To know me is to know how much I love Bobcat Goldthwait.
I grew up in the early ‘00s and developed a huge affinity for all these modern comedians who were pouring their soul out on the stage. Hopefully they make you laugh, but there’s sometimes a sense with these types of comics that first and foremost they care more about expressing themselves. But it wasn’t always like that. Like all art forms, styles of stand-up comedy have ebbed and flowed throughout the last century. Some decades leaned more towards the comedy of the oppressors, and some decades leaned more towards the comedy of the oppressed. The hipster sick-niks of the 50s and 60s were a direct response to the clubby Borscht Belt comedians before them, just as the alternative comedians of the 90s were a direct response to the loud, brash comedy of the 1980s. While some like to glorify or vilify certain trends or eras of comedy, they all had their hacks and they all had their geniuses.
In an interview with Christian Finnegan, I asked him a lot about post-1980s stand-up comedy, and the trendy lo-fi, alternative comedy scene centered in New York City’s Lower East Side. He described the sentiment of the era as: “What I’m saying is more important than the manner in which I’m saying it ... I have a thought here that I’m trying to express, and I hope that you find the thought funny, not the fact that I kind of slickly memorized this sort of switcheroo.” When he’s talking about slick switcheroos, he’s talking about the club comedy of the 1980s.
The 1980s is certainly the era of American stand-up comedy that takes the most heat from scholars and historians. I can’t pretend to be an exception there. The 1980s saw a comedy spike unlike any other era in the history of stand-up. “As the Comedy Boom expanded, comedians started to get to know the rock-star lifestyle,” writes Kliph Nesteroff, “The clubs were packed, there were plenty of girls around … more clubs, more comedians, more money -- it also meant more cocaine.” When I think of 1980s comedy, I think of cocaine. Lots of cocaine. It’s telling that cocaine was the drug of choice for 1980s comedians, unlike the softer, more introspective marijuana-fueled comedy of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1990s. I think about cocaine, tough urban clubs, anger, yelling, and character comedy.
In strict terms, character comedy is a method of stand-up where comedians presents themselves as characters, typically with a different name and voice. This style of comedy also had its cultural peak in the 1980s. It is a far cry from the vulnerable stand-up comedy that got me into the game, but it is still an interesting beast in its own right. On some level most comedians are always doing a character. Part of the process is often ramping up different parts of your personality for comedic effect. You might find yourself asking: “Is Sam Kinison *really* like that?” And some of the fun as an audience member is not knowing the truth. Before the 1980s boom, when comedians did characters it not at all this this extent. Typically, it was just one portion of their act. For example, Carlin would do a few jokes as the Hippie-Dippie weatherman, Pryor would tell stories as Mudbone, and Andy Kaufman would do routines as the foreign man (later made famous in the TV show “Taxi”) or Tony Clifton. With the exception of Moms Mabley and a small handful of others, it wasn’t until the 1980s when comedians would often have entire careers as one particular character.
Characters were typically wacky, zany, or demonstrably “other” in some way. In broad terms, they are often prone to a more physical, slapstick sensibility, humor frequently described as “low” humor. There were some comedians at this time using character work to great effect, for example Whoopi Goldberg’s brilliant 1985 Broadway show, which is made up of five character vignettes. While comedians like Steven Wright, Steve Martin, and Rodney Dangerfield were comics with extreme personas that verged on being characters, for our purposes we’re sticking to comedians who invented a character (typically one of a few characters they had that happened to stick) that is distinguishably different than their true self. Some of the biggest character comedians were PeeWee Herman, Emo Phillips, Gilbert Gottfried, and, of course, Andrew “Dice” Clay.
Dice, or “the Diceman,” is one of the most polarizing comedians in stand-up comedy history. In On the Real Side, Mel Watkins says Dice simply “Substituted phobia and misogyny for jokes.” Maybe we was thinking about his infamous take on nursery rhymes, which included the lines “Twinkle twinkle little star, will she blow me in the car?” and “Mother Goose, yeah I fucked her.” Still, his persona found its audience and Dice was hugely successful for a period of time. Not only did he have prominent roles in a handful of movies, but he was the first stand-up comedian to ever sell out Madison Square Garden two nights in a row. In a sense, he is a perfect Madison Square Garden act -- loud and brash, with a focus on catchphrases and a performance style where it isn’t necessary to connect with the audience in the same ways it is in a true blue comedy club. Either way, Dice continues to personify this strange and raucous time in stand-up comedy history.
