"I Don't Need Anyone's Help With Anything, Least of All Yours, You Preppy Little F*ck"
Lessons in collaboration and being "nice"
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I have a story I’ve wanted to tell for multiple DECADES about a semi-famous a**hole comedian. I’m finally ready to tell it.
Why have I not told this story before? I was always worried that this mean-spirited potato-head would find out about it, and, being a comedian with a microphone and a spotlight, he would spend an aggressive amount of time attempting to make me look like an idiot and ruin my career.
However… I am now at a stage where I don’t really care anymore, and he’s… well, dealing with his own legal troubles and has bigger fish to fry.
Here’s the story…
The Perfect Summer Assignment
When I was in my early twenties, I was offered a summer assignment producing taped comedy bits for a late-night comedy show host who was spending the off-season doing a cross-country stand-up tour. I grew up obsessing over David Letterman’s taped bits that ran inside the live studio broadcast. From dropping watermelons off the roof of the building to antics with Sirajul and Mujibur and Larry “Bud” Melman, the taped pieces stuck with me more than any of the live material. So travelling across the country producing comedy with a pro comic promised to be a dream come true.
I tried to set up meetings and calls with the host before the tour began to talk about ideas and a plan of action, but he was always too busy to meet with me. The first stop of the tour was in Ottawa and we were going to be there for several days. I put together concepts for comedy pieces and started booking them. I sent the host the concepts for the pieces and the shoot schedules, but again, never got any feedback. WEIRD.
I headed off to Ottawa and tried to meet up with the host and was again rebuffed several times because he was too busy. I was now panicking.
The Fake Bus… er... Boat Tour
I had arranged for him to be a fake tour guide to an entire busload of non-Canadian tourists and he was going to tell stories full of fake facts and lies about Canada. I was pretty excited about it and thought it would play to his strengths working with crowds. He cancelled this first shoot at the last minute because… he needed a massage. He left me hanging with a full tour bus, a camera operator, and no on-air talent. He told me the only time he could meet was after his stand-up show - very late that night.
I talked to the bus company, apologized profusely, and rebooked the shoot for the next day. That night, we finally met up and he told me he was cancelling all the shoots I had booked the next day as well because his friend was hosting a barbeque for him in his backyard. Then he told me my new job was to drive him to and from the barbeque.
After cancelling the tour bus for the second time, the bus company was not open to trying a third time. I luckily found a boat tour that would let us do the fake tour guide bit on our last day before heading to the airport. On the drive back from the barbeque, I begged the comic to do the boat tour because we were both facing the prospect of being paid to go to Ottawa for three full days and coming home with zero minutes and zero seconds of footage. He reluctantly agreed. Then he spent the rest of the ride on a call with another national TV host trying to figure out how to get a free truck from the network because he’s a big star who deserves a free truck.
On our last day, I showed up at the boat launch and waited for him to arrive. And waited. And waited. The boat, full of tourists, was leaving. I made a Hail Mary plan and decided to fake the entire shoot. The camera operator and I got on the boat and started filming the sights on the tour and filmed the crowd looking confused and flat (as if they were watching a weird tour guide). I was hoping to later shoot the comedian against a plain background pretending to do the tour and pray that I could edit it all together in some way that made sense.
The boat tour ended and just as I was disembarking, the comic showed up. “Oh well, I missed the boat,” he wryly jabbed at me. “I guess we can’t do the shoot.” I told him about my Hail Mary plan and he reluctantly got on the boat, stood in front of a wall, and mailed in dumb jokes for 5 minutes and left.
Sample joke: “On your left is the official residence of the Vatican in Ottawa… so much for that vow of poverty, eh folks?” No fake facts, no fake Canadian history. Just dumb one-liners. It was BRUTAL.
The Phone Call
I returned home dejected and frustrated. I reached out to the host to talk before our next trip. Here is the gist of what I told him on the phone:
I am so excited to work with you and I feel like we didn’t get off to the best start in Ottawa. I’d love to talk about how to make future trips work better for you. My job is to make you look awesome while the show is off the air and I want to do just that, so if you can help me make this a great experience for you, I’ll do whatever it takes.
