Goodbye, Ron

After an extended - and very public - battle with cancer, stand-up comic Ron Shock died yesterday.
   

I hadn't seen Ron in twenty years.  But from 1984 to 1986 I was the house booking agent at the Comedy Workshop in Houston, Texas.  This made me the de facto agent for Ron Shock, Bill Hicks, Brett Butler, and a host of lesser-known comics.  So, for two years, I dealt with Ron Shock on an almost-daily basis.

The relationship between an agent and the talent he/she represents is often fractious.  Rightly or wrongly, if the talent isn't as successful as he/she wants to be, the agent is often blamed.
  

At the time, Ron Shock was stuck in the middle spot.  (For those of you who have never been to a comedy show, it traditionally has at least three acts: the MC, the middle act, and the headliner.)  Ron, of course, wanted to be the headliner.

Of course, I wasn't the owner of the Comedy Workshop.  I had a boss to answer to, and he felt that Ron Shock's long-winded storytelling act wasn't ready for the headline spot.  I agreed.

You see, Ron wasn't a conventional stand-up comic.  He didn't do the usual setup-punchline-tag sequence that most comics use.  He told funny stories.  Consequently, the laughs were further apart.

Later in his career, Ron learned to get the audience liking him in the first half of his act.  THEN he told his long stories, when they were on his side.  But in 1984 he hadn't mastered that.  Instead, he argued with me.  Sometimes he just came at me like a child, repeating the same demand, over and over.  It wasn't pleasant.  At one point, after he publicly excoriated my own stand-up act (yes, I was a performer, too), the Artistic Manager of the Comedy Workshop made Ron call me the next day and apologize.  Which Ron did, sincerely.

He must have had some respect for my talents, though, because he and Bill Hicks got together and asked me to become their personal, exclusive agent.  Hicks said that "the reason you're not promoting us enough is that you have all these other duties at the Comedy Workshop."  (Getting work for our stable of comics was secondary to other duties, such as booking acts into the Comedy Workshop's rooms in Houston and Austin.)

I politely declined.  In truth, I couldn't think of a less-secure income than trying to get booking commissions out of these guys.  This was the 1980s, when drugs were rampant.  Most of these comics were full-time performers, with their entire days free...yet they could barely get organized enough to meet for breakfast at a diner at 3 pm!  They didn't really need me; they had more than enough free time to book and promote themselves.  (Some of the more business-like comics, like Fred Greenlee, did just that.)

Eventually, I quit the Comedy Workshop and left Houston.  Despite some bad encounters with Ron Shock, I was pleased to find that, years later, he had made it to the headline spot.  I was delighted when Ron appeared on "The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson"—the last new comic to be introduced on the show during Carson's reign.

And now Ron Shock is gone, along with Bill Hicks and Johnny Carson himself.

But, in the photo above, you'll notice that Ron Shock is wearing a tee-shirt with a skeleton on it.  He had them printed up and sold them at some shows.  The logo - which you can't see - is "You're gonna die anyway."

Ron Shock was right about that, too.