Mr. Know-It-All by John Waters

Author:John Waters
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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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