I don’t like yelling. My shoulders go up to my ears and my eyebrows furrow into themselves until it stops. My parents are English and Protestant, and to this day I’ve never heard them yell. Typically, I see that behavior as childish and unnecessary. There are few things that require it, and there are few points that are made more salient by it. My first exposure to yelling comedians was Sam Kinison. Kinison proved to be the absolute wrong choice for the uninitiated. I think I made it through about 30 seconds of the first track on his album, Louder Than Hell, before I turned it off. I looked him up because comics I respect like Marc Maron and Joan Rivers loved him, but to this day I don’t understand him. Sure, the content was disturbing in itself, but the tone went straight through me and listening the whole way through it was out of the question.
I fell in love with stand-up because of comedians like Patton Oswalt, Pete Holmes, and Demetri Martin -- people who would present ideas by gentling laying them at your feet, not jamming them down your throat. If you’ll pardon the expression, there’s an old saying that there are two types of comedians: the ones who got called [redacted] and the ones that used to called people [redacted]. For years, I assumed that comedians who yell were firmly in the later camp, and I frankly wanted nothing to do with them.
At least in my case, I think a part of growing up was realizing that there are times when yelling is called for. That was a lesson that truly took a long time for me to internalize, and to be honest I’m still not entirely there. My shoulders still go up, but I’m learning that there are beast worth fighting, and some of those beasts live a life so large that yelling is required.
Angry, yelling comedy is practically an entire genre of its own. It comes and goes in the material of comedians like Richard Pryor, George Carlin, and Lenny Bruce, as well as countless others. Carlin, especially, often allowed himself to get completely worked up in politically charged bits, committing fully to his points and disregarding any audience members he might be alienating. In his 1996 special, Back in Town, Carlin goes up against pro-life conservatives, calling them out for their hypocrisy. "They're all in favor of the unborn," Carlin says. "They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born, you're on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months." I liked these rants when they popped up in the material of my comedians, but I still stayed away from the comedians whose anger was their stock in trade. It wasn’t until I stumbled upon one particular comedian that I began opening myself up to this strange, acidic subgenre of my favorite art form.
As a comedy scholar and comedy nerd, I’m embarrassed to say that I hadn’t heard the name Barry Crimmins until a few months ago. I found Crimmins when I was in the throes of a Bobcat Goldthwait obsession, which was a phase I can’t exactly account for (nor can I say I’m quite over.) After his career as a warbling character comedian, Bobcat Goldthwait retired from stand-up comedy and began a new career as an independent film-maker. I say retired loosely, for he always seems to go back on tour whenever he runs out of money. I once heard him jokingly refer to a particular tour as “The Alimony Tour,” which floated him through the muddy waters of a recent divorce. Bobcat’s films have been primarily dark comedies, but his most recent release was a documentary film about Barry Crimmins, a Boston comic who had mentored Goldthwait in the dingy and infamous Boston comedy clubs of the 1980s and 1990s. Boston in the 1980s, in particular, is truly the stuff of comedy legend. And by all accounts, Crimmins was the father of the scene.
Before watching the film, I did a quick YouTube search and stumbled upon a video of Crimmins onstage at a populist protest. “I’m tired of being called a radical!” Crimmins starts. “I don’t think I’m radical, I don’t think you’re radical. I don’t think we’re radical. What’s so radical about what we want? We want peace. We want economic justice. We want jobs. We want civil rights. We want homes. We want public transportation. I’m a radical!? No, I’m not a radical. I don’t have 400,000 troops assembled in a desert wearing scuba diving suits to bring me more oil that I’m already choking to death on! That’s radical.” I knew then I was in store for a yeller, but I trusted Bobcat, and I trusted the direction in which Crimmins seemed to be yelling.
Barry Crimmins operates within a unique style of stand-up that fully belongs to its time. In the same way that recent comedians such as Louis CK and Bill Burr seemed to encapsulate the ethos of post-9/11 America, these comedians feel like a direct result of the socio-political climate in which they were living. Some people call them “truth-teller comedians,” but I like to call them prophets. I’m not just talking about angry comedians. I’m talking about the comedians who make us feel as if they just rode into town in a flurry to save us from ourselves and incite riots. If this style were as popular now, you would hear them in comedy clubs around New York shouting, “Wake up, Sheeple!” These are comedians who don’t like the government, they don’t like the Catholic church, and they don’t like anyone who tells them what to do. With a shaking fist and a righteous pose, these often coked-up comics of the 1980s and 1990s taught their audiences how to think for themselves and how to fight back. I have never been a fighter, but I have to respect their fire. In many ways, they were a direct response to the hypocrisy and the brainwashing of the Reagan-era. Sam Kinison, Bill Hicks, Lewis Black, and their compatriots are angry prophets who can’t wait to tell you why they’re so pissed.
