Ralphie May: 2/17/72 - 10/6/17 · 11:54pm Oct 6th, 2017
Warning: the following blog post contains language and terms which have been deemed by the vast majority to be offensive. Some of them are vulgar. Others are racial.
I don't talk like this and I don't write like this. But I'm going to do it now, because to voluntarily censor anything on this of all days would be one of the greatest insults I could ever do to a man's legacy.
If you feel you might be offended by anything you could see? Stop reading now.
Last warning.
Too late.
This is who Ralphie May was: he could walk through the most gang-infested part of Compton, find the biggest, baddest man there, the one with the gun handle sticking out of a waistband and fake tears tattooed under his eye (one for every death he'd never be sorry for), then yell out "Hey, nigger!" And live.
No -- it was more than that. Ralphie would shout that shit to the world and he wouldn't just live: he'd thrive. Sure, maybe some of the young idiots might start to make a move because dumbasses wouldn't know who he was just yet. But there would always be someone who did, and it would probably be the biggest, baddest man around who'd stick out an arm in front of the moron who was about to do something stupid. And he'd call Ralphie over, and they'd start talking because you couldn't not talk to Ralphie. That's practically the Twenty-Seventh Amendment right there: everyone talks to Ralphie. And anyone who was offended because Ralphie had said that word in front of them and how dare he would have to listen, because the biggest man was talking to someone bigger than he was. Someone who had more presence than size and once you saw Ralphie, you'd know how special that was. After a while, they'd stop being offended. Then they'd start laughing. Give Ralphie ten minutes with just about anyone and they'd wonder why they'd ever been offended at all, because the word had come out of his mouth and cracker knew just what the fuck it meant. It meant him.
And if it meant him -- and you could see what he was, everyone could see it, everyone could see it every moment of his life -- then he'd just said you were the same as him. You'd just been complimented, dumbass. What were you so pissed about?
Nothing. You were pissed about nothing. And that shit's funny -- so now we're all gonna laugh. Twenty-Eighth Amendment.
This is who Ralphie May was: there's a bunch of all-black comedy tours which go all over the States, sometimes a little beyond. And there's black men and black women and black jokes and this common experience of blackness which just fills the whole place. And at some point during the show, there's Ralphie May.
Some idiot in the audience was gonna look. Open his stupid mouth, probably with something like "Who's the whiteboy fatass?"
And while just about everyone in hearing range cringed and waited to see just what kind of righteous verbal beatdown was gonna land in the event that the man on stage heard that, someone else was gonna say, sure as sunrise, "That's Ralphie May, dumbshit. Now shut the fuck up."
Because that is who Ralphie was. You shut the fuck up and as Fat Albert said, you might even learn something. Maybe you wouldn't know you'd learned something until two days after the show wrapped. Ralphie's words could hit you like lightning at three in the morning.
First thing to know about Ralphie wasn't that a white man had a black soul. He had every soul. Black was just how he wanted to express it most of the time. Black is where he lived.
Christ, did that man live.
Never let anyone tell you nothing good came out of reality television, because that's where we got Ralphie. Not that it's ever quite that simple. Screen wants you to believe it creates: in this case, it just found.
So you take this Southern kid who wants to be a comedian, and one day he wins a little contest, see? He gets to open for Sam Kinison, and maybe you don't know how special that is, to open for the son of a preacher man at the First Church of Screaming. Sam told it like it was, like just about no one else ever saw it. Sam told it true and like just about all of the greats, the truth drove him down to a point where it killed him. Seventeen years old and Ralphie's going on stage first. Sweating bullets? Would have been the nicer fate. You wish it was just bullets when the flop sweat, that perspiration of expiration, is threatening to come around. It's called baptism by fire, and Ralphie lived.
Preacher man, he didn't lay his hands on Ralphie's shoulders, anoint him with the Carlin dictionary and a "You got next." But he saw something. He told Ralphie, go to the cities. Go to the circuit. You've got something and the best way it comes out is to grind it down fine under the stone voices of a thousand hecklers until you've got a wit which can cut.
Ralphie, he went: you don't ignore the preacher man. Wound up in L.A, honing and honing. 'round comes this casting call for a new show, Last Comic Standing. (The first season, the good season, before the executives saw what they had and did everything they could to ruin it.) It was for the ones who hadn't quite made it yet. Five-minute sets for the audition judges. Ralphie walked in with his paperwork and walked out carrying the whole damn room.
