Remembering Mike MacDonald... by John Wing (part 1)
The first night I ever went to a comedy show, in late May of 1980, I saw Mike MacDonald perform. He was one of four comics to do a set before the headliner. He was tall and wiry in those days (he got tank-solid later on), and he had a very dark presence; dark hair in a thick marine-cut, dark eyebrows, which moved a surprising number of ways, and he rarely if ever smiled for the first few minutes, creating an aura. He would acknowledge the applause with a soft, “Thank you. I have so much to live for. Truthfully, he looked borderline psychotic. But he brought me into his world quickly. He was working out a new bit, about playing Monopoly as an adult. “…and it only took me a few minutes to figure out why I STOPPED playing this game.” Within moments, I was sitting at the table playing monopoly with Mike and his friends, laughing. The other comedians that night were excellent. They were two brilliant craftsmen and an actor who did routines with characters, but none had Mike’s edge, his danger.
A week or two later, I signed up for an amateur night and as I was leaving the office I saw Mike at the sound board, with headphones on. This was Yuk Yuks at Bay & Yorkville. I went over and stood there in front of him until he turned off what he was listening to and talked to me. It took a while, but when we chatted, he was very nice, told me he was listening to a set he’d done the previous night, and related a little bit about his history at Yuk Yuks. Others filled in some gaps for me later on.
He’d walked into the club perhaps eighteen months before, and within a very short period of time, he’d become the guy. There was a comedian who was number one at the time, and now he was number two. I’m not sure he ever recovered, but that’s another tale. Mike had already headlined the room several times when I met him, and he was working out a new hour to headline again three months later. Material poured out of him. He was angry, brooding, full of ideas, and he remembered everything he saw. People always missed that about him; how smart he was. Possibly because he didn’t look smart. He looked like a mean bouncer. And his comedy was primarily physical and situational, rather than cerebral or beautifully phrased. But my God he was so sharp, with a stunning and original perspective on everything. He’d grown up an Air Force brat and lived all over the world before he was fifteen. He’d drummed in bands. He’d taught ballroom dancing at Arthur Murray’s Dance Studio in Ottawa, for Christ’s sake. He was five years older than I was, but it was an enormous gap at the time. A chasm.
If you were unfortunate enough to not have seen Mike perform, I’ll attempt to describe what his act was like when he was in his twenties. It was setup and punchline, some short bits, and some long routines. It sounds normal, but his setup was telling you the joke, and his punchline was showing you the joke physically. He had a body that was flexible in weird ways and he never did a joke without some sort of physical move. You could see the drumming, the dancing, the natural rhythm of the show. He would stand still on the setup, and then explode physically into the punchline. It was full body comedy. To this day, whenever I drive by one of those air-blow-up cylinder men you see as advertising in front of car dealerships, I think of Mike.
And funny? Oh my God. I watched a lot of Mike’s full shows over those years, and thought all the shows were great, there were nights when he was in such a groove that, when it was over, I looked around, and realized, Oh, right. I’m in a comedy club. He could literally make you forget where you were, like a great movie.
Mike always closed his headliner shows with his famous Rock And Roll Fantasy piece. He would tell a story, (and he was really good at telling stories) about being a teenager and wishing he were a Rock Star. And, as he put it, “In MY rock’n’roll fantasy, I would actually dress for the part.” And every aspect of the dressing had its joke. He would put on a jacket-coat with fifty emblems sewn on it, “This was like the rockiest thing I could find in the house. My father used to wear this when he was stationed in Germany. Wow, dad, I can see how mom fell for you.” He would put on huge sunglasses, taking them out of the box they came in, and he would show the box. “It says: EVERYONE’S WEARING ‘EM!” Then he would shade his eyes and search the crowd. Certain that he would see some others, since EVERYONE was wearing them, right? He could even portray sarcasm physically. Then he would take out a tennis racket, the cover of which read MIKE’S FENDER WILSON STRATOCASTER. “Read with me, follow the bouncing finger…” Finally he’d pull out a truly enormous guitar pick and he was ready to rock and roll. The music part was taped and he air-guitar-ed it to the hilt. It was thrilling to watch. A master class on commitment and comedy. He did Hendrix, behind his head. He did Peter Townsend’s windmill, Gene Simmons’ tongue, and Chuck Berry’s duckwalk. And then just as you were getting a little tired of the loud music, he would trip, the tape would sound like someone falling into the speakers, then feedback, and then a man was screaming. It was Mike, of course, imitating his father’s voice on the tape.
