ROSEBUD BAKER; PROFILE
This is another profile that’s a chapter stolen from my book STANDUPWORLD- ESSAYS ON THE WORLD’S GREATEST ART FORM which you get free when you sign up here for my newsletter.
ROSEBUD – CHAPTER 14
I’m glad I’m a happily married man and like seven hundred years older than Rosebud Baker, because if not I’d probably make such a fool of myself over her if we ever met. She’s so much like the type of woman I used to jump onto the tracks for. Again, that’s if I ever met her because I’ve haven’t and I have no idea what she’s like in person. She just makes me laugh really hard, writes great, dark, jokes, I love the way she thinks, and yes, I’m sorry, this makes me terrible, I know, but she’s beautiful. You’re not supposed to say that anymore. You’re not supposed to see women’s beauty. Especially not women comics. It’s sexist, and even racist, and somehow or another, homophobic.
I DON’T SEE COLOR
Remember; ‘I don’t see color’? It also now; ‘I don’t see ‘hot.’
GUY IN THE LOBBY ASKING A GUY WHAT HE THOUGHT OF THE COMIC’S SHOW;
‘Comedian was great, right?’
‘..Great, yeah, just great..’
‘Kind of hot too, right?’
‘ What? No. I didn’t even know she was female. I swear. I watched the whole show focused on the work. I purposely didn’t assign they/them a gender. It didn’t feel right.’
Well, I’m sorry. When a comic is great looking on this level and truly funny, I’m bringing it up in the opening paragraph. I know, I’m damaged. Someone needs to take me out back and shoot me. She’s also got a mid-seventies TV star vibe like she could have been the last woman that went head to head with Elizabeth Montgomery in auditions only to lose out the role of Samantha in Bewitched. She could have gotten the role of Bill Bixby’s wife in any show he was ever in.
PERSON MORE ADJUSTED THAN I AM READING THIS;
‘I don’t see hypothetical acting scenarios.’
But here’s the thing, Rosebud’s flat-out funny. She’s joke to joke funny. Dynamically clever and, you can feel in her as well a joy in the work and the hours she’s put into it. She’s working the craft in a poised traditional way and giving it her own spin. A dark vibe that you really have to just go with.
ROSEBUD; So, I have one sister who’s a nurse. And, I know I was giving the healthcare heroes shit earlier, but I do want to say this on her behalf. Nobody appreciates nurses as much as they do.
Now, it’s not that what they’re doing isn’t heroic, because it is. It is a heroic thing. They’re heroes. They’ll tell you that too. And they never, ever, shut the fuck up.
Don’t ever ask a nurse how her day went. No, because you’re gonna get a story, and it’s going to ruin yours. I called my sister. Hey, how’s your day? She was like, ‘it was pretty rough.’ Surprise!
I took the bait. I was like, ‘what happened? She goes, ‘I had to pull the plug on my favorite patient.’ ‘Jesus Christ, you’re favorite patient’? ‘What do you do to the ones you don’t like?’
I’ll tell you who Rosebud reminds me of from the time when I was starting in stand-up; Michael Keaton. I know it’s a strange comparison, and some weren’t aware Mike started as a comic but if you watch The Comedy Store doc, he did, and we go into it.
He also had a similar instantly likable stage presence. He had good looks and a sense of intelligence that rather than turning the crowd cold to him, made them comfortable with wherever he wanted to take them.
Also, I don’t know if I read this or someone told me this, but I think Rosebud started as an actress and has a lot of acting chops much like Keaton did, which makes a lot of sense. She’ll probably end up doing a lot of film and T.V. work and you never know if she sticks with stand-up. If it’s only a vehicle to get her into acting and she’ll move on as others have, or she’ll stick with it which can be really tough with the demands of a successful acting career. I know Rosebud claims that she’ll always keep doing stand-up, has compared it to “spending 12 years in medical school just to become a witch doctor”. Which is a good line, but life can sometimes be a sharp stick in your front spokes going downhill.
(*After a short break from the weight of writing too many analo- gies in a row…)
HER GRANDPA
The other reason Rosebud and Keaton kind of remind me of each other, and this may just be me being stupid, which is, as have I said, is a common occurrence, is the fact that her grandfather was James L. Baker the former Secretary of State for Bush sr. and a major inside Washington player for just about everybody. Michael’s father I think, I heard somewhere was also a pretty big deal in the CIA. (Either that or he owned Wayne Enterprises and was gunned down in an alley. It was one or the other. You see how they muddy up the truth, these people?)
The thing with Rosebud’s grandfather being James Baker is true though. For sure.
If you’ve ever seen her in a men’s three-piece suit and a tie and her hair cut really short and wavy, greased and slicked back, and she was leaning against a window that looked like something in the Oval Office you’d go, ‘Damn. She is his granddaughter. Damn, that’s spooky, the resemblance.’
