You know, God closes a door and then he opens a window
and my window happened to be a giant,
ethnically ambiguous punk rock chick with big titties.
Looking like if The Rock was a Suicide Girl.
[dark electronic music]
♪ ♪
- Welcome to "This Is Not Happening."
[moaning]
I'm your host, Roy Wood Jr.
Ooh, nice teeth.
[roaring]
You boys have a good time.
[whip snaps]
Oh-hoh.
Ladies.
[muffled] Tonight's episode is all about romance.
[cheers and applause]
This gentleman has a brand-new stand up album
titled, "If These Balls Could Talk."
Please give it up for my friend Louis Katz.
[cheers and applause]
- So I've always been a very romantic guy.
And then at some point, something took a turn in me
and I became very cynical.
It's hard to pinpoint exactly when that happened,
but if I had to take a wild guess, I'd say it could be,
uh, July 2, 2006, at 8:53 in the morning.
That was when my six-year relationship that was supposed
to end in marriage instead ended when I found out
for the last two of those six years,
she was fucking another dude.
[crowd oohs]
Yeah. It's weird figuring out
that someone you're with is cheating on you.
It's kinda like solving a murder mystery.
Except you're the victim.
I should have seen it coming. All the signs were there.
You know, she was distant, she wasn't returning my phone
calls as quickly as she used to,
her pussy tasted like dick.
[laughter]
My friends were trying to cheer me up.
They'd be like, oh, don't worry,
at least you'll get some good material out of it.
All I got was that pussy tastes like dick joke.
Not worth it.
I was super depressed.
I couldn't stop thinking about it.
I even invented my own sex move as a way to try
and get back at her, kinda like the Donkey Punch
or the Dirty Sanchez.
I invented my own move. I called it the Vengeful Louie.
And here's how it works.
You find out a girl's cheating on you,
but you act like everything's cool, right?
Then you go in for the make-up sex, right?
And then right before you're about to come,
you pull out, then you start crying,
she leaves, and you never trust anyone ever again.
[laughter]
The Vengeful Louie.
No, being cheated on, it really fucked me up, man.
I was completely broken.
And I thought the only way I'd ever get better
would be if I fell in love again.
And I didn't think that was possible.
I was in that mindset still a year later
doing a gig in Portland, Oregon.
And after the show, I'm looking for a place to eat.
I finally find one place that's open,
but sitting out front blocking the door are two gutter punks.
All right--one person knows.
Gutter punks, of course, they're like, you know,
the young, rock and roll homeless.
Always got all the patches on their clothes, and the tats,
and the piercings, looking like a band that went
camping and then got super lost.
Always got a dog that's somehow cleaner than all of them.
And as I get close to the door,
I'm about to walk in, instead of asking me for change,
they get up, follow me into the restaurant.
Turns out, they weren't homeless;
they were the wait staff.
Yeah, it can be hard to tell in Portland,
where everyone's dressed like they're in
some stage of camping.
So I go inside and I notice that the one that's
helping me out, she's actually kinda cute.
I'm thinking, oh, I've gotta say something cool
to impress this fine-ass gutter server.
So I'm like, you know, I'm just travelling through town,
you know, I'm a stand-up comedian.
I tour all over the place.
She's like, oh, that's really cool,
I love to travel too.
I actually used to hop on trains.
I went, that's so funny, because when I first saw you
I thought you were homeless.
Classic pickup line.
Believe it or not, it worked.
I got her number, and I started talking
on the phone regularly with the most uniquely beautiful
woman I've ever met in my life.
You've never seen anyone like her.
I mean, she was nearly six feet tall, part black, part white,
part Native American, part Hawaiian.
So you see her, and you're like oh, she must be the first
of a new master race of Amazonian super women.
Or like the world's largest Filipino.
Plus, she had all that gutter punk style.
You know, with the tats and the piercings.
And she had purple hair and it was shaved on the side
I'm just like, oh, this is perfect, you know.
I could totally picture her defending my honor
as we roam through a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
It was amazing. It was as if
the universe was making up for me being cheated on
by bringing me my dream girl.
You know, God closes a door and then he opens a window
and my window happened to be a giant,
ethnically ambiguous punk rock chick with big titties.
[applause]
Looking like if The Rock was a Suicide Girl.
So we're talking on the phone, it's that early stage
of the relationship, we're just getting to know each
other and it's like every new thing I'm learning about
her is just making me more and more into her, you know.
I found out she used to do heroin, so that's interesting.
She was starting to strip. Like, cool,
we both work in night clubs.
She stabbed a skinhead-- living the dream!
She had a baby. She's totally down to fuck, awesome!
But between the baby and the possible manslaughter charge,
I'm thinking I should not see her anymore.
So I fly out to Portland to see her some more.