“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?” “Just playing a little tennis in my room, Dad.” “TENNIS?? IN THOSE CLOTHES??” “These are kinda like rock-star clothes…” “I THINK YOU’VE GOT ROCKS IN YOUR HEAD!! DID YOU GET A JOB YET??” “I’m supposed to phone this guy tomorrow, looks really good…” “JESUS CHRIST! ALL I KNOW, BOY, IS YOU BETTER GET YOURSELF A JOB AND GET OUT OF HERE! CLEAN UP THIS PIGSTY AND GET DOWNSTAIRS FOR SUPPER! AND PUT AWAY THAT GODDAMN TENNIS RACKET!!” (Door slams) “Someday they’ll pay to see this, old man!” (Door opens) “WHAT WAS THAT???”
I wish I could show you how exceptional a piece of comedy theater it was. It exists on YouTube, I suppose, but one of the things that held Mike back from real stardom was that he didn’t translate very well to the small screen. It was too confining. His aura was muted by it. It softened his danger and made him just another comedian. Onstage he was uncontained, a force of nature, his connection to the audience palpable.
The Mike stories are endless. In Detroit one night a drunken heckler was in the audience and, in Mike’s view, ruined the show. Afterward, the guy came over to Mike, insisting that he had only been helping. He probably made the mistake of touching him, or grabbing him, and Mike beat him up, or so the story goes.
Another night, at Yuk Yuks in Toronto, a guy named Bill was heckling every performer in the show and calling out scores for each comic like an Olympic judge. Mike was only doing a guest set, but he told the emcee to call Bill onstage after he finished. “You know, ask him a question or two. Interview him a little.” The emcee did as Mike requested, and when Bill left the stage, Mike appeared, having snuck into a seat in the front row, with two pieces of cardboard in his hands. He called to the host, stood up, brandishing the cards, and said, “I gave Bill a two point six.” The audience howled.
Mike would go to Amateur Night -- Monday at the Yorkville Yuks -- and watch the hopefuls. Sometimes afterward he would go up to one of them and say, “That bit you do about such-and-such, it’s a really good idea, but you’re not doing it right. I’ll give you a month to figure it out and get it right. If you don’t, I’m taking it.” And it wasn’t as though he was a stealer of ideas. He had millions of his own. It was his way of telling newbies, Get to work. Be SERIOUS about his. Having Mike brace you about a bit you were doing was an initiation rite. He also had a laugh that was truly distinctive, so if he thought something you did was funny, and he laughed, you’d hear it, and know it was Mike laughing. It was a single, sharp sound. You would do a joke he hadn’t heard and liked, and you would hear, from the back of the room, “WAAAK!” It was similar to the sound Burgess Meredith made as the Penguin on the Batman TV series. And hearing it made your heart soar.
I idolized him, of course. I became friends with other comedians; I learned many things from other comedians, but the one person I wanted to hang out with was Mike MacDonald. My second year of comedy, I was hanging out alone in the restaurant of the club one night when Mike walked in. He had a joke to tell, and wanted someone to hear it. He knew me only peripherally at the time; we’d barely spoken since the first encounter at Yuk Yuks, but he was stuck. I was the only person in the room. He came over and said, “Did you hear they let Mark David Chapman out of prison?” (Mark David Chapman assassinated John Lennon in 1980) “Really?” I replied. “Yeah, and he immediately attacked Ringo Starr.” “No,” I said, “That’s not right. He immediately attacked The Lennon Sisters.” Now, I was nothing more than a punk kid, but the proper punchline just appeared to me and I said it before I had time to think about it. Mike looked at me, and I realized he was actually seeing me for the first time. “Yeah,” he said. A week later he invited me to one of his nightly smoke-dope-and-riff-bits session with his crew. Four guys, three of them as funny as anyone you’d want to meet, and Mike, their fearless leader. I went. The first night I tried a line, and was shot down by one of Mike’s boys. “If you don’t have anything funny to say, you’re better off shutting the fuck up,” he said. And I did after that, for the most part. Listening was how you learned, anyway. Then, about a month later, Mike called me over one evening at the club and said, “We’re going back to my place tonight and we’re all going to drop acid. You wanna come?” “Gee, Mike, I would love to, but I have to be at work at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.” Mike smiled his evil genius smile and said, “You’ll be there. We’ll drive you.” I didn’t go. I’d never done acid at that point, and I wasn’t going to do it the first time with a bunch of comedians I didn’t wholly trust.
