Mr Know-It-All by John Waters

Author:John Waters [Waters, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humour, Writing, biography
ISBN: 9781472155207
Google: 8I15xAEACAAJ
Amazon: 1472155203
Goodreads: 45155728
Publisher: Corsair
Published: 2019-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

OVEREXPOSED

If you learn to speak in public, you will never be unemployed. Lobbyist, lawyer, comedian, revolutionary, disc jockey, all these careers are possible if you don’t fear addressing a crowd. I’ve been doing my vaudeville act for more than forty years. First I just appeared before my films were shown at colleges, coming out looking like a hippie pimp and ranting about the brilliance of nudist-camp movies, Ingmar Bergman’s vomit scenes, Ann-Margret in Kitten with a Whip, and obscure art-exploitation films such as Nude in a White Car and The World’s Greatest Sinner.

Then once Pink Flamingos hit, I worked with Barbara Meyer at New Line Cinema’s lecture bureau and expanded my intros into a speech of sorts; I guess it was the first “art-film stand-up comedy” act. Sometimes it was billed as Shock Value, then as An Evening with John Waters and, once I realized that sounded a little too stick-in-the-mud, This Filthy World. I later offered up alternative titles such as Going to Extremes; Negative Role Model; Cinematic Immunity; Loose Cannon; Ad Nauseam; At Wit’s End; and John Waters Is Certifiable; but This Filthy World seemed to catch on the quickest.

Since I always want to go back and play the same city where I did well, I constantly update my material and call it This Filthy World—Filthier and Dirtier. I know it is permissible to do your exact same act again and call it a command performance (the code word for laziness), but I feel that would be cheating. Some comedians swear their audiences like hearing the same jokes over and over and argue, “Why else do people buy comedy albums?” But I think my audience is too smart for that. The struggle to continue to add new jokes by the time I come back to your city never ends. “Filthier! Dirtier! Holier! More Political! Nude! In 3-D, Duo-Vision, and Completely Lip-synched!”

After I wrote an essay for the National Lampoon titled “Why I Love Christmas,” I did a holiday show with just that name at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco and later expanded this ho-ho-ho act into A John Waters Christmas, which I’ve been touring with every December for the last fourteen years. Now averaging eighteen cities in twenty-two days, it’s a big part of how I make my living. I have a big Christmas list—this way I know I can afford all the presents I have to buy. It’s my part-time Christmas job and you should get one, too.

I also have a version of my show I do at horror conventions, called This Filthy World—More Horrible and Dirtier. For years I’ve been trying to steal Vincent Price’s career, and while I haven’t been successful, at least I’ve hijacked that early TV monster-movie host Zacherle’s. “You don’t make horror films,” some gorehounds complain, but I just answer, “Ask my mother, she thinks they’re all horrible!” Real movie stars (or my idea of them) appear at these horrorthons: Dyanne Thorne (Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S.); all the survivors

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