I will never forget his reply to me as long as I live:
Listen up, you little pr*ck. I’m the host of the show. I’m the only reason it’s on the air. I’m the only reason it’s funny. I’m the only reason people watch. And I’m the only reason people show up in the audience night after night. I’m a big f*cking fish in a small pond - I’m on my way to being a star in the States! I don’t need ANYONE’S help with anything, least of all yours, you preppy little f*ck. F*ck you!
And he hung up on me.
That was week ONE. I had four more trips with him, each worse than the last. He had a temper tantrum in Banff when the manager of a Roots clothing store didn’t recognize him and wouldn’t give him free clothes. He almost got into a fight with a canoe rental employee who told him that he DID know who he was, but that he didn’t think he was funny. And it ended with him and me having a screaming match in the middle of the cavernous West Edmonton Mall after he cancelled more and more shoots and left me with nothing.
After the screaming match in the mall, I quit.
Leaning Into Stereotypes of Nice Canadians
So why am I telling this story? There’s an obvious “don’t work with a**holes” message here, but there’s more to it than that.
I have often been labelled as “a nice guy.” Many times, people have told me that I’m TOO nice. (As a teenager, I MAY have been rejected by crushes because I was too nice.)
However, as I got older and had experiences like this horrible standup comedy adventure, I decided to lean into niceness. And it turns out that doing my best to bring decent human values to being part of teams, leading teams, growing companies, working with clients, and developing content has been one of the best things I’ve ever done, both for my career and my creative work.
Despite what the comic screamed at me on the phone, great creative work doesn’t happen alone. Collaboration always drives better ideas and better outcomes with your creative partners.
Empathy and generosity are two more powerful “nice-adjacent” values on two different levels. First, as a collaborator, having empathy for the creative styles and working methods of others opens you to new ways of thinking and new ideas. Generosity means giving your ideas freely to the group and being open to having them evolve with the input of more participants. Second, empathy and generosity are vital when thinking about your audience. You need to make something of value for the people you are trying to reach. Understanding the audience’s needs and generously creating value for them is mandatory for earning attention with your work.
When I was talking to potential clients at big brands based in the United States, I would often invoke our approach as very stereotypically Canadian. I’d explain that we were very nice people to work with, we worked hard to understand our clients, their desired business outcomes, and their target audience, and we prided ourselves on deep collaboration.
Being nice to work with won Pacific Content a lot of business, and it earned a lot of renewals as well. People don’t like working with jerks. And as you can tell from my experience with the hack comic, people remember when they are treated poorly and spread the word (even if it’s a few decades too late).
Coda
The final beautiful touch is that it turns out other people found the comedian repugnant also. His show was cancelled. He was cancelled. And he never made it to the States.
But the “preppy little f*ck” has spent a lot of time working in the States with amazing, talented people because… it’s nice to work with nice people who care. And collaboration delivers better creative results than a selfish, precious artist working alone.
What’s Earned My Attention Recently
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Kevin Kelly has a new book filled with pearls of wisdom about life. This is one I love that is applicable to Earning Attention and content strategy:
“Greatness is incompatible with optimizing in the short term. To achieve greatness requires a long view. Raise your time horizon to raise your goal.”
YES.
How the Savannah Bananas Reinvented Baseball
How do you reinvigorate, reinvent, and differentiate yourself in the storied world of baseball? By making it a SHOW. The story of the world’s most entertaining baseball team - and the huge success they’ve achieved by taking risks and putting the audience first - is fascinating and inspiring.
Measuring Earned Attention
Paul Rismandel and Jeff Vidler are doing great work at Signal Hill Insights with this blog series about the importance and value of brand lift research. It’s a powerful and effective way to determine if your content is Earning Attention.
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The Brand Storytelling team assembled 12 leaders in the brand-funded content space to talk about the future.
If you’re seeking to create a differentiation strategy for your business and your marketing, please reach out to The Creativity Business.
I can’t believe Alan Thicke did you like that. 😜
Great piece. I’m glad you’ve got this outlet to express yourself, this “open mic” if you will. I never found him funny and always wondered how he got on air. Good thing that experience didn’t change you. Nice guys don’t always finish last. 😉