If you want to get into her stand-up though, watch ‘Whiskey Fists’. It’s a Comedy Central special, that I love. She has a lot of other good stuff up on Youtube and around but start with that special. It’s well done, well shot, lit, directed and the material is excellent.
WHISKEY FISTS
ROSEBUD; So I recently went through a breakup. I’m killing it. Battling a 1,000. It’s my year. So let’s see, my cat died, my dog died, my boyfriend left, and oh, I started fucking a DJ which is somehow worse than all three of those things.
Like, I’m about to make a lot of mistakes. Forget about fucking a guy with a neck tattoo. I’m about to get one.
It’s fun though. It’s fun to be crazy. I’m being such a whore. It’s fantastic.
Truly, I’m so empty. If a man came inside of me right now, he could hear the echo.
I’ve been through too much. Like, I’ve just gotten to that point in my life where it’s like yeah, I’m not gonna, I don’t know. I’m not going to pretend to gag on your dick. It’s not like I haven’t been, swallowing bigger disappointments since the day I was born. I’m 33. I’ve outlived, Jesus. I’m not going to eat your ass. ..Unless it tastes like a book deal. We can maybe work that out because that’s on my vision board.
But this is why I want to get married.
I was desperate to get married. Oh my God, to my last boyfriend? So bad. It was like, I didn’t want to meet a new person. I didn’t ever want to date again, you know?
I just was jerking him off all the time. Like I was banging on a vending machine. It was aggressive. That’s probably why I’m not married. To be honest I probably should have just blown him more. At least that’s what my grandma said. She’s a huge whore, my Grandma.
Just kidding. She’s dead.
Check out here website. See her on tour.
Rosebud Instagram
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BUMPING MICS
I know we talk up a lot of acts and specials here. A lot of that is because if we don’t think someone’s great we don’t write about them. I don’t bring up mediocrity here. My mission for this blog is to highlight, spotlight, praise and raise up great stand-up comedy of yesterday, today and maybe even tomorrow. That being said, my personal favorite stand-up comedy act right now, my number one best thing to make me laugh hard and be happy is Bumping Mics.
BUMPING MICS
Jeff Ross and Dave Attell are both amazing right now on their own. They’ve each matured in pretty amazing ways and have become a pair of quite unique legends in this business. So much in fact that I don’t know how many dates they have going forward as Bumping Mics but I do have to say there is a magical symbiotic combination that is formed between the two of them that is so much different than the parts, that I just adore.
COMEDY TEAMS
Years ago there were so many comedy teams. Back in the Vaudeville days so many, of course in the movies, Laurel and Hardy and then in TV Abbott and Costello, then the Martin and Lewis Days, and the Smothers Brothers days, when I was a kid my favorite record was TIM and TOM, Tim Reid and Tom Dressen’s album and Cheech and Chong of course. When I got started at the store Roger and Roger and Samuels and Cohen and Rick and Ruby were hot. The Mooney Twins were around for awhile, but sadly none of them really stuck it out and made a major mark. The Sklar brothers are on the scene now and are doing really well and are damn funny I might add, so we’ll see how they do.
A JAZZ ELEMENT
Bumping Mics is in a class of it’s own though. Bumping Mics came together more or less as an idea of Jeff Ross’s. Just a notion he had to have a good time with his best bud. Anyone that is lucky enough to know Jeff knows how much his friends mean to him and he is crazy about Dave Attell. I believe that’s half of what makes Bumping Mic so great. (I actually think there’s a great movie with these two guys walking / traveling around insulting themselves and everyone else they see. Almost a throwback to an old W.C. Fields film) I also get a jazz vibe to the show. They don’t plan much. They just let it take it’s own course and cadence. Free float. It’s gut funny and raucous and you so much feel the connection there.
Last year my family had a loss and I was in a bad place and after the funeral and a lot of tough travel I just needed to laugh. I love to laugh. I flew with Jeff to a Bumping Mic gig in Chicago at a beautiful theatre out in the suburbs because I knew I was going to laugh my ass off. I really did too. It changed my whole energy.
If you ever get a chance to see these guys live do it.
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MR. LENO!
So much to say about Jay. I’ve known him so many years. I think so much of him on so many levels. When I came to Los Angeles in 1977 Jay was the top level of the new comics. I think he had done a couple shots on Merv Griffin. He was great though. He took me under his wing. He was so damn good to me. I hung out with him every night and every day for years and years. He called my folks when I was just settling in at 18 years old and helped them not worry about me out here, and a couple years later when I was sick late one night with what we found out was an ulcer he took me to the hospital in the late hours and stayed with me until five o’clock that day.