Character comedians exist today, but they are increasingly rare. Expecting the work of Sasha Baron Cohen, who is a performance artist and filmmaker as opposed to a stand-up, the only real character comedian with a thriving career nowadays is Larry the Cable Guy. The character of Larry is a dim-witted stereotypical redneck whose comedy had the tendency to grate on city liberals. He is similar to Dice in the sense that he has a fiercely loyal following but seems to primarily confuse, irritate, and alienate the rest of the population. I don’t pretend to understand the appeal of either of them. Characters also pop up now and then in some comedians’ acts, but it is primarily in the pre-’80s sense, where the character is one part of the comic’s repertoire. We see this when Maria Bamford plays her mother on stage or when Rory Scovel tells jokes as his spacey South Carolinian. Character work seen in clubs today is rare and typically a meta-comedy satire of classic comedian types. For example, Aziz Ansari’s character Randy is a direct parody of style-over-substance comedians like Dane Cook, Pauly Shore, or Dice.
For my money, the most compelling and revealing character comic from the 1980s is without a doubt Bobcat Goldthwait. While Bobcat was loud, crass, and irretrievably rebellious, his persona and his attitudes on comedy were not the status quo of his time. His comedy was a mixture of 1980s raucousness and the alternative cultural critique comedy of the 1990s. For example, in his first album Meat Bob, he screams nonsense in the beginning in trademark warble, but he also refuses to play the game and dissects comedy itself with lines like, “Jokes are just tiny little lies … So that’s why I don’t have any jokes.” He was self-aware in a way that Gilbert, PeeWee, Dice, and others never seemed to be. He remains the only comedian of his ilk that was able to successfully walk away. This is not to say he is without his fair share of career blemishes -- Police Academy 4, for example, is pretty hard to defend. Still, Bobcat Goldthwait found a way to instill earnestness and innocence in a comedy world seemingly devoid of either.
Robert Francis Goldthwait was born in the summer of 1962 in Syracuse, New York. He was one of five children in a suburban Catholic working class family. His father Thomas was a sheet metal worker, and his mother was a lunch lady at his school, as well as a department store employee. In an interview with Jonah Ray, Bobcat tells the story of being eight years old and seeing George Carlin on the Dinah Shore Show: “He came out, did his poem, his hair poem, and I was 8 and I said to my mom, ‘What does that guy do for a living, like, what’s his job? How does he make money?’ And she goes, ‘No, that’s how he makes money.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s great.’ … And that was it.”
Bobcat’s father was what he called a “suburban performance artist,” doing tricks and informal shows for the neighborhood kids. He had a pair of rubber waders that he cut the bottoms off, looking like “rubber lederhosen” and he would do amateur magic or perform tricks on his motorcycle. More often than not, his father’s stunts had an absurdist slant that strongly influenced Bobcat’s sense of humor, like putting on a crash helmet and threatening “to jump off the top of the refrigerator into an open jar of mayonnaise.” Decades later in retirement, his father built his own props and became a magician, occasional opening for Bobcat on the road, billed as “Tom Terrific.” Goldthwait’s brother Tommy, was also a huge influence. Bobcat told Maron stories about his late elder brother, saying “My brother would come to dinner and stab a potato and use it as a microphone and get the whole family singing songs.” Bobcat described Tommy as his hero when he was a child, before he got in with the wrong crowd and became addicted to drugs. Tommy later died tragically when his trailer caught fire.
Bobcat Goldthwait’s comedy career started at the young age of 15, alongside his best friend Tom Kenny, who was a castmember on the hugely influential Mr. Show and later made his fame and fortune as the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants. Bob and Tom met in first grade at their Catholic school. As the story goes, a six year-old Bobcat made a nun cry by repeatingly asking questions that challenged Catholic dogma. “Tommy thought it was really cool that I could make a nun cry,” says Goldthwait, “And he introduced himself to me at lunch.”