[scattered applause]
We meet up, she shows up, she's already pretty drunk,
proceeds to get drunker.
We end up sleeping together but we don't have sex,
'cause like I said she's very drunk,
and also remember, she's almost six feet tall.
It's very awkward trying to have sex with someone
that much bigger than you.
Less of a doggy style, more of a jockey style.
You know?
[laughter]
So we wake up in the morning,
she's like, hey, can you get me a beer?
I'm like, okay. I get her a beer
and she chugs the beer.
She's like, could you get me another beer?
I'm like, all right. Get her another beer.
She chugs the beer. Apparently she was playing some
kind of one-woman drinking game.
Called alcoholism.
But after chugging only two beers, she was pretty sober--
relatively, for her.
And we're having a great time.
You know, we're just fooling around,
making each other laugh.
She was super funny. She always called me
the one of two things.
She either called me toots,
like some kind of Waffle House waitress named Trixie.
Or woman.
That's a funny thing to call a dude.
And we're sitting there messing around in bed,
and I'm just kissing her all over,
and I keep kissing her, I'm not even thinking that
I'm doing it, but I keep kissing her here and here.
And at one point she just kinda nonchalantly just stops me,
she goes, hey, why are you doing that?
And I didn't even realize it until she said it,
but I was kissing her on these scars
she had from where she tried to kill herself.
[crowd exclaims]
I was super embarrassed at the time, you know?
I just revealed so much about both of us.
We were naked but all the sudden,
it got way more intimate than either of us
wanted it to be, you know?
I mean, there's so many weird things I could've
been doing in bed with her
that would've been so much easier
to explain why I was doing.
Like if I was just perched on the edge of the bed,
just flicking my nut sack.
Staring at her. She'd be like,
why are you doing that?
Well, let me take you to the
scrotum flicker's subreddit.
There's a whole bunch of us. We're a community.
But I didn't know how to explain
why I was kissing her suicide scars
like some kinda living Morrissey lyric.
[cheers and applause]
I guess I could've tried to explain myself.
Like, I don't know, you got daddy issues,
I'm kissing your boo boos.
I've got a savior complex,
you've got wounds on your wrists.
I mean, isn't it obvious?
This is just my way of asking you
will you go codependent with me?
She leaves, and I have this horrible feeling in my stomach.
And I realize I have fallen in love again.
And I knew it was gonna end badly,
but to me that was the best part.
You know, shit wasn't gonna go down like it did
with the last girl, you know?
My ex had stabbed me in the back;
this girl would never do that.
She'd stab me right in the face.
And yeah, I knew it was gonna hurt.
But after being cheated on,
that's what I thought love was like.
It hurt. You know, it wasn't all bells ringing
And birds chirping.
No, that was a fantasy.
That kind of love was one of those things
that only happens in the movies.
And like wacky food fights.
And double penetration.
No, this is how real love felt.
You know what I mean? It was scary
it was painful and it was gonna
tear me up from the inside.
Like double penetration.
So we--
We keep having this long-distance relationship.
Seeing each other on and off again,
over the course of the year.
I would always love talking to her,
because whenever I had a bad day,
she would always cheer me up.
Like, I remember this one day I was really struggling
with this new queef joke I was working on.
So I call her up, I'm like, I really gotta talk to you.
She's like, I really gotta talk to you too.
I got evicted from my apartment,
they fired me from my job, and they took away my baby.
I can't even begin to imagine
bringing up the queef joke now.
That's a lot of problems for one person to deal with,
but I'm like, this is not a problem for me.
I can solve this, I can save you,
here's what we're gonna do.
I'm gonna buy you a ticket from Portland down to L.A.,
you can come stay with me while we put you in a rehab,
and I did it right there and then.
Bought the ticket, she flew down the next day.
Huge mistake.
'Cause it wasn't true.
She couldn't live with me,
because I live with my parents.
Yeah, kind of an unspoken rule at my folks' place.
Don't bring home any alcoholic stripper hobos
if they're not Jewish.
[applause]
So now we're holed up in a seedy motel
less than a mile from my parents' nice house.
I'm constantly paranoid
my mom's gonna drive by and see us.
I'm sneaking her food from their kitchen, "E.T." style.
Or "Stranger Things" style, if you're closer to her age.
And finally, after about a week,
I find a rehab that has room for her.
We put her in, and she starts following
the program and getting better.
It just felt so great, you know?
It's like, wow, it's like a good deed that I can fuck.
And time passes, I'm not really hearing from her.
It sounds like she's following the program and sobering up
And I'm thinking, wow, you know, this is amazing.
You know, we're not together, but this is
the happy ending I was looking for.
Then I get a call from her.
She ran away from the rehab
with a street poet named Trashcan.
