Chris White: the tale of a terrible comic

Chris White takes his requests to Black Box

Friday, Feb. 6, 2009

Click here to enlarge this photo Submitted photo Comedian Chris White will perform at 8 p.m. Feb. 7 at Black Box Theatre. Tickets are $10. The theater is at 4185 Indian Head Highway, Indian Head. Call 301-743-3040. E-Mail This Article | Print This Story Click here to enlarge this photo

Comedian Chris White knows that scoring a breakthrough — the kind which might allow him to get a new car or move out of the Washington, D.C., apartment he has rented for 9 years — has less to do with talent than dumb luck hinged to a shift in demographics. For some reason, though, even after five years in the business, the silly guy continues to go into the world and do his thing … all the while foolishly waiting for the sun to rise and fall over the land in a way which would leave behind a clamor of demand for an awkward 30-something-year-old white dude whose skin is so pale that no amount of pancake makeup could possibly make it look non-diseased under lights.

These are more his words than mine, and so are these: Another thing preventing White from lasting more than three minutes on the television show "Last Comic Standing" is the undeniable fact that he is terrible at what he does, as doomed as he is awful. Boo this man off the stage. Go to www.chriswhitesucks.com and write something mean.

But try to not to miss the irony: White … is … making … fun … of … himself.

"I came up with that idea I'm sad to say, but the number of people who do not get the joke is distressing and I should probably pull the plug on it," White said during an interview at his apartment. Pictures of Hawaii hang on the wall. He has a Nintendo GameCube — says he and his roommate do not use it much.

White, really, is not a bad comedian (or cursed in any obvious way), and his Web site cleverly modulates an act which leans as heavily on wit as it does on self-deprecation, on cutting himself down through nerdy flashbacks or myriad family memories he chooses to shamelessly fictionalize and exaggerate. Sure, he sports the rare physical features of very white skin and red hair and freckles, but it's not as bad as he might jokingly make it out to be. At the very least, it's less nondescript than his name.

"The worst comedians to hang out with are the ones who are on all the time," the natural comic said. Even so, the former all star of his high school quiz bowl squad speaks matter-of-factly about things as energetically as he might, during standup, lament the fact that he forgot the quadratic equation in the heat of an intense nursing home visit with his uncle.

D.C Improv Lounge, March 5, 2008: He started yelling for 10 minutes about how Asian people are trying to steal our jobs, and I tried to explain to him that Racist Old Guy isn't a job that Asian people would want to steal … but he just starts getting more worked up, his face gets redder and redder and all of a sudden he's grabbing his heart; he's like ‘Oh my God,' I'm having an attack, I need my medicine. I say, "Where are your pills?" and he says "They're on the nightstand!" and so I run to grab his pills. "How many pills do you need?" "I need X pills." … If 4-X-Squared plus 3X equals seven … I couldn't do the math. My uncle died. The ironic thing is, if I was Asian, I probably could have done the math … So that's the quadratic equation … and if you graph it, it makes a picture of a man sitting alone in a basement watching "Battlestar Galactica."

One last thing to consider about White's Web site: Imagine the horserace for www.chriswhite.com. There is Chris White (the voice actor) and Chris White (the guy who does a Podcast about The Rapture).

And there is Chris White, the Washington, D.C., comedian who will perform his special one-man variety show, "I Take Requests 5," at the Black Box Theatre in Indian Head, the same Chris White who edited opinion columns for five years at the Washington Post after studying history and journalism at the University of Richmond.

During a self-described rut at his former job, in a hunt for something "new," White read an article in Washington Post Weekend about open mic comedy shows in the District. He decided to check one out at a now-closed spot in McLean, Va. "I might not be great," he thought, "but I am better than at least one of these people."

White signed up for the next event and spent a vacation week rehearsing a 7-minute routine. And although he was scared of getting electrocuted by the microphone and wore baggy pants fearing shaky legs, his first attempt went well enough for him to return weekly for about six months — until a hobby became a full-time job.

About two years ago, White began asking his blog readers to challenge him with topics they would like to hear jokes about. Requests came in from all over the country, and White began producing a show, "I Take Requests," an hour-long medley of comedic vignettes, with trivia and an interactive video for a grand finale.

"If a request is truly appalling or horrible or unworkable then I will drop it," he said. "But I try to do some them that are, on the face of it, pretty nasty, and pretty difficult to do jokes about."

Like Newton's Third Law. Like ancient Sumeria. Like BlackBerry cell phones.

Arlington Drafthouse, Sept. 29, 2008: Now, anywhere I am in the world, no matter what time, wherever I am, I know, 100 percent, that nobody in the world is trying to e-mail me. That's awesome: I am completely in touch with the world.