He survived every elimination. The hard part for the rest of the house was surviving Ralphie, because they were all living together and God, you put that many comedians together in a small space and something is gonna break. There were jokes and pranks, little things to take the edge off and more to sharpen. He reached the finals, public voted on him, his clean set because it was NBC and they were so scared, so goddamn scared because part of the prize was a development deal and they weren't sure Ralphie was safe for television, not for more than five minutes at a time. Network edited the show to promote someone else, America followed the cuts, and Ralphie came in second. Who came in first? Doesn't matter. That guy was funny. But he wasn't Ralphie. First place had his Vietnamese background and his mom jokes and most of the stuff you've heard before, looked at through those two lenses until you got tired of the view. All Ralphie had was two things: the world and the truth.
Didn't win. I think that was best for him, not winning. It meant there was no control. He didn't have to worry about some self-titled lords and masters sitting in judgment from on high, or at least from atop the stick which was eternally up their ass. He could just go out and be Ralphie, and now that more people knew who Ralphie was, he started doing some major touring. Making that good money. Connecting with the planet, because he had a black soul, a white soul, every soul. You knew when Ralphie was in the room because that's where the life was. He burned the candle from both ends, then got a flame going under the middle because that was just fun.
You looked at Ralphie and you knew the wax was going to run out. You also knew he was getting six times the life out of his candle than anyone else was wringing from their own flame.
He burned pure.
You couldn't miss Ralphie. If his personality didn't let you, then his body guaranteed everyone knew he was there. Five-foot-nine and on a good day, four hundred pounds. He went up, he went down. He tried diets and surgeries and even got desperate enough to give reality TV another shot. He stayed on the right side of mobile, and that was about it. He knew he was fat, and he knew you knew. He made you think about it until you had to stop, and then he was just Ralphie. Some people are meant to take up a lot of room on this Earth: he just made it spiritual and physical. If Ralphie's size was anything, it was redundant.
Know the main thing about Ralphie being that big? It gave him some jokes, it gave him a little hint of that presence, the part you saw coming before the bit you felt, and then it didn't matter any more because you were laughing too hard. Sometimes you were laughing in shock because you were laughing at all. Ralphie, he went to some filthy places looking for his jokes. He was a muckraker. No -- better: he was a tosher. Ralphie went down into humanity's collective sewage and came back with gold. Racial stuff? Man, that shit's funny when you start thinking about how stupid it is. Sexual? Ralphie would tell you all about how a fat man has sex (or doesn't have sex, at least not for a few positions), and tongue training because if your body can't move, your mouth had better do some work. Ralphie on stage was a comedic gymnast: leaping from one concept to another, keeping you spinning on the rings as he vaulted every expectation you had of him and then stuck the fucking landing. Ralphie's weight didn't matter because he didn't throw it around: he had his mind for that and his imagination came in at three battleships, all loaded with nukes.
You didn't mess with Ralphie. He would destroy you, and it would be all the better because you'd be laughing at every blow. I went to one of his concerts: had the privilege because someone got comp tickets and I wanted one, I wanted it so bad that when I got it, I made sure we went out early, arrived early, were in our seats early. Put us six rows from the stage, near the aisle. Let me hear exactly what he said when two women walked in about ten minutes late, pushing and shoving their way through. Was he troubling them? Was there somewhere else they had to be? Just let him know and he could just hold everything up until they were ready. Politeness and consideration were tossed out as grenades, and neither of those bitches survived. At least, the bitchiness didn't. They had to laugh because they'd fucked up and Ralphie had made them see it. Besides, wasn't as if they were the only ones laughing. There were seniors laughing, people whose values had been born in the 1930s with their idea of what shouldn't be said at all stemming from about 0 A.D, and they laughed. Gotta laugh when someone's funny.
Ralphie, he saw truth. He had the filthiest mouth and the cleanest soul, the cleanest every-soul. He was a tosher and that meant he'd spent his life cutting through the bullshit. All he wanted to do was make you laugh until you spotted the core. Take you to that place just outside nirvana, where the universe starts to make just enough sense to make you realize how ridiculous the whole fucking thing is. It's universal. It's the goddamn human condition, and Ralphie had a terminal case. He connected to the core of us. Because there's two great comedians in my life, Christopher Titus and Ralphie May. Titus, he makes you hurt until the laughs come. Ralphie, he made you laugh until you saw where the hurt was.
And both times, the pain went away from a while.
Can't ask more than that.
I saw him once, years ago. I was going to see him again, later this fall. Because it was time. Because it's been a hard year and God, I could use some damn laughs. So I started checking tour schedules, shifting my budget. Titus was coming around and there would be dollars to commit there if they were assembled from pennies off the curb. But there was Ralphie, about to pay a visit. There had to be some money for Ralphie, because you can't ask for more from money than truth.
