It's Not Easy Bein' Me by Rodney Dangerfield

Author:Rodney Dangerfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2004-06-22T16:00:00+00:00

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I’m not a sexy guy. I went to a hooker. I dropped my pants. She dropped her price.

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Chapter Nine

Can I Have Your Autograph…and More Butter?

Same thing with my wife, no respect. I took her to a drive-in movie. I spent the whole night trying to find out what car she was in.

People often ask me how I came up with my “no respect” line. When I got back into show business in 1961, I felt—for obvious reasons—that nothing in my life went right, and I realized that millions of people felt the same way. So when I first came back my catch phrase was “nothing goes right.” Early on, that was my setup for a lot of jokes.

It worked pretty well, but a few years later, the book The Godfather came out and it was a bestseller and then the movie came out, which was even bigger. Because of The Godfather, suddenly all anybody would talk about was “respect.” You’ve gotta show me some respect…If she’s with me, you show her respect…It’s all about respect…”

I realized that fit pretty well with the image I was now working with onstage, so I decided to come up with a joke that had the word “respect” in it. The first one I wrote was: “I get no respect. When I was a kid, I played hide-and-seek. They wouldn’t even look for me.”

I was working a place in Greenwich Village, Upstairs at the Duplex, when I first did that joke, and the crowd loved it. After the show, people came up to me and said things like, “Hey, Rodney, me, too—no respect.”

So I kept writing jokes off that line—“I don’t get no respect”—and it caught on more and more. Now I have probably written over five hundred “no respect” jokes. Here are a few of my early ones:

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