Over the years, these were the hallmarks of being friends with Mike. When you were with him, he talked, mostly, and you did what he wanted to do. If he wanted to go and play video games until four in the morning, that’s what you did. His personality was so strong and he had great powers of persuasion. Plus, it was clear, You want to be here, this is what we do. One night in the mid eighties, we were both playing Windsor. I was headlining Leo’s Komedy Korner, and I’m not sure what gig Mike was doing. But we were in motels about a half block apart on the outskirts of town. On the Friday night after the gig, he showed up at my door with a video player, two videos, and some excellent marijuana. He had The Warriors (1979), and The Road Warrior, (1981), neither of which I’d seen. We ordered in food, got super high, and watched Road Warrior, then Warriors. In between films, he went into my bathroom and shot up. I didn’t ask him about it, but I knew what a needle kit looked like. He was a little slower when he came out, as relaxed as I would ever see him in those years.
We both moved to Los Angeles around 1987-88. He finally had to learn to drive. We were both trying really hard to get The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, which was then the ultimate prize of standup. Mike claimed to have turned down Saturday Night Live, when they wanted him to cut the Rock’N’Roll Fantasy piece down to six minutes, from the eight or nine it normally took. However, I was never sure if that was true. The bit was always performed at the end of his show, when the audience knew him well and were exhilarated from 45 minutes to an hour of laughing. I was never sure the bit would work even half as well coming on cold. But we were in LA and we were auditioning for everything we could get in the door on. In the fall of 1988, I ran into him at the Improv and told him the Tonight show booker had seen me three times and wanted me for the show, which was true. Of course, he did the same thing to me that SNL did to Mike. He cut a bunch of jokes out of my set and the whole thing fell apart. “Write a new six,” he said, “and call me.” So that delayed things a full year. During that year I was in Toronto with my wife and we saw Mike at Yuks. He was really happy, and dashed over as soon as he saw me. “I got The Tonight Show,” he said. “Just waiting for the date to come through. It’s all set.” “Wow, great. Good for you,” was all I could manage. I was happy for him, sort of, but not really. On the way back to our hotel, I was angry. “He doesn’t get to do the Tonight Show, goddamnit, I do! He gets every fucking gig on earth. This one is mine.” We had passed into a new stage in our relationship. I had missed the transition, because once we’d moved, we simply didn’t see each other. And this was before social media. So I went to L.A., which was a big move. And though we lived in the same city, L.A. wasn’t like Toronto. There wasn’t one comedy club you could walk to where you hung out. There were four or five comedy clubs and you had to drive to them. So we stopped hanging out. But the message of his coming over to tell me was that Mike now saw me as a rival. When I thought about it, I realized it was a huge compliment. He had seen me first as a nobody, then a hang-around guy, then one of the guys, then a colleague, and now, somehow, in his league.
He never got the Tonight Show, and it was possible he was telling me that to intimidate me, since I had become his rival. Just as likely, he got a confirmation he would do it and the date never happened. That occurred in a lot of cases. Appearing on Johnny Carson was really hard. The booker had to be absolutely sure you would kill on the show. Any doubt and it wouldn’t happen. Plus you would get booked sometimes and a guest would run long and you’d be bumped. I first did it more than a year after Mike told me he had it. And that was two and a half years from the first time the booker told me I would do it.
Cover photo by Couvrette Photography
