Rob Maher

Originally published May 18, 2007.

We arrived in Cancun at roughly 8:30 AM Saturday morning. Friday was an extremely long day. I got up at 4:00 AM to head to Baltimore to do radio, picking up Joe Robinson along the way. After the radio I headed back home to do some day job stuff. I then went to Ned Devine’s to run the open mic. After Ned’s, I did some last minute shopping at Target, went home, packed and headed back to Joe’s to meet up with him, his wife and Justin Schlegel. Yadda, yadda, yadda, by the time we got to Cancun I had been up for 30 straight hours.

We take the bus over to resort. I suck down a couple of Corona’s courtesy of Amelia who somehow had a whole cooler of them. Thank you, Amelia. The resort is beautiful. The room has a balcony that overlooks the Caribbean. There is a mini bar in the room. There are four restaurants on the resort. You can drink from 10 AM to 4 AM if you wish. There is 24-hour room service. There are a couple of pools, one with a bar in the pool. There is a pool with dolphins swimming in it. It’s hot here but not crazy hot plus there’s a constant breeze. It’s pretty awesome.

I get a much needed nap in before I got out and attempt to paint the resort Rob. I start the night by having dinner with Mickey and his wife Jamie and Joe and his wife Sheila. They talk about their kids all night. I attempt to fit in by telling them I once paid for an abortion. That is a total lie of course, I only paid for half of the abortion. After dinner I head 15 feet away to the Barracuda bar. Justin is over there as well as a bunch of the listeners that made the trip. I immediately fall in love with Lisa who is straight out of “Holy Shit, She’s Hot” magazine. When that bar closes we head inside to the lobby bar.

It is at the lobby bar where Scott the Producer and I decide to create fake identity’s for ourselves. We walk up to this one girl who is 200 pounds past human. She’s lapped fuckable 4 times. We tell her that we are Chuck and Conner and that we own a Golf and Tennis shop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We are here in Cancun to attempt to save our business for we have a difference in opinion on how to make our business grow. I tell her that if we were Wham, I’d be George Michael. She immediately knows the name of the other guy, Andrew Ridgley or something like that. I tell her that I want to start pushing tennis because I think tennis is about to make a comeback and that we need to be ahead of the game. Scott calls me an idiot and says tennis is dead, golf is where the money is at. This girl is totally convinced we are serious and starts giving us advice. I then proceed to proposition her and she rejects me. I act upset and go into the bathroom to gather myself. Once that got boring, Scott and I walked over to this girl who had just gotten married and told her we were the karaoke champions of Milwaukee. We proceed to sing “Free Falling”. A worse rendition has never been sung. The bride claimed to love it, her friends, not so much.

When that bar closes, Scott and I head off resort to the Congo Bongo. It turns out the Congo Bongo costs 45 bucks to get in. Thus far I have spent zero money and gotten hammered plus ate a great meal. 45 bucks sounds like 450 bucks at this point. We make a pathetic attempt to sneak in. It fails miserably. We head back to this bar right next to the resort. Its open till 4 and we get two free drinks for being guests of the resort. They have a band playing. Scott dances by himself on the dance floor for about thirty seconds. I laugh at him. He has hit the wall and realizes that he must get some sleep. I am a little more stubborn so I decide to stay a little longer. There is this girl a few feet away from me dancing with her boyfriend. She is grinding up on him. Maybe it was my drunken state or maybe it was the music but at that point I swore she was the hottest girl I had ever seen, sans Lisa. I stared at her awkwardly for another 20 minutes then realized that I turned into the creep guy at the bar. I decided to call it a night. One down, six to go. That’s all for now but next time I will tell you about the Joe Robinson fight and my encounter with a breathalyzer at 6AM, so stay tuned.

Originally published May 10, 2007.