Under the tutelage of older comic Barry Crimmins, Bob and Tom, billed as Bobcat and Tomcat, would perform at local comedy clubs in Syracuse and Skaneateles, New York. Barry Crimmins was also occasional billed as “Bearcat” but somehow Bobcat was the only one who’s nickname seemed to stick. In those early days, Goldthwait often used his older brother’s ID to gain admittance into comedy clubs to perform. After graduating high school at the age of 18, Bobcat and Tomcat followed Barry Crimmins to Boston to pursue careers in stand-up comedy. Their home club was the infamous Ding Ho, a comedy club and Chinese restaurant in South Boston. The Ding Ho was the epicenter of the Boston comedy scene, and was home to comedians such as Paula Poundstone, Kevin Meaney, Denis Leary, and many others. Bobcat met Robin Williams at the club when he was 19, and they remained friends until Williams’ death in 2014. The Ding Ho was a raucous ‘80s club, and Bobcat would get blitzed with the best of them, doing lines at the bar and covering up the windows so they could keeping partying as the sun came up. Goldthwait tells a story of particularly rough night at the Ding Ho when he saw three police officers walking in. Yet instead of getting arrested, the cops settled in and starting doing blow with the comics. That’s the 1980s for you, ladies and gentlemen. It was moments like these, in addition to a few serious lectures from his idol, Crimmins, that got Bobcat clean and sober at 19. Despite what his persona suggests, he’s been sober ever since.
From the very beginning, Bobcat never did traditional stand-up comedy. His early heroes were comedians like Steve Martin, Andy Kaufman, and the British troupe Monty Python.Instead, he opted for more absurdist approaches, like sobbing and reading a Dear John letter onstage or bringing a dead fish onstage and gutting it while kibitzing with the audience. Comedians and crowds alike were not quite sure what to make of Bobcat Goldthwait.
In those early years of stand-up comedy, Goldthwait developed an on-stage persona based on a character from a sketch he did with Tom Kenny. In the sketch, Bobcat played a simple country man who was in shock after seeing Bigfoot in the woods. “I don’t know what I seen,” He told the audience, “But it ain’t no bear.” Out of that sketch, grew the character and the voice that became Bobcat Goldthwait’s stage character and on-screen persona. The character’s most distinguishing feature is his voice, which alternates between a gruff and bellowing yell and a sort of crying warble, intercut with extremely labored short breaths, not unlike a cartoon bull. The little warble comes out now and then in his normal speech, especially when he’s visibly nervous. While most characters and on-stage personas at the time were tough guys, Bobcat’s character featured a hyped-up nervousness, that often read as a man very sweet yet very overwhelmed. “I always felt like an outsider, I always tried to protect my character, I didn’t want people making fun of him,” Bobcat said, “Comedy in the 80s wasn’t about the little guy, it was about ripping apart the little guy.” Still, the character had a harsh edge to him that revealed itself in the same manner as a cornered animal. If pushed, he would bite, which was something he had to learn to be able to defend himself in rough Boston comedy clubs. If you watch his early material closely you can see this beautiful innocence in his eyes. He’ll look up at the audience with a nervous smile that reads like a child awaiting a gold star from a teacher. In many ways, his character was a child, alternating between zealous temper-tantrums and the unabashed cuteness of a woodland creature. When I try to explain my love for Bobcat Goldthwait, it always comes back to this big-eyed transparency that, even with the character, he need seemed able to shake.
In 1983 at the age of only 20 years-old, Bobcat Goldthwait made his network television debut on Letterman. In his introduction, Letterman called Bobcat “One of the strangest comedians we’ve seen in a long while.” He opens the show by saying “Thank you,” about a dozen times in awkward, labored speech, before starting his first joke. Actually, I’m not sure I would call it a joke, but I don’t really think there is a word yet for what he was doing. Whatever you want to call it, it went like this: “Ronald Reagan is so old, [Yells] THIS IS A JOKE, Ronald Reagan is so old, he’s so old he’s got Jelly Beans in his face. I don’t get it. No. Thank you very much.” The rest of the set follows the same chopped, schizophrenic tone. At one point, after a bout of senseless screaming Bobcat turns to the audience and asks, “Do you know what that is? I don’t either, but it kept me out of the army.”
After the Letterman appearance, Bobcat moved from Boston to San Francisco where he encountered much more accepting audiences and began working as a radio host. He lived there for a couple of years before moving to Los Angeles to begin his film career. At 23, Bobcat booked a prominent role in the Police Academy sequel, playing Zed McGlunk, a maladjusted gang leader with a tendency to start riots and bite into unpeeled bananas. In short, he was playing his character. He went on to star in the following two Police Academy movies, along with parts in cult films such as One Crazy Summer, Scrooged, and Burglar. While his films weren’t particularly lauded by critics, they were typically moderately successful at the box office, at least enough so to secure the next gig, so to speak. He produced two television specials in the 1980s: An Evening with Bobcat Goldthwait: Share the Warmth and Bob Goldthwait: Is He Like that All the Time? He also put out his first comedy record album in 1988, entitled, Meat Bob. While other comedians were telling setup-punchline jokes, Bobcat Goldthwait was screaming, crying, and (onstage) telling Rolling Stone to “Blow me” after they wrote a less-than-glowing review of his work.
