Man of Stunts Considers Turn To Literature

Interview with David Deeble

BY ROBERT NELSON & BILL GIDUZ

JW: What does a performer eat on the road?

DD: I eat a million small meals. I like Chinese food, but no sea food and no fast food. Well, I have partaken of fast food on occasion... I eat at coffee shops a lot. Even when I'm home I eat at a coffee shop every day, especially since my daughter, Molly, was born. I used to eat out seven times a week, but now my only indulgence at home is to go to the coffee shop, put down 93 cents for coffee and start reading. They keep bringing me coffee all day. To me that's the ultimate. Molly is 9 months now. She was in California for a while, but now she lives with her mother in Chicago. There's kind of an ambiguous dynamic between us. At least her mother and I are both planning on making Fargo.

JW: Has your life changed in other ways since Molly was born?

DD: I've never hustled so much for work before. I used to take it as it came, but now I'm planning. My dad's a photographer and I've got him taking promo pictures of me, and I'm trying to get all my Los Angeles juggler friends to drop me some names.

Maybe I can also make some money joke writing. Jon Wee recently made me an interesting offer about writing some jokes for the Passing Zone. I write a lot of jokes for team acts that I can't use in my own show and Jon suggested maybe I could make some money by doing this. I don't think the money would amount to much, but it might behoove me to write their jokes in return for some name dropping, since they seem to know a lot of upper-level people in show biz.

JW: SO you've been writing jokes for free up to now?

DD: Yeah, I have. It's funny, Jon and Owen of the Passing Zone did some of my jokes on their second Tonight Show appearance. Not exactly killer jokes, but little lines. They went from a passing pattern straight to Owen in a four-club juggle. It gets a lot of applause and then Jon raises his hands and says, "And let's hear it for Owen as well!" as though the applause were for him. Granted, that's not a real side splitter, but they did use it and I wrote it.

I did sell a joke for the first time a few weeks ago. I was driving a friend of mine, Billy Prudhomme, from LAX to a cruise ship. I hadn't seen him for a long time, and in the hour we spent together we started exchanging stories and jokes. He visited me the next week and said, "Dave, I've got a proposition for you..." I knew then and there that he had boosted one of my jokes and used it on the cruise. He stole it and used it and now was trying to save face by paying me for it. It wasn't one of those things I even used, it was a cover line for a joke that bombs. You say, "Do you get the feeling my mom and dad must own this place?"

Again, it's not a killer line, but he tried it and he said it got a great response. So he of­fered me $50 for it. Being a true businessman I said I wouldn't take a penny over $25 for it, but being a nice guy he gave me $50 for this joke I never used. Now I've got the bug for joke selling.

JW: Tell us about your show.

DD: It's mostly a character thing. I'm acting like I'm some sort of superior genius, when in fact the things I do are just stupid. Steve Martin does it all the time, doing something incredibly stupid and acting proud of it. You do something bizarre and sort of invite people into your own world. There's something attractive about doing something "out there." I'm sort of a loose scientist character, a guy totally caught up and fascinated by his own work.

I have this new thing with a ping pong ball I'm pretty proud of. It takes two seconds but I enjoy performing it. I keep a ping pong ball in the air by blowing on it, which I've always done. But now while it's floating in the air for those few seconds I sneak up on it and snatch it out of the air with a pair of chop sticks!

The longer show I'm doing is a really just a juxtaposition of different three to five minute stunts. - I blow up a balloon and keep a scarf up in the air with it. Then when the scarf with a dust buster vacuum. For a while I was playing "Pop Goes the Weasle" on the tin whistle, and on the "pop" I'd kick a hat to my head. There's the chopstick thing, and there's the marshmallow balance of mystery.

I balance a barbecue skewer on my nose that has a flaming marshmallow stuck in the center of it.  As I balance it I manage to blow it out, and I let the skewer fall and catch the marshmallow in my mouth. I'd like to catch it in my mouth while it's still on fire, but would have to talk to some fire eaters about that.