On the surface, these grizzled comics don’t seem entirely dissimilar from the drifters and grifters who pop in and out of entry-level comedy open-mics. From minute one, comedy is full of weirdos, and these comedians often feel like the weirdos that just stuck around the clubs. “I don’t mean to sound bitter, cold, or cruel,” says Bill Hicks. “But I am, so that’s how it comes out.” While this style of comedy hit its apex in the 1980s and 1990s, there have been comedians bashing authority since there has been an authority to bash. Proto-stand-up comedians like Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and Will Rogers willfully challenged authority in their day, as well as the bulk of the “sick-niks,” TIME’s term for the beatnik generation of willful comedians. Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce led that particular charge against the status-quo, each in their own unique styles.
Bobcat’s film features footage of Crimmins walking through New York City, saying, “Well there’s a couple of things I have to accomplish, and if I do, I’ll be able to put my little tile on the grand mosaic of life. And those two things are: I’d like to overthrow the government of the United States, and I’d like to close the Catholic church.” He wasn’t yelling, he was matter-of-fact. The rebel in me loved this sentiment, but I was skeptical about Crimmins for another specific reason. More than any other genre of stand-up, prophet comedy is the most likely to not be funny. And I don’t mean that the comedy is unsuccessfully or bad, nor do I believe that is even something truly quantifiable. I mean that this comedy often gets itself so worked up that it forgets that humor is even a goal. Bill Hicks’ posthumous special Rant in E Minor is correctly titled, and even though it has moments of great laughs, the special clearly ranks the laughter of the audience as a secondary or tertiary goal, after the crowd’s enlightenment or their own catharsis. Hicks’ special is entertaining, but I would hesitate before calling it strictly stand-up comedy.
Sam Kinison, on the other hand, has a cult following of fans and fellow comedians, but as I said, I find his specials virtually unlistenable between the shrieks (and the misogyny.) Kinison was a fire and brimstone Pentecostal pastor before becoming a comedian, and his specials feel like holy damnations. Therein lies the next problem with this genre of comedy -- where is this hatred being pointed? When it comes to these stand-up comedians, particularly Sam Kinison, Denis Leary, or Bill Maher, it can prove to be more alienating than invigorating for much of their audiences.
Throughout Bobcat’s film, it became clear that Barry’s onstage vitriol seemed to be hurled in noble directions. Journalist Dean Johnson called him “the social and liberal conscience of Boston comedy almost since its beginning.” Crimmins travelled to Nicaragua and performed politically-charged comedy about the government and the Contras, and he participated when anti-war protesters were camped out outside of Bush’s Texas ranch. He gave speeches with Cindy Sheehan, an outspoken mother of a fallen soldier who served in Iraq. Crimmins clearly walked the walk. Other comics joke that Barry is one of the few people gifted with the ability to actually become more articulate the angrier he gets. “He was a very lovable, capable, straightforward comedian that was able to smuggle stuff about authoritarianism and consumerism into a seemingly middle-of-the-road set.” Recalls Patton Oswalt. “The audience would laugh at and then it was too late, they’d already started laughing at some pretty subversive apocalypse culture sorta stuff.”
Barry is a huge, lumbering presence, with big curly black hair and a handlebar mustache. In keeping with his oeuvre, onstage he was often sweaty, disheveled, and holding a beer. His pain, and it was clearly pain just dressed up as rage, came from a feeling that the world didn’t seem to be a principled place The things that broke his heart didn’t seem to call the attention that they deserved. “He would like politics to be an honorable profession.” Says Scott Alarik. “He would like the world to share his values. And one of the ways it’s expressed when he’s on stage is in the tremendous kindness that he shows to the audiences he’s screaming at.” Barry would often get incredibly frustrated during his political comic tirades. There are stories of him taking a break from his material to teach the audience a civics lesson. He would stop his rant, take a deep breath, and begin: “Okay, there are three branches of government.”
Here are Barry’s words on the state of this country from a 2004 interview:
“Barry Francis Crimmins is fucking ashamed of the United States of America right now. You should all be. If you’ve got no fucking courage, if you don’t stand up against this bullshit, and you don’t believe, go read some Tom Payne and then see what you should do right now. You decide what you do right now, because I’m embarrassed. I’m embarrassed to live in a country where everyone’s cowed into bullshit. ‘Oh well, but no, you know, in the end we’re still the greatest land…’ We suck right now. The United States of America in 2004 sucks right now and is an embarrassment.”