Goldthwait’s best moments, however, didn’t come from his stand-up comedy or from his mediocre film comedies. He shines brightest as the charmingly crass anti-hero in the ridiculous stories he tells. I’m not sure what it is with comedians and authority, but Bobcat Goldthwait seems to have one of the worst cases. Some of his antics included stealing John Cusack’s credit card information from the set of One Crazy Summer, and ordering tons of room service for his friends in the cast and crew. Or the time he was offended by the fact that Saturday Night Live had Dice host one week, and he sent Lorne Michaels a funeral wreath with the words, “In loving memory of intelligent comedy on SNL.” Or, my personal favorite, the time when he was doing a show in Corpus Christi and, as he tells it: “The guy told me, ‘No swearing!’ So I come out with my cock hanging out.”
Still, there is no doubt in my mind that all of Bobcat’s best moments come from his late-night television appearances. These are the moments, dear friends, when the fun really starts. Words will never do these moments justice, but highlights of his appearances include running into the audience and jumping onto the desk on Conan, using ipecac to induce vomiting on Live with Regis and Kathie Lee, or straight-up destroying Arsenio Hall’s set for him after it was announced that Paramount didn’t pick it up for another season. This included throwing the couch cushions into the audience, smashing one of the monitors, and, the crowd favorite, spray-painting “PARAMOUNT SUCKS” onto Arsenio’s backdrop. During this rampage, Arsenio tried to stop Bobcat and actually had him in a headlock at one point. As Bobcat tells the story, though, Hall took that moment to whisper, “Thank you” into his ear. Yet another story of Bobcat’s disdain for authority and those in power.
The crowning achievement in his late-night appearances, however, is without a doubt his guest spot on Jay Leno. Goldthwait entered the stage in front of the live studio audience with fire accelerant in his back pocket and a lighter taped inside his sleeve. In the middle of the interview he stood up, turned around, and lit his chair on fire. Leno was pissed and the audience was in shock. After the show Bobcat was served and taken to court. He is now a convinced arson, and he was charged $700 for damaged and forced to do TV promotionals for the local fire department.
Despite his tendency for mischief and mayhem, Goldthwait maintained his working class ethic, and never punched anywhere but up. He’s said on many occasions that even though he’ll talk loads of shit about the studio heads, if the Kraft services attendant thought he was a jerk it would break his heart. During Carson’s last month on air he was invited on the show, but he declined the offer because it interfered with a Arsenio Hall booking he’d already accepted. When asked about this decision, he response was, “Dance with the person who brought you.”
Part of the reason that Bobcat Goldthwait sticks out among other comics is that he doesn’t really *feel* like a comic. Most comedians I know are a little more quiet, dark, and brooding than Bobcat. He himself says that “Comics are really angry, and they’re mean and nasty. The happier I got, the less that I gave a shit about doing comedy.” From the start, he never idolized comedy the way most comedians did, and in a very real sense, he sort of fell into the industry. I’m not saying the he didn’t work hard, but Bobcat didn’t toil in the clubs the way other comedians did. Many of the those comedians hated him for it. Especially the Boston guys. Bobcat broke early and he broke big, and he broke without really doing *comedy,* at least not in the traditional sense. Many of these differences can be chalked up to the fact that Bobcat seems to feel more like a musician than a comedian. He has said himself that he’s always had more of a connection with music than with comedy. When he was in high school he was in a band called The Dead Ducks. He was the lead singer, but he was eventually kicked out for bad behavior. “Keith Moon had more to do with my comedy than Johnny Carson,” Bobcat once said, “By the time I was a teenager, the idea of wearing a sweater and arking probing questions like where a sock goes in the dryer … fucking horrible, man.” In many ways, Bobcat was always more punk rock in form than he was a traditional comic.