I wrote a bit in a dream I had the other night. I dreamed I called this girl cute and she got mad that all I referred to her as was cute. Then, in the dream, I wrote a bit about the whole thing. I woke up thinking the bit was hilarious and that I was a genius. The bit went something long the lines of her turning into Joe Pesci from ‘Goodfellas’. “What, I’m cute to you, like some little kid, I’m cute like a fucking puppy, etc….” I was patting myself on the back thinking, wow, you wrote a bit in your sleep. You are fucking amazing Rob Maher. As the day went along I slowly began to realize the bit sucked ass and was completely unfunny. I then remembered that I had watched’ Entourag’e right before I had gone to bed and the whole “cute conversation” was in that. From genius to hack in 7 hours.

Originally published May 8, 2007.

I did a gig recently for the Shriners. The Shriners are a group made up of old white guys who also happen to be Freemason. I’m not sure exactly what they do other than be old and have secret handshakes. All I knew about the show was to keep it PG. I show up and look into this giant banquet hall full of old guys in suits. I immediately evaluate the situation and determine than I am going to eat a dick. I turn back towards the lobby and see the most wondrous sight ever. I do a double take for I thought I was seeing things at first. There was this old man getting his picture taken with his arm around these two, young, beautiful, TOPLESS women. My act is supposed to be PG, but I am seeing titties. Titties aren’t PG, some are PG-13 but these were R titties. They had stories to tell. They take several pictures and then several more when I politely ask to see their breasts again. Then this other old man introduces the two girls by saying these are my girls. I am thinking, holy shit, this is their father? I’ve got to become a Shriner. I can be old and racist. How hard is that shit? I now reevaluate the situation and conclude that I will be performing in front of dirty old men. I fucking love it! I am going to destroy. Legendary shit.

I finally meet the guy running the show. He is very friendly as he goes over the show run down. It turns out I am following a Shriner who is getting a lap dance from two strippers. Aha, so those girls were strippers and the guy who introduced them as his girls is the owner of a strip club. It’s starting to make sense.

The show begins with the lap dance. I am not sure why they were honoring this guy or why he was getting a lap dance, maybe he killed a black person or something, I don’t know but I didn’t care. It is now time for my set. I am introduced incredibly awkwardly. I am performing in front of a podium. I am following a two girl lap dance. I am staring into a sea of, “who’s this fucking kid” faces. I now reevaluate the situation. Sarcasm can’t follow titties. I am going to eat a monster dick. A Viagra, tantric sex-knowing, stunt cock, porn guy dick. Legendary shit.

Let the cock feast begin. I bomb as expected. Nothing works. Clean jokes, dirty jokes, crowd work, racist book jokes (don’t judge me you fucks, it was rough up there), nothing works. I comment that I need a drink. In like 30 seconds I have a shot of whiskey in front of me. Then another and another and another. Fuck! I am now drunk which means I can’t leave this awful place.

After my set I go sit in the lobby attempting to sober up. I befriend one of the Shriners who tells me he wants to do comedy. He starts trying out material on me which causes me to need to drink more but I can’t drink more because then I have to stay here longer and hear more bad jokes and eat more dick. It’s a vicious cycle. The cycle is finally broken up when talks of a poker game start up. I love poker. I can’t drive yet. I should play so I invite myself to the game. I am thinking this is my chance to get some revenge.

There’s six of us playing. Not including me, the average age is around 80. We are playing dealer calls his own game which basically means we will be playing all bullshit games. We played for close to two hours. I somehow found room in my stomach to eat more dick. It was old, wrinkled up dick but dick is dick. I only won one hand and that hand I tied with another guy. When I had a flush, someone had a higher flush. When I had a full house, someone had four of a kind. When I had four of a kind, someone had a straight flush. You get the picture. I lost 140 bucks. I made 200 for the show. So essentially, I drove three and half hours round trip to bomb in front of old men and then bomb playing poker with old men for a measly sixty bucks.

I consider myself a good comic and a pretty good poker player. That night I guess I was neither. But there’s always another show, another game, another set of breasts to admire, another three and half hour drive to make for virtually nothing, another story to tell. Deal me in.