He later called himself “a tuning fork for pain,” addressing his enormous empathy and the way that it rears its head in his comedy. He clearly had a huge heart and a huge capacity for good, but his intensity also seemed to bleed into other areas of his life. There is footage of him yelling at other comedians, as well as drinking heavily as a coping mechanism. “I’m Barry Crimmins, trying to be a good guy, but putting off a nasty aura most of the time,” He told the camera after a momentary outburst. Crimmins was a messy, passionate comedian, but when he found himself at last able to confront his own demons, he became a savior, an arbiter of justice, and a testament to the power of righteous anger in the hands of a prophet.
In 1992, Barry Crimmins took the stage at the Boston club Stitch’s. His show featured his standard slew of political outrage, before it took a turn towards the personal. That night Barry disclosed to his audience, and to his fellow comedians, that he had been raped several times as a child. When Barry was young, he and his sisters had a babysitter who had an arrangement with an older man. This man would take Barry down into the basement to violate him, and during the act he would shove his face into the couch pillows, suffocating him and frequently causing him to pass out. These horrific acts only ended when Barry’s sister, then only 5, made it downstairs and witnessed the event. In interviews she often references the hollow, empty look in his eyes at the moment, and how she was never the same again.
Crimmins began speaking openly about what happened to him as a child, seeking support and seeking awareness on child abuse. Articles with titles like “Comedian Bares Soul” were written about that night. Crimmins himself wrote a piece framed as a survivor’s story for The Phoenix. “So many people said this me: ‘Well, are you talking to anyone about it?’” Says Crimmins. “‘Yeah, I thought I was fuckin’ talking to you.’ But what they’re really saying is go talk to the psychiatrist.” Crimmins did seek professional health, but he rejected any prescriptions or medication, believing instead that his path required him to handle his trauma as it came. He later joked that this was the only time in his life that he turned down drugs.
Crimmins began reaching out to organization and survivor communities, but too often he found that most were less accepting towards him because he was male. Many of these communities wanted to remain a haven for abused females, and they were concerned that male attendees would be triggering for some of their members. For this reason, Crimmins was looking elsewhere for communities, when he came across a slew of chat rooms in the early days of AOL. However these chat rooms were not for victims, they were for perpetrators. Barry had stumbled onto a huge ring of pedophiles. He found rapists and child pornographers sharing videos and stories back and forth in the dark corners of the early internet. Crimmins wrote: “I wished everyone could see these pictures. I wished no one could see these pictures. And I thought about the kids who could still be protected.”
AOL was charging its customers in terms of minutes and data, which means they were making enormous amounts of money off of these predators. Crimmins wrote a slew of letters to AOL, but they continuously ignored him and went on profiting. “I lodged many complaints with AOL,” He wrote. “And its officials responded in a fashion that made the Nixon White House seem accessible....” He went to the police, but the police were largely unhelpful because computers were still uncharted territory. One of the officers he spoke to said that they didn’t even have computers in their stations yet. “He was a man that I could describe as crazed at the time,” remarked one of the officers.
Determined to help these children, Barry created different screen-names, posing as children to gather incriminating evidence. “He damaged himself to save these kids,” recalls a close friend of Barry’s. He withdrew from the comedy community and from much of the world. His weight went down to 155 pounds. “He had a haunted, hallow look,” Bobcat said. “I’ve never seen anyone transform to a shadow of a person like I saw him transform.”
On July 24th of 1995, Barry Crimmins was invited to the floor of the senate to speak at a senate hearing. The hearing was entitled, “Child Pornography on the Internet,” and Crimmins was up against AOL’s corporate lawyer. With his messy black hair and Jerry Garcia tie, this Boston comedian from rural New York state was up against his personal Goliath. However, size and experience only matter so much when what is right and what is wrong is so plainly clear. AOL attempted to downplay the problem, stating statistics about their 3-strikes policy and the employees they’ve recently hired to police their users content. Crimmins was quick to point out the absurdity of any strikes at all for child abusers. Crimmins was successful in bringing a huge issue to light, and his hearing was instrumental in creating legislation concerning child abuse and the internet still in use today. After his hearing, over 1,000 child pornographers were indicted.
I've seen Tig Notaro teach us how to talk about tragedy, and I've seen George Carlin incite a Supreme Court case over free speech, but I've never seen a comedian who instigated such seismic change. Crimmins is the ultimate example of a comedian breaching into larger culture and demanding a better world. Perhaps things would be different if I stumbled upon him first, not Kinison.
Towards the end of Bobcat’s documentary, Barry revisits the house in which he grew up, even journeying back down into that basement. In spite of everything, Barry talks about how he feels so lucky for everything. “... I can convey things to people they don’t generally want to hear about.” He says. “If there were some grand rhyme or reason to things, I could understand why I was gonna grow up to be a big, strong man who knew how to tell people stuff they didn’t want to hear … make it accessible to people.” Barry Crimmins is a walking reminder of the power of angry righteousness, and he reminds me personally that sometimes the best thing you can do is yell.