Now she's living on the streets
and she's back on heroin.
Yeah, that's the thing with this girl, you know how
addicts have to hit rock bottom before they can quit something?
She would hit a rock bottom,
and then drill through that rock bottom
to find a new deeper, shittier rock bottom
like some kind of life fracker.
So now I'm getting random calls from her while she's homeless.
At one point, Trashcan calls me--
very charming guy, I get it.
And I get one last call from her.
She calls me up. She says, Trashcan is dead.
I don't know what to do. You gotta help me.
I go, shit, how'd he die?
She said, he said he would kill himself if I left him.
And I did, and he did.
God damn, Trashcan is a man of his word.
I mean, that's the real romantic, right there.
How am I supposed to compete with that?
There isn't enough chocolate-covered pineapple
in the world for that Edible Arrangement.
I'm like, look, I don't know what you want from me,
I already flew you down
from Portland to Los Angeles,
I struggled and fought to get you into rehab,
I put you in the rehab, and still you manage
to fuck it all up.
So why don't you stop calling me, lose my number.
And I hang up on her.
So I'm driving to pick her up.
Decide I'm gonna drive her to the Greyhound station
over in Hollywood, get her a ticket back to Portland.
She can go be a homeless junkie
where she knows the bus schedule.
And we get to the station, but instead of
walking in to buy the ticket with me,
she decides she's gonna lie down on the ground
in the middle of the parking lot,
started screaming, crying, and throwing a fit.
Luckily it is a Greyhound parking lot,
so that kinda thing happens, like, every hour, on the hour.
I'm standing there trying to reason with this clearly
unreasonable person, and as I'm talking to her,
three older well-dressed white ladies start coming at me,
looking like Nick-at-Nite moms coming from a bake sale.
I was scared of my mom catching me,
now I got three moms and they're coming at us fast.
And they're asking questions in a typical mom fashion.
You know what I mean?
Like, concerned, but also
a dash of disapproval on top of there.
First I get kinda defensive,
like, look, can't a man attempt to abandon a young girl
in a Greyhound parking lot without being judged?
But they did seem like they actually wanted to help.
You know, they were checking her vitals,
and making sure
she stays conscious and stuff like that.
So I'm thinking, like, oh, maybe they're nurses.
And one of them pulls me aside and goes like,
this is really serious, we've gotta get her
out of here quick, because if we don't,
the psychiatrists are gonna come
and they're gonna pump her full of drugs.
Yeah, I was just worried
about getting her on the bus,
I didn't know we had to look out
for psychiatrist street gangs.
Whose turf is this? The Freudian Crypts?
Or the Young Jungians?
Finally I put it together in my head:
irrational fear of psychiatry, we're in Hollywood,
they're not nurses; they're Scientologists.
[crowd groans, laughs]
They didn't come from a bake sale.
They came from praying to Xenu the Galactic Overlord.
All praises due upon him, no disrespect.
[scattered applause]
Still trying to make it in show business.
Then I'm thinking, like, I don't know.
Maybe Scientology would be a good option for her.
If she ever quits heroin, she'll need
an equally time-consuming hobby.
Maybe Tom Cruise will come through and save the day.
That's right. The originator of jockey style.
And then at one point, even these nice ladies are like,
We don't know what else we can do for her.
They're like, we're gonna call 911.
I'm like, wait, don't do that.
I get down on my knees and start whispering
right in her ear, like, saying, like, look toots,
stop fuckin' around,
they're gonna call the police.
I don't want you to go to jail.
Please get up right now.
And as I'm talking to her,
her head gets heavy in my hand,
I can't find a pulse, and she doesn't seem to be breathing.
So they call 911, an ambulance comes screaming
into the parking lot.
Somehow they manage to revive her.
As soon as she comes to, she starts kicking and screaming,
freaking out even worse than before.
It takes two large EMT guys to restrain her.
And they strap her down to the gurney, and they're pushing
her to the ambulance, and there's tears and mascara
pouring down her face, and before they close the doors
I'm like, look toots, please, just listen to the doctors.
do what they say, you'll get better.
She goes, I'm never getting better!
And it just kinda knocks the wind out of me,
'cause I realize, you know, like, maybe she's right.
You know, maybe she's never getting better
'cause maybe nobody ever really gets better.
You know, I thought if I fixed her, it would fix me.
But I couldn't do it.
I wish I could, but I wish I knew how, I wish there
was some kind of instruction manual for fixing people.
And the ambulance drives off,
and one of the ladies comes up to me
with a kind look in her eyes and she says,
have you ever read "Dianetics"?
[laughter, applause]
And that was the moment I stopped being a romantic.
[cheers and applause]
Thank you guys very much. Good night.
♪ ♪
- Louis Katz, ladies and gentleman.
[cheers and applause]