This symbolic connection came to fruition when Bobcat was contacted by Kurt Cobain in the early 1990s. Cobain was, weirdly enough, a huge fan of Bobcat, and sought him out to interview him. Goldthwait was shocked by this, stating that it was “like Jimi Hendrix saying he likes Buddy Hackett or something.” The two of them forged a unique friendship and Goldthwait began going on tour for Nirvana. He was featured prominently in Nirvana’s “In Utero” video, and was opening for them on the road. As Bobcat tells it, Cobain knew every word of his album Meat Bob, and would call him out after a set if he did primarily old material. The two of them spent many night together on the road, staying up late and talking about their lives. Opening for Nirvana wasn’t exactly easy, and he faced his face share of hecklers, as well as having to manage with the occasional objects thrown at him on stage. “Nirvana fans … pelted Bobcat Goldthwait with M-80s, shoes, beer-soaked blue jeans, miniature bibles, and even an unlucky audience member.” He never seemed to wear these bombs around, however, telling an interviewer once: “Secretly, not even so secretly, I ‘ve always done stuff that I was interested in doing; I wasn’t really trying to reach out and win everybody over.” I have to agree that it’s probably not so secret that the guy vomiting on morning television wasn’t gunning for universal appeal.
The most noteworthy moment of Goldthwait’s time with Nirvana would have to be the New Year’s Eve show at the end of 1993. It was a packed show at the Oakland Coliseum, and Bobcat Goldthwait opened the show as per usual. He invited the band onto the show by saying, “It’s my pleasure to introduce to you your headliners, please welcome The Nirvanas!” Which was a little joke between him and the band. When it was time for the midnight countdown, Bobcat repelled in from the roof of the Coliseum, stark naked except for a winter hat and angel wings. “I love how vain I was,” He later remarked, “Like, I’m fine with you seeing my cock, but I don’t want you to see my balding pate.”
The allure of the music industry wasn’t the only departure from traditional comedy in Bobcat’s world in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. He was becoming increasingly interested in writing and directing his own feature films. He directed aspect of the movie within the movie in One Crazy Summer, and the idea of making his own films had been stewing in the back of his head up until 1988 when he received a script for Hot to Trot, a movie where he would be starring opposite a talking horse. He scoffed and wrote to his manager, “Why would I do this?” And his manager’s reply was one keystroke: “$”.
Whatever the reason, Bobcat signed on and made the movie, which was, not surprising, a box office bomb, with a budget of $9 million and a gross of less than $6.5 million. The movie is pretty much forgotten, and deservedly so, but it was instrumental in his career by his own admission for one specific reason. Through making that film, he learned firsthand that someone doesn’t necessarily need to know what they’re doing to go ahead and direct a movie. Three year later, he released his first film: Shakes the Clown.
Goldthwait wrote, directed, and starred in Shakes, which was affectionately called “The Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies” by The Boston Globe. The film features his friends Robin Williams (credited as Marty Fromage) and Tom Kenny, as well as comedians Adam Sandler, Kathy Griffin, Joel Murray, and others. He didn’t direct again until the ‘00s, spending the rest of the ‘90s doing bit parts in TV shows and raising his daughter. It was around this time that he stopped performing comedy regularly. “Stand-up was interesting to me at the beginning, because I was trying to parody it … and then I became the very thing I was making fun of,” Bobcat later said, “Tom Kenny pointed it out recently, he was like, ‘You lost interest in stand-up when you could no longer make people feel awkward, when people expected the unexpected from you. People expected to be weirded out.” He also officially quit from acting at the end of the decade, but admits that he happened to quit acting around the time that people stopped hiring him. He later received a few offers to be a judge on reality shows and such, but he turned them down in order to stay true to himself and pursue his dream. He directed episodes here and there of television comedies, before landing the job as the head director of Jimmy Kimmel Live! In simplest terms, Kimmel asked Bobcat if he could make the show funnier -- part of Bobcat’s appeal as a director of comedy is that he was a comedian for so long. As such, he has a better understanding of how to direct properly for the most effective use and translation of the show’s humor, something not all directors, however talented, can fully grasp.
Bobcat Goldthwait’s second film Sleeping Dogs Lie (sometimes titled Stay) was released in 2006, a solid fifteen years after Shakes the Clown. He shot the film on a micro-budget during a two-week vacation from the Kimmel show. The crew was largely made up of Craig’s List hires, and it was sometimes shot in less-than-legal guerilla style film-making. Bobcat describes the film as a story about honesty, relationships, and a little bit of beastiality. While the film wasn’t a huge success critically or commercially, it did make its way to Sundance and paved the way for Goldthwait’s later films.