You say you'll see someone later, and then later does what it always does. It runs out.
Cause of death? Coroner's going to say cardiac incident after fighting pneumonia for too damn long. But I'll give you the straight call: fucker ran out of wax. He knew he was going to run out and he just kept burning anyway, because the fire is how he knew he was alive.
He's survived by an ex-wife and two kids and a whole bunch of immortal concert footage. You can go to YouTube right now and search. You should probably do that right now, because those clips may live forever, but there's a couple of truths added to that: you won't and once that thought kicks in, you're going to need a laugh. Ralphie ain't here and he's still got your back. Because the political stuff and the news commentary, that won't age well, some of it. But the truth? That shit is always going to be funny and we could use some damn funny right now, because the man who saw what truth was isn't here to spot it for us any more. All we can do is work with what he found and hope the glint of light leads us the rest of the way.
Wherever he wound up, it was a big entrance. I'm thinking he just blew his way past the gates before anyone knew what was happening. And he stomped around the clouds, he set up a barbecue and let the good smoke tarnish a few halos, then waited for the Big Boss to show up and find out what the goddamn fuck was going on.
I think I know what he said when that Big Boss came on the scene. Ralphie, he said, "Hey, nigger!" And because Ralphie was the one who said it?
God laughed.
When it's funny, you've gotta laugh...
You've made me deeply regret that I've never seen this man perform. I'll go rectify that. I can think of no better way to pay my respects to him.
I've never heard of this man before and I still feel like the world has lost something precious, from the sheer conviction of the words in front of me I have to conclude that he was intensely precious to a great many people and maybe by tomorrow I'll know if he was precious to me too.
But for now I'll just say goodnight and I hope you're as optimistic as the writer seemed to be. There was certainly a sense of loss but also a sense that he wouldn't let that bother him 'case 'Ralphie' would've said it was stupid.
fuck
I remember reading that back in the 1950s George Burns said that they would be the last stand up comics because of TV. In his words "There's no place left to be lousy". I used to watch The Gong Show. Almost always, a music act would win. That's because you can be an OK musician & get by (just ask Bob Dylan) but a comic is either great or he ain't squat.
As to "congestive heart failure", I recall what The Unknown Comic said (funny, but NOT for the easily offended)
Karen Carpenter died from the effects of an eating disorder. Mama Cass Elliot died of congestive heart failure but folklore said she choked on a ham sandwich. His take on the matter "If Mama Cass Elliot had shared that ham sandwich with Karen Carpenter, they'd both be alive today"
Ralphie May.
The world is a litte smaller without him.
We need more people like that.
That's a hell of a eulogy.
I laughed at him. Or rather his jokes. My Favorite one is when he talked about how he waked and baked when his wife came home...
The world is gonna be a sad, sad place. Just like how Mr. Williams died, this too, is the day that laughter had lost its chuckle...
I remember him on Last Comic Standing, he had this way of laughing along at his own jokes sometimes that was charming and annoying. He kind of reminded me of Ron White, but sober.
something about this made me think of a chapter in a book: "everybody likes Eddie".
um, sorry, that was the chapter title, the book was called "where the money is".
the chapter is about Eddie Dodgson, a.k.a the Yankee Bandit, who robbed over 50 banks before being caught-STILL an all-time record!
the chapter ends with the author of the book-who worked for the FBI-becoming friends with Eddie, because..."everybony likes Eddie".
Fuck yeah, dude. Ralphie May was a fucking legend. Titus is one of my favorite comedians, too.
What a shitty year. I hate that this happened. Nothing good seems to stick around. Thank you for at least capturing what he really felt like. I'm glad at least, we can share in his spirit.
All I can think is to paraphrase a partial poem I heard once:
Here I sit while Dawn is breaking
Even while my heart is aching.
I raise a toast to honest friends,
The best of all comedians.
Damn fine eulogy.
R.I.P. Ralphie...
I want to be as passionate about life as this eulogy is about Ralphie May
Okay, I'm on the other side of the world, and I've never heard of the guy before. But reading this, I felt that I had to check him out. So, thanks to the miracle of YouTube...
When you break it down, all humour is offensive. Look hard enough, and Why did the chicken cross the road will upset someone. The first clip I saw had me nervous...
...right up until they cut to the audience to show how they were reacting. To see the people he was "mocking" (that should really be exaggerated finger air quotes) falling out of their chairs with laughter said so much. I couldn't help but laugh along. I'm glad I was let in on the joke. I'm sorry there won't be more to come.
He seems like a completely decent human being as well. The thread on Reddit seems overwhelmingly positive too.