- 10 months ago
Craig Gass tells us a story of interacting with Donald Trump and doing comedy after 9/11.
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00:00All right, you guys ready for your next comedian?
00:01And everyone's like, oh, please, let's go!
00:04Please welcome king of queens, sex in the city, Craig Gass.
00:08And I walked out on stage, grabbed the mic, and just went, thank you.
00:11Looked in the crowd and went...
00:13Our next guest, usually here to promote a show in Philly, but he's in Jersey,
00:20and he's at the new venue at Hard Rock Casino, and that's the Howie Mandel Comedy Club.
00:25And ladies and gentlemen, our good friend is back in town.
00:28He's performing tonight through Thursday, Craig Gass.
00:31Hey!
00:33Excited to be here and excited to see this brand-new comedy club in Atlantic City.
00:38By the way, I am really moved personally by what you just did in the last hour,
00:45by having a minute of silence.
00:47That was really a cool move.
00:49We do it every year, and only because you need to, and we appreciate that.
00:53Did anybody work in comedy?
00:55I'm so glad you brought that up.
00:56For a stretch after that?
00:58When you talk about the smoke, there's a couple clubs that I worked at in Greenwich Village
01:02where there was smoke going through the neighborhood for a couple weeks.
01:08Wow.
01:09Wow.
01:09It was coming through that neighborhood for a couple weeks.
01:10Because it's not that far.
01:11It's not that far.
01:12And in fact, there's one road that you stand on, one comedy club, where you look straight
01:17down, you're looking right at the World Trade Center, and then if you turn around and
01:20look uptown, you're looking straight at the Empire State Building.
01:24And now this half of it's gone.
01:26Right.
01:26But there's smoke coming through.
01:28And people always thought, like, oh, it must have been tough to do comedy because of that.
01:33And this is the truth.
01:34Yeah.
01:35When you're on stage and there's smoke coming through that neighborhood from those buildings,
01:39you could not get a laugh unless you talked about what happened.
01:45You had to talk about it.
01:47It's just like in anything else with comedy.
01:49It's a release.
01:50If you acknowledge what's going on in this room right now, it's like, you know, Steve
01:55will tell you that if you follow somebody who either crushes or bombs, you have to acknowledge
02:02it.
02:02Right, right.
02:03And that's the best way to, like, I remember doing a show in Las Vegas once at the House
02:08of Blues with Norm MacDonald.
02:09And this MC walks up to me on the side of the stage and goes, hey, what's your name?
02:15And I go, it's Craig Gass.
02:16And he goes, what do you want me to say?
02:17And I go, hey, whatever.
02:18You could do, you know, Sex and the City or King and Queens, whatever.
02:21And he goes, all right, cool.
02:22I'm nervous.
02:23And I go, yeah?
02:24It's a big crowd.
02:25And he goes, yeah, man, it's my first time.
02:26And I go, it's your first time in front of a big crowd?
02:28And he goes, no, I've never done comedy.
02:29And I go, oh, God.
02:31Oh, boy.
02:33How did you get out of this show?
02:35How did you get that?
02:35And he goes, oh, I work here.
02:36I'm a bartender.
02:37I've always wanted to be a comedian, and I'm a bartender here at the House of Blues.
02:40Oh, my God.
02:41And actually, when I saw that Norm MacDonald was coming, they announced it like six months
02:46ago.
02:46And I campaigned.
02:48And all my friends that work here are like, you got to make Fred be the MC.
02:53For Norm MacDonald.
02:54For Norm MacDonald.
02:55Yeah.
02:55It's 1,800.
02:56It's sold out.
02:571,800 people.
02:58Oh, my God.
02:58And he's like, yeah, man, I'm really nervous.
03:00And actually, a bunch of guys who work at the House of Blues took the night off to support
03:03me.
03:03And I went, and you've never, you haven't, in the last six months since you got the gig,
03:07you haven't hit an open mic?
03:08And he goes, no, this is, this is it.
03:10And I went, oh, my God.
03:11Well, good luck.
03:13He walks out on stage and eats it.
03:17Yeah.
03:17So hard.
03:19In front of 1,800 people.
03:20That include 20 or 30 of his friends.
03:23Yeah.
03:23And at one point, in the middle of complete silence, he makes the rookie mistake of saying,
03:30well, maybe you had to be there.
03:33And a guy in the upper row of the upper balcony goes, maybe you're not funny.
03:41And the place explodes with its first laugh.
03:47Oh, my God.
03:47And even Norm Macdonald, who's one of the nicest guys in the world, walks over.
03:52He loves to, like, rip on people.
03:54And even Norm Macdonald walks up to me and goes, man, I feel bad for this guy.
04:00Don't say anything.
04:01I feel bad for this guy.
04:03And I go, all right, all right.
04:04You had to.
04:06You had to.
04:06And I didn't say anything.
04:07Yeah.
04:08He said, all right, you guys ready for your next comedian?
04:11And I was like, oh, please.
04:13Let's go.
04:14Please welcome king of queens, sex in the city, Craig Gass.
04:18And I walked out on stage, grabbed the mic, and just went, thank you.
04:21Looked in the crowd and went.