Bobcat Goldthwait released a second comedy album in the early ‘00s, entitled I Don’t Mean to Insult You, But You Look Like Bobcat Goldthwait. The album is really aesthetically interesting because he couldn’t seem to make up his mind about whether to continue doing the voice or not. The voice creeps in and out of his material, making it half-character, half-not. The special didn’t seem to have a lot of heart behind it, nor was there very much new material, but Bobcat wasn’t coy about the reasoning. He’s been frank about the fact that he simply ran out of money, unofficially (and unapologetically) referring to the tour as “The Alimony Tour” in reference to his divorce from his 12 year marriage to Ann Luly. The tour was a financial success and seemed to have got him back on his feet. After all, he jokes, “Anywhere where it’s still the ‘80s, I’m huge.”
Since Sleeping Dogs Lie, Bobcat Goldthwait has gone on to direct many comedians’ specials and television shows, as well as writing and directing four of his own feature films, with each one seemingly receiving more critical success than the last. His best film, however, is most certainly Call Me Lucky, a documentary about his early friend and comedy hero, Barry Crimmins. The film has an 84% and an 81% percent on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and audience members, respectively, and it follows the story of Crimmins’ emotional and public confrontation with the abuse he suffered as a child, and the echoes of his bravery in terms of both outreach and legal policy.
His film World’s Greatest Dad stars his life-time friend Robin Williams as the father of an insufferable teenage son who dies suddenly in an auto-erotic asphyxiation accident. In order to protect his son’s legacy and shield him from the embarrassing truth, he frames the death as a suicide and forges a suicide note. Considering Williams’ own suicide in 2014, five years after the release of the film, it is a particularly difficult film to watch. Bobcat is often asked about Williams’ and whether he ever exhibited suicidal tendencies, which Bobcat always handles with perfect candor: "People come up to me and they'll go, 'Did he ever talk to you about suicide?' And I was like, 'Yeah, we're comedians. We talked about it for 33 years. You know? *Sometimes* we'd talk about other shit.'"
His other films two films are Willow Creek and God Bless America. Willow Creek is a found-footage style horror movie about Bigfoot, and God Bless America is a searing social commentary of American culture (or the death of American culture, more accurately) that centers around a duo who go on a killing spree, taking out reality TV stars who they believe need to die. These films, while hard to watch at times, make so much sense coming from the guy who is at his best when he’s making people uncomfortable. “I’m trying to win over all the weirdos,” He told Michael Ian Black, “One weirdo at a time.” As a certified weirdo, I can’t argue his success. At least as far as I’m concerned.
When talking about his experience as a writer and director, Goldthwait can’t help but be brought back to his early memories with his best friend Tom Kenny: “I kinda feel like why I write and direct now has a lot to do with my relationship with Tom Kenny because I used to just sit and watch Tom. We’d come home from school and he’d not only do impressions of the teachers but he’d play the whole class … and I’d just be crying. And I’m not really doing anything much different now. I just have my friends and I watch them ad-lib and act.”
In 2011, Bobcat released a third special, entitled, You Don’t Look The Same Either. For the first time the voice is completely gone, and what remains is a story-teller comedian, enjoying the company of the audience and sharing aspects of his life. As he tells it, for a long time he thought he hated stand-up comedy, but in reality he was just pretty sick of doing that character. It is nice to see him moving on and changing organically as he ages. If you are lucky enough to live in Los Angeles, you can check out his weekly comedy show Crabapples at The Hollywood Improv, co-hosted with comedian Caitlin Gill.
My favorite thing about Bobcat Goldthwait is that he did his career backwards. He started by selling out, and then as he got older he began to go what he actually wanted. I guess that’s part of the benefit of breaking at 20 years-old. Still, that’s only the first half. He could have easily been one more 1980s comedian, but he fought to follow his dreams. “I think that writing, making stuff, is a very defiant act towards death,” He once said. “It’s giving it both birds. That’s why I like to make stuff.” Leave it to Bobcat to throw some crassness into his creative philosophies. At the end of his appearance on Michael Ian Black’s show, Black turned to the crowd, and then turned back to Goldthwait, telling him, “I think your truth is maybe a little bit more jagged and crazy than other peoples,” At which point Bobcat giggles like a little kid, before Black continues, saying, “But it’s a great truth and I want to thank you for sharing it with us.” I couldn’t agree more.