THE GODFATHER
When I went back to San Diego to finish my shameful fifth year of college, I went to every comedy club in San Diego in hopes for some stage time, and everyone told me: “If you want to do stand-up in San Diego, you need to talk to Sean Kelly.” Who is this mysterious Sean Kelly character? Is he a comedy club owner? Is he Dave Chappelle’s cousin? Everyone seemed to know him, but nobody wanted to tell me where to find him. I needed to hunt him down if I wanted to be part of the San Diego comedy scene.
I went home and did some research on Sean Kelly. Through a Google search, I found that Sean was the owner of a public-speaker agency where you could hire anyone from Bill Clinton to Scottie Pippen. I was enamored by all the celebrities I saw on that website. At that point, the only celebrity I knew was Kevin Sorbo. Then I saw Sean was performing at the Comedy Palace in San Diego that weekend, so I went down there and stalked down this mystery man.
I told the doorman at the Comedy Palace I was a comedian, and he let me right in free of charge. That’s the secret to any comedy club; just say you’re a comedian and they’ll let you right in. And if you say you’re “industry,” meaning an agent or manager, the doorman might actually pay you to come in. Everyone in a comedy club wants to get signed. It’s the training ground for desperate artists.
I finally got my first glimpse of Sean when the host introduced him. He was an unassuming middle-aged bald white guy who definitely wasn’t Dave Chappelle’s cousin. But he was funny as hell. I waited for him backstage like an excited fangirl at a Justin Bieber concert. Finally, he walked past me and I saw my chance to introduce myself.
“Hi, Sean. I saw you owned a public-speaker agency. How does that work?”
And just like a mob boss, Sean said, “Take a seat.” My research paid off. He started dropping some serious knowledge on me. He told me:
“The speaker agency is a side thing I started. You can make money doing stand-up, but you can make a lot of money being a public speaker. We should all do both. Comedians don’t think about that. We are already great public speakers.”
Sean was a master businessman. I learned that the Comedy Palace was a Greek restaurant during the day called the Greek Palace. Business was slow at the Greek Palace, so Sean convinced its owner to let him run a comedy show there at night. Eventually, that turned into a full-fledged comedy club with its own staff. Sean told me, “Instead of begging for stage time at other comedy clubs, I started my own comedy club.”
When other comics were talking about jerking off, Sean was talking about business plans. Whenever Sean talked, he captured your full, undivided attention. Some people can sell ice to an Eskimo; Sean can sell a Home Depot utility belt to Batman. And his ultimate gift was helping others discover their story.
“Where are you from?” Sean asked me.
“I went to high school in LA, but I was born in Hong Kong.”
“How old were you when you came to LA?”
“I was thirteen. I couldn’t really speak English yet, so I learned how to speak English by watching BET,” I jokingly told him the truth.
Sean didn’t laugh, but he took it all in. “That’s what you need to talk about in your stand-up. You have a great story and you have a different point of view. Talk about that in your set. Then once you have all your stories written down, you can even write a book.”
And here I am, writing that book. I’d never met anyone who had such a high-caliber creative motor within a clever business mind. I hung on to everything Sean said. He became my mentor and my comedy godfather.
Along with his many talents, Sean was also a licensed auctioneer. He did charity auctions, police impound auctions and storage unit auctions. He’d later use his skills to pitch the reality show Storage Hunters, where he played the auctioneer. To many in the US, Storage Hunters might be the lesser-known version of Storage Wars, but Storage Hunters eventually became one of the biggest reality shows in the UK.
Sean and his wife, Lori, would eventually move to the UK where strangers stopped him every two steps to take a selfie. Not only was he selling out shows as a comedian, he had made himself a celebrity in the UK. We’ve become family over the years. Lori once asked Sean, “Can we just adopt Jimmy?” And Sean said, “I’m pretty sure Jimmy has real parents. And he’s way past his prime adoption age.”
FIRST JOB IN SHOW BIZ
The Comedy Palace became my new hangout. It became my fraternity that I never had at UCSD. We had a hundred new people coming to watch our sets and we drank on the house every night. We even had a waitress that used to work as a stripper at Cheetahs. I mean what more can you ask for in a fraternity?
I was hanging out at the Comedy Palace so much, they eventually hired me as the doorman. I seated the audience members in exchange for ten minutes of stage time and two hours of minimum wage. It was always a challenge to seat the audience and then try to be a comedian onstage. Everyone in the audience was asking themselves, Hey, isn’t that the kid who just sat us? I guess they just let anybody do stand-up here. I took on the challenge. It was so much sweeter when I made them laugh after they thought I was just a doorman. I got paid fifteen dollars a night as the doorman, but I got paid nothing for my sets as a comedian. I was just happy to get some legitimate stage time that wasn’t an open mic.
One of my favorite comedians at the Palace was Tarrell Wright. Tarrell was a hilarious black dude from Detroit. His brother Kool-Aid was a famous urban comedian that used to be on BET Comicview . Needless to say, I looked up to him. Tarrell was so funny that nobody really wanted to follow him onstage, so he always went up last at the Comedy Palace shows. He was just as funny offstage as he was onstage. He’d always give me old-school player dating advice that his dad had passed on to him. “If you fuck her mind, you fuck her all the time.” I didn’t even know what that really meant, but it sounded cool as hell.
Then there was Guam Felix, who’s literally from the US territory of Guam. Imagine if my name was Hong Kong Jim; that would actually sound way more gangster than Lowball Jim. Guam was a forty-year-old veteran comedian who was a former strip club DJ. His goal in life was winning the lottery. He’d preface everything with:
“When I win the lottery…” But he didn’t even have ambitious goals for if he did win the lottery. He’d always tell me:
“When I win the lottery, dog, we are all going to HomeTown Buffet.”
“Guam, you don’t have to win a fifty-million-dollar lottery to go to the HomeTown Buffet, it’s eleven ninety-nine.”
“Yeah, but we can go there every day!”
Tarrell once said, “Guam is the ghettoest motherfucker I’ve ever known.” That speaks volumes coming from a guy who grew up in the hood, in Detroit.
All of the comedians helped out in the club. Every week, we folded envelopes with promotional mailers in the back room of the Comedy Palace. I never minded the extra work; I got to hang out with some of the most hilarious people in the city. We were late on sending the promotional mailers one week and all the comedians stayed up to pull an all-nighter in the back of the Palace. Tarrell, Guam and I along with five other comedians were tediously folding envelopes like a bunch of Chinese sweatshop workers. It was four in the morning and we were trying our best to keep each other awake. Guam asked Tarrell:
“Hey, T, how many girls have you slept with?”
Tarrell tried to do some math in his head but quickly gave up. “Phew, I don’t even know.” Either he had amnesia or it was so many he simply lost count. I couldn’t imagine a day where I would lose count of the women I’d slept with. At that time, I could count on one hand; honestly, I could have counted with one finger. Guam continued:
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