04:24That's it.
04:25I'm not going to be.
04:26No, no, no.
04:26That's what I needed.
04:27Yeah, yeah.
04:28And it's the same thing.
04:29After September 11th.
04:31Yeah.
04:31You're on stage.
04:33You're not getting any laughs if you're talking about, like,
04:36hey, my girlfriend.
04:38You know.
04:38You ever try to hail a cab?
04:39Yeah, yeah.
04:40And you know who was destroying back then?
04:43I saw a benefit show at Carnegie Hall.
04:46The lineup was Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Bill Cosby,
04:52who wasn't a rapist yet.
04:52Yeah.
04:53It was, but no one knew.
04:54Yeah, yeah.
04:55He was probably raping somebody at night.
04:57Yeah, yeah, yeah.
04:57Okay.
04:58So he probably raped Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld at night.
05:05Bob Newhart.
05:06Wow.
05:07Will Ferrell.
05:08Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Cosby, Chris Rock, Bob Newhart.
05:11Will Ferrell is the host.
05:12Colin Quinn opens the show.
05:14Colin Quinn steals the show.
05:16Yeah.
05:17Because he talks about September 11th.
05:18He walks out and said, you ever have one of those guys who keeps putting
05:23themselves in the middle of September 11th and they had nothing to do with it?
05:26Right.
05:27These guys would be like, you know, if I was on the end train that morning,
05:29I wouldn't even be here.
05:30Really?
05:31Did you ever take the end train?
05:32Nope.
05:32But if I did that day, I wouldn't be here.
05:36And he destroyed because he acknowledged it.
05:40There was a lot of media that weekend.
05:42I was supposed to perform on September 14th and 15th of that weekend.
05:47I was supposed to perform at the theater at Madison Square Garden with Robert
05:50Schimmel and Bobby Slayton.
05:52Bobby Slayton, Bobby Slayton, listen, Bobby, do you want to talk like Bobby
05:56Slayton?
05:56You're going to talk like this.
05:57Just a couple words at a time.
05:59You're going to do it.
05:59Yeah.
06:00But the show got canceled.
06:02Both the shows got canceled.
06:04And Stuttering John was doing a show down the road here in Atlantic City.
06:07From Howard's show, yeah.
06:08From Howard's show.
06:09And Stuttering John said, he said, hey, can you, since your show is not
06:12happening, my show is still happening.
06:14Right.
06:14It's turned into a benefit show for first responders.
06:17Will you come down?
06:18And I said, I would love to.
06:19So I came down and did it and I performed at what turned into a benefit
06:22show.
06:22They had water jugs out, like big, the big, like, like the at work water
06:28jugs that people put coins in.
06:30And they said, you know, we're raising money.
06:32You can make donations.
06:34People filled those water jugs with a hundred dollar bills.
06:38There was tens of thousands of dollars in each one of these water jugs.
06:41That's crazy.
06:41I go back into the dressing room after this show and I'm hammered when
06:47someone says, hey, Donald's here.
06:49And I said, who's Donald?
06:51He said, Donald Trump's here.
06:52And I said, oh, OK.
06:53And Donald Trump walks in the room to say hello to all the comedians.
06:58And there's a bunch of members of the press.
07:02I am begging for anyone who was there that night to please contact me and come
07:07to the shows this week at Howie Mandel's at the new Hard Rock.
07:12Because what happened was something that was so easy to research on the Internet and it
07:18got scrubbed.
07:20You can't find a single photo.
07:21And there were hundreds of pictures of this on the Internet at one time.
07:26So Donald Trump walks in and the press, the guys in the press say, hey, Donald, you want
07:31to take a picture with the comedians who raised all the money tonight?
07:33And he goes, sure.
07:34And he walks over and starts saying hi.
07:35And then someone says, hey, this is the new guy.
07:37This is Craig Gass.
07:38And I go, hey, Donald.
07:39And I'm hammered.
07:39Yeah.
07:40And someone goes, hey, why don't we give, hey, Donald, you want to get him to hold the
07:43hold of the bottle jugs, the jug, the water jugs?
07:46Here, let Donald.
07:47And now they've handed these two massive water jugs full of cash to Donald, which kind
07:53of paralyzes him a little bit.
07:55It's a very awkward pose.
07:57And he can't move.
07:58And he's holding tens of thousands of dollars.
08:00And I'm looking at him and I go, hey, I got a picture.
08:03How about one of me on my knees for the money?
08:06And I got down in front of Donald and I grabbed his hips and just started going, oh, my God.
08:10I just started, you know, pantomiming, fellatio, and Donald can't move.
08:16And he's standing there like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.
08:19And there were hundreds of people.
08:24You could hear, like, everyone just started laughing.
08:27And you could.
08:29You need that picture.
08:30All you had to do was Google Craig Gass, Donald Trump, and you could find hundreds of images.
08:35And now it's been scrubbed from the Internet.
08:37And all those members of the media were right here.
08:41Sure.
08:41They were right here and in Atlantic City.
08:43Please contact me.
08:44Oh, man.
08:45Just to have that over your fireplace would be pretty cool.
08:46Wouldn't it?
08:47Yeah.
08:47Yeah.
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