popular thinking

JOKERS WILD: TONY V

(Interview conducted Dec. 21, 2005)
These could be the busiest two weeks of the year for Tony V.
He hosted holiday parties earlier this week at the Comedy Studio and the Comedy Connection, has entertained corporate parties, performs at Giggles tonight and will host the First Night Women of Comedy show on New Year’s Eve.
"People forget that this is when we work," he said. "They’ll go, 'Can you come to a party on Saturday night?' No!"
Tony V said he helped start the First Night comedy shows, which over the years have moved from Suffolk University to the State House ("that room is not actually conducive to comedy") to the Wang Center and now Hynes Convention Center.
"You’re basically in a plane hangar," he said. "The room we’re in is about as big as basically downtown Concord, New Hampshire. On one side of us there’s a band, on the other side there’s an ethnic thing. Everything is going on at the same time. I’d like to think it’s me (that draws the crowds), but it is First Night, and I’m not a mime. Not to cast aspersions, but at least we’re talking to them."
Tony V does cast aspersions toward Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey onstage, referring to her by a four-letter word that remains a comedy taboo (hint: it rhymes with cunt). Tony V said the holiday-themed club parties allowed for exceptions to the rule.
"That night is intended for us to do everything we couldn’t say," he said. "Which makes it all the worse. It’s like the Walsh Brothers up there, in the most ridiculous sweaters I’ve ever seen, blowing their dead grandmother’s ashes into the audience. Where else could you possibly see that?"
The holiday skits went over much better with the packed Comedy Studio crowd than with the meager group who showed up the next night at the Connection.
"We had something for everybody and they still didn’t get it," he said. "All I can do is chide them for that and make them feel bad."
But the comics all partied merrily together this week.
"It’s a good community still," Tony V said. "We did the Ding Ho reunion show (last weekend at Jimmy Tingle’s), which is completely different from anything else we do. Those are guys I only see once a year, if I see them at all . . . All of us sitting around, telling road stories as if they happened yesterday."
Unlike many of those comics, Tony V still likes to test his mettle with the young college crowds at the Comedy Studio.
"I think anyone who doesn’t do that is an idiot," he said. "You prove yourself every night. You don’t just close your office door and coast. When I get a room of 20-somethings to laugh about something that doesn’t involve their genitals, I feel good. It makes you a better comic and a better person."
He expects tonight’s crowd at Giggles to be ready to laugh, too, because it’s two nights before Christmas.
"That’s not a night you go, 'What do you feel like doing?' and wander into a place" for comedy, he said. "That’s good. People come in there with an expectation."
Which reminds him, he still needs to finish his Christmas shopping.
"I’m a last-minute guy because I work all the time," he said. "They don’t go on my schedule. I wish I could be like Oprah, have people open their stores for me at 3 in the morning."
Tony V will have to make do.
"Luckily for me there’s the Home Shopping Network and the knife channel," he said.
Knife channel?
"After 2 o’clock in the morning, it turns into the knife channel. You can literally get 120 knives for 30 bucks. Why shouldn’t everybody get a knife? Some of these are good knives. One of the guys hawking the knives is missing his middle two fingers. As he’s standing there pointing, you’re thinking, he stayed in that business a week too long."