A Tingle named Jimmy
Next weekend’s shows will be more proof he’s been there, done that
Photo by Ellen Shub
Here’s a good example of a Jimmy Tingle “joke,” not a joke exactly, but funny. He might use this when he takes the stage at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater March 17, 18, and 19, might not:
I was doing a show recently, trying to be positive in the middle of this pandemic, so I say, “Folks, isn’t it great that we got this vaccine!!??” In the whole room, only three people clapped. And it just came out; “Three people? Are you shitting me?” Then I’m talking with a friend who’s a recovering heroin addict, and he refuses, refuses, to get vaccinated. You know what he said? “Hey, you don’t know what’s in it.”
Funny? Yes, among other things. Opinionated? Check. Political? Sure, overt or otherwise. Making judgements? Between the lines, if nowhere else.
But mainly amazed by absurdities, surprises, and juxtapositions rather than being divisive or abusive, why he’s calling his new show “Humor for Humanity.”
“Comedy can make a huge contribution to the cultural conversation,” he says. And then he pauses. “Look at Zelensky.”
A stand-up comic as hero of the Western world; if it wasn’t true, that could be a Jimmy Tingle riff.
Jimmy has run for President more than once, as a bit, but he seriously ran for Massachusetts lieutenant governor in 2018 as a Democrat and got more than 40 percent of the primary – OK, there were only two people running, but still.
What makes Tingle special, besides having a comic’s best-ever natural-born name, is that his life and career create an Americana arc, merging into a generation of free spirits who moved topical comedy from fringe to mainstream.
Jimmy’s father was a North Carolina Tingle, but he grew up in Cambridge, what we might call working class or blue collar, words he never really heard until he was living in New York as the street-smart guy with a Boston accent. He’d hang in the park off Tremont Street in East Cambridge, a long way from those famous universities nearby, starting point guard (at maybe 5’7”) on his hard-nosed high school basketball team.
He made it to college, UMass-Dartmouth, where he saw a movie about iconic comic Lenny Bruce, watched Belushi and Aykroyd on Saturday Night Live, glued to Johnny Carson’s monologue at 11:30 pm, checked Dangerfield, Carlin, Pryor. He got it in his head that he could play a little harmonica and do routines, make up song parodies and lace in jokes, “Test Tube Blues” for example.
In 1979 a very weird thing happened and it happened in the neighborhood where Jimmy grew up, Inman Square, Cambridge. An old-man bar had been taken over by a Chinese family who turned it into the Ding Ho, funky Cantonese, but for some reason a guy named Barry Crimmins decided this could and should become a comedy club by night. The owner Mr. Lee was fine with that so long as people bought food and drinks (given some of the material, just as well Mr. Lee didn’t speak much English). Crimmins created open mic nights with 20 or 30 people doing five-minute sets, he’d curate acts, and soon let this guy with a harmonica close at 1 am because he was original and could handle an unruly crowd.
“I got hooked,” Jimmy says. By 1980 he was working at the Ho, daytime cleanup, behind the bar, at the door, answering the phone (“At least I could speak English”). Among the madness, a handful of ambitious comics were honing chops, Steve Sweeney, Paula Poundstone, Dennis Leary, Bobcat Goldthwait, raw, working crowds night after night. The scene got hot, then one night in the back room they huddled around a TV because one of their own, Steven Wright, had broken through, live on Carson’s Tonight Show, the pinnacle for comics.
Comedy clubs started opening, you could truck from “The Comedy Connection” to “Stitches” to “Play it Again Sam,” do a set each: “If you were funny, that’s really all you needed. You could make a few hundred dollars a weekend.”
He moved to New York City in 1988 to do the same thing and stood out, carrot-top with the Boston accent, made it onto the Tonight Show himself, Letterman, an HBO special. The people he was moving with professionally became Dennis Miller, Chris Rock, Kevin Meaney, Jerry Seinfeld.
He had gotten sober, loved a new genre of one-person shows, Jackie Mason, Lily Tomlin, Eric Bogosian. He was political, working off the front page. He also was learning how to hustle, booking himself in the Hasty Pudding Club in Cambridge for a month. He took off for Los Angeles in 1998 -- where he lost his shirt.
Then in 1999 another weird thing happened. CBS’s iconic show “60 Minutes” spun off “60 Minutes II” on Wednesday nights and needed someone to fill the Andy Rooney slot -- be funny and topical as the stopwatch ticked toward 60. Jimmy auditioned, along with every other comic in the country. Turned out it was him they wanted, something to do with authenticity, look, his take.
He lasted two seasons, but it wasn’t all joy.
“They treated every piece like it was a New York Times article,” he remembers. “Lighting, tone, sound, everything had to be perfect or it didn’t get on the air. It was heavily edited, heavily produced, no live audience, talking to camera. It wasn’t comedy, it was humor but commentary.” There wasn’t a chance for him to craft material before an audience, let it ferment – plus the CBS “brand” was an ever-inhibiting factor. After awhile he needed to stop.
“I really wanted to get back on stage, feel free, uncensored,” he says.
One of those places was Cape Cod, where he first showed up in 1994. He’s worked many stages since, his own club for awhile, and just so no stereotypes fit he walked to Harvard Square from his old neighborhood and got a master’s degree in public administration at the Kennedy School of Government (and delivered the grad school commencement address).
His shows next weekend at the theater on Route 6 extend a long local context, one more small chunk of a career that has moved through incarnations high and low, big and small, famous and obscure.
Maybe this is why Jimmy Tingle still pivots in a conversation, non-sequitur, and says, “I was seeing these Canadian truckers blocking the roads, and you know what I heard? They had adopted the identical feminist language we knew in the 1980s: My body! My choice! My body! My choice!
“Isn’t that amazing?”
Yes it is.
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Almost 20 years ago, when the Payomet Theatre was at Ducky Noon's sand and gravel pit (the seats covered in a fine layer of stone dust we had to wipe down before the evening performances) Jimmy had a line about how his career had now taken him "fifty feet from the breakdown lane." A perfect joke that I think of every time I take the 6A split.