"Part of the reason I like doing these shows," White said, "is that some of the requests make me do things I wouldn't necessarily think of doing jokes about, but one of things I have found is that you always bring it back to what your own personal point of view is."

Jokes about body odor are funny, but not as funny as jokes about body odor paired with something about his family. "So I like to talk about a lot of the things that are important to me," White said, like "deep-seated personal shame."

While he has tested out most of the "I Take Requests 5" material in his regular standup routine, a joke about the color blue will make its official debut. "It's not the most exciting or sexy request," White said, "but we try to make each one a little different."

Did I catch a "we" in there?

"‘We' meaning me. I am just using the ‘Royal We,' that's all," said White, in an apparent reference to "The Big Lebowski."

Sort of interesting, because it did sort of feel like chatting with Chris White the manager, the guy who woke up for an 11 a.m. interview and was answering questions while also thinking about the new day and various odds and ends and the inputs he might feed the machine: videos for his Web site (like fake commercials which are a bit edgier than his standup), blog postings (often more politically serious than his standup), new jokes and a voice project. (He also runs the comedy Web site, www.dcstandup.com).

"I Take Requests," in a sense, combines a variety of White's nonstandup pursuits. For D.C. Improv Lounge, White runs trivia night and does podcast interviews with each week's featured comedian.

White grew up near Philadelphia. The image on the cover of this publication is a childhood photo of him taken at Olan Mills; his parents took White and his two brothers there annually until they reached a certain age. In the punch line to one of his most notorious jokes (although it does not seem like it's his most notorious) White says his mother taught him in his youth that freckles were marks you get for disappointing Jesus.

"I talk about my family a lot and I think they get a bad rap when I talk about them," he said. "Industry secret is that 90 percent of what I say is to some degree fake … [My parents] are, really, great people. Sometimes I do feel a little bad about making them seem like these horrible monsters onstage, but you just take these little incidents, little incidents that happen to everybody, and blow them up way out of proportion."

In real life White's mother once told her husband that if he touched a bat on the back porch he would get rabies. Dad touched the bat, turned out OK. In the joke, though, Dad touches the bat and does get rabies and White has to put him down — "Old Yeller-style."

White says he was a "huge nerd." He was "disturbingly good" at school. Outside of quiz bowl, White played trombone in the marching band, loved history, loved reading, wore semi-thick glasses, played some Dungeons and Dragons.

"That whole experience, it wasn't bad," he said. "I'm pretty happy, for the most part. That kind of feeling of being, not an outsider, but awkward, or kind of thinking in a different pattern than a lot of people around you — that pays off in comedy."

Nowadays, then, White is a nerd injected with a shot of confidence, although let's say he's quite a bit more "normal" than Lewis Skulnick after winning the affection of Betty Childs.

Late in the afternoon, White went to the D.C. Improv Lounge for a podcast interview with Nashville comedian Keith Alberstadt. Both are "history dorks" — and, as the interviewed revealed, Republicans — and after noticing that White was reading Joseph Ellis' "His Excellency: George Washington," Alberstadt recommended historical novelist Jeff Shaara.

You learn two things from watching a comedian interview a comedian: In a broader sense, the things weighing constantly on their minds, like finances and comedy markets and "big projects" … and also that once a thread of conversation gets weirdly serious, comics use humor the way firemen use water

Comedy, like most things, is a hustle, and to break in and succeed, you have to put yourself out there — anywhere and everywhere. Few attain the same fame of the comedians who fill the photographs on the walls of D.C. Improv Lounge, and blue collar comedians can make it. But for how long? White, if he chooses, will at least have a career to fall back on. He even took six credits worth of graduate history courses at George Washington University — has a 4.0 — and you can almost picture it … White in front of an audience, with perhaps a chalkboard behind him instead of a video after 45 minutes of standup in "I Take Requests 4" — singing "America the Beautiful" with cartoon images, pouring a bag of sugar labeled "cremated bald eagles" into his cereal bowl.

Is White really even a nerd? Maybe he's just an exceedingly intelligent, observant guy in his early 30s, mining laughs from some of our most consuming fears.

D.C Improv Lounge, March 22, 2008: I'm 31 and I feel like I'm getting older, and the reason why is last year I realized, out of nowhere, that I love Phil Collins … No one starts out by saying, ‘I love Phil Collins.' You start out thinking you have free will; you're going to do your own thing … I want you to think about this: Phil Collins, 3 feet 6 inches tall, got into Genesis through answering an ad in the newspaper, has millions of dollars. And I think that I'm taller than him, about as attractive, have about the same amount of talent … I'm 31, I am going to be a star! If Phil Collins can do it, anyone can.