work.
Gorgo is bushy-headed, with an expression somewhere between a grimace and a scowl. He isn`t smooth like Dennis Miller or wacky like Robin Williams; at his best, he is a skeptical observer of the world-a descendant of Lenny Bruce or Mort Sahl. It`s exactly what they expect in a Chicago comic.
Gorgo loves to do takeoffs on bizarre true stories, and here he draws on two. First, the story of a Wisconsin woman with 26 personalities: ”The amazing thing is to find a woman in Wisconsin with any personality at all,”
he says.
