A funny guy discusses his latest antics and a new documentary.
Johnny Steele has been on the local (and national) comedy club scene since dropping out of grad school in the early ’80s, a move his parents dubbed “Operation $40K Down the Drain.” Turns out it wasn’t such a bad career move. Steele has gone on to win the SF Stand Up Comedy Competition, flirt with Hollywood stardom, host the Live 105 morning show, and star in a TV gabfest on KRON’s former cable station, BayTV. But, in large part due to the decline of the comedy club (Oh, Chuckle Hut, where have you gone?), Steele’s career hasn’t been an uninterrupted juggernaut. Thanks to some wise investments, he hasn’t had to resort to turning his car into a taxi cab to make ends meet (like some people I know), but he’s also not ready to idle away in his Barcalounger with the remote all day, either. The story of how Steele, along with fellow Bay Area funnymen Will Durst and Larry “Bubbles” Brown, have managed to survive the ongoing laugh drought is the subject of the soon-to-be-released documentary Still Standing. I met up with the Berkeley-based comedian recently at Caffé Trieste on San Pablo Avenue to find out how he keeps the home fires burning.
Paul Kilduff: What do you think the documentary is going to do for your career?
Johnny Steele: Well, look, I’m already on the Paul Kilduff Comedy Hour. Are you kidding me? Are you nuts?
PK: Yeah, that’s right; you’re already talking to me.
JS: Look at you. Don’t you see the potential of this?
PK: Is your career in that bad of shape, that you need a documentary about it? What’s going on?
JS: The irony is I’m happy to be in it, but the documentary is essentially about three guys who screwed up their careers. It really is. It started to be about the San Francisco comedy boom, and then while doing it, they said, “Why did it bust?” And then they found a more interesting story, thankfully for me. And the interesting thing [about the San Francisco comedy scene] was some guys went to LA and got famous. Some of those names you don’t know, because they created TV shows; they didn’t star in them. And some of those guys you do know because they got on TV shows. Robin Williams is probably the best known. Dana Carvey went to New York, not LA. But a bunch of us stayed here because we love San Francisco and we love the Bay Area. Will Durst and Larry Brown are not originally from the Bay Area. I’m from the East Bay and I didn’t want to go to LA for a lot of reasons. LA was totally commercial. It was a commerce town. You went there to try and get on a sitcom that appealed to people in red states. That wasn’t the point of my comedy. That wasn’t the point of my career. I heard Lenny Bruce and Cheech and Chong and Mort Sahl and all those guys and [that’s why] I wanted to be a comic.
PK: But you did go down there for a while, right?
JS: I commuted quite a bit and had what they call a “development deal,” which means some big fancy person, Brandon Tartikoff, in my case, former head of NBC, saw me [perform] somewhere and said, “We don’t know what it is about you, but we love you, and so we’re gonna give you 25, 50, 75, 100 thousand dollars for six months, nine months, 12 months, whatever it might be, and we’re going to wrap a TV show around you. Or we might put you in one of our existing shows.” So I had a couple of those type of deals happen in LA and I had really good management, but I kept getting artistically pruned down there. I remember one time at a performance a manager came up to me and said, “Look, there’s a lot of very important people in the room. They really like you. They want to see you. So don’t come out and do that San Francisco stuff where you start making fun of middle America and how stupid everybody is. Just come out and be charming, be powerful, be funny.” I said all right, I’ll do that. I remember watching the comics in front of me, and they were the crappiest comics on Earth. They would never have been allowed on most stages in San Francisco in that day, and they were killing. Everyone was so excited to see them. Then the demons got in my head and said, “Just do what you want to do.” So I came out, and I think my opening joke was something to the effect of, “I lost my virginity when I was 15; I might have lost it when I was 11, but I wasn’t an altar boy.” And the room, which was about a third Latino and very Catholic, they were having none of it. And so I think two days later my agency let me go, but I got a radio job offer, which I like more than anything, as you can see, because I’m not allowing you to speak.
PK: That’s it with Johnny Steele.
JS: We’ll be right back after this break. … In retrospect [the radio job] wasn’t a smart move, and my manager at the time told me that. He said, “Look, they’re going to offer you a 100 and some thousand dollars. That’s great. You move to San Francisco, you buy yourself a condo, you do your morning radio show. Six months, 18 months, two years from now, someone’s going to buy the station; they’re going to fire you, sweep it all out, and you’re going to come back down here with your hat in your hand, and we’re gonna tell you to get the hell out.” And they did, and they did, and they did. That’s all exactly true. He’s a very smart man, Tim Sarkes.
PK: How do you define yourself?
JS: That’s my big problem. I haven’t fully distilled it. I have a sort of NPR-PBS-Berkeley-left-of-center perspective. However, I have jokes in my act that can be perceived as insensitive. Insensitive is not considered a liberal or left-wing intellectual trait. And so I confuse people, and that’s a problem. I’ll come out and do one joke about why are we so anti-immigration? We’re a nation of immigrants. We didn’t grow up here. You can’t blame Mexicans for immigrating. They just want to go north where people are kind and literate and civilized and they have to go through here to get to Canada. You can’t blame them.
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Age: 53.
Birthplace: Pittsburg, Calif. Johnny, whose real last name is Lopez, took the stage name Steele as an homage to his hometown known for its steel mills. His brother is Los Angeles Times columnist/novelist Steve Lopez.
Astrological sign:“Yield”
Book on Nightstand: I’m A Stranger Here Myself: Notes On Returning To America
Website: JohnnySteele.com