A SPECIAL GUY
His parents raised Jay right, I’ve always said that. Is he driven? Yes, did he rub some of the comics the wrong way on the way up the talk show game in a super competitive arena? Maybe, but he was someone that paid his dues and wanted his seat at the table and was willing to fight for it and deserve it, and when others wanted him to lay down and play dead he didn’t always want to do that. Too bad. A lot of these guys don’t always know the real stories, or they forget them. I was there though. I remember a lot things other seem to forget.
EBONY GENIUS
When a group of the class a few years ahead of me at the Comedy Store were just taking on wind, Jimmy Walker was starring in Good Times, and he was the ‘guy’. He was the Joe Rogan of his day. The center of the pack. He hired David Letterman and Jay, and a lot of others, and even Byron Allen to write jokes for him, and before long Jimmy’s managers, a married couple, Jerry and Helen Kushnick, started a company with Jimmy called ‘Ebony Genius’. Jay was their second or so client and I think David Letterman was signed up pretty soon after.
A couple years later as Dave started to show his promise, Rollins, Joffee, Morra, and Brezner, who handled Woody Allen, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams and others wanted to take Dave on and Dave very much wanted to go with them under the guidance of Buddy Morra, a top manager there. He went to the Kushners and JImmy Walker and asked to be let out of his contract which he had he worked under for quite some time by then. A contract that was more than a little onerous and something that only a very, very, green artists would agree to. The managers held firm and wouldn’t let Dave out unless he agreed to pay them a large part of all of his future earnings. Jay got into it with the Kushners who went on to become his managers until they each passed away years later and Jimmy and, finally got them all to release Dave from his contract. (Dave may have had to settle with them somehow monetarily. I don’t remember,) I do remember that Jay came down hard on them all in Dave’s defense. I was there at this house once and heard his side of the phone call in fact.
Years later I brought it up to Dave who claimed he had no memory of it, which I believe. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing he had a large hand in either way. He was arms length on a lot of that type of thing, but it was typical of Jay. He was always looking out for his friends. In fact the biggest falling out he and I had, and it was a big one, was the Comedy Store strike. I let him down. It was a mistake. I sided with Mitzi Shore after a long time on the sidelines when I felt it was just a bloodletting and a lot of comics, not Jay, and not Letterman or Tom Dreesen or Elayne Boosler, but acts that never got spots from her just wanted to destroy her and her business and I didn’t want any part of that.
The loss of my friendship with Jay for a long time was one of the hardest hits I ever took in comedy. Over the years we’ve become friends again and he had me back on his show when he was the host of The Tonight Show and I loved being on it with him talking about and hawking my movies. He always asked about my dad who had become friends with years earlier when he would play Detroit. My dad was also a car guy and he would lend Jay an old car he had restored to drive around for his shows in Detroit. You got to feel pretty comfortable lending a nice car to Jay Leno.
He was always so good with cars. I remember driving around LA in his old cars with him. Back when he only had three or so. Which by the way. Who had three or so cars? All of his cars were Mr. Mister Buick, Mr. Mercedes. Mr. Chevrolet, whatever.
TAKEN SOME HITS
He’s taken some hits lately but the way he’s gone through them are so ‘Leno.’ No complaining. No whining. Not even a lot of pain pills. Just shucking it off. Skin graffs? Broken bones? ‘Yeah, other people have it worse. I got some shit to do. I’m gonna get back to work.’ It would be a character in a sci-fi film if it wasn’t a real guy. But he’s just Jay. He’s Leno through and through. Just a well written character. Still doing his act, still tinkering with his car, married to Mavis, hasn’t changed one bit, still has the same phone number from four hundred years ago.
CRAZY LENO-ISM’S
Any comic that knows Jay knows he’s set in his ways with his theories, traditions, and beliefs on stand-up. Most of the time he’s right. He always told me a few things I never listened to him about and he was dead right on. He would harp on me not to let go of my act. ‘Never give up your act, Binder. Keep doing your act no matter what.’ He was spot on. Also he was hard on me. ‘Work on the jokes. Work on your act. You get up there and fuck around, talk to the audience, do stupid shit with the curtain. Work on an act. Work on it.’ And I didn’t. That’s why I let it go. It didn’t grow. It didn’t get better. It was just okay. I wasn’t proud of it. It wasn’t getting great. He was right about so much. I’m doing it again, and I’m working my ass off on it, doing exactly what he used to harp on me about years ago, and now I understand exactly what he was saying. It all seems so clear now.
He was such a good friend. He still is. There still is so much to learn from a guy like a Jay Leno. He’s loyal. He’s real. He doesn’t turn on his friends. People in this business turn on you so quick. Guys like Jay are rare.
Like I say, his parents raised him right.
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