Clark: Comedian Jay Wendell Walker is primed for an old school Spokane roasting
Now 74, this sad old bag of bones would be lucky to flip a light switch without throwing his spine out of alignment.
Did that sound snarky and snide?
I hope so. I’m practicing for next Tuesday night at the Spokane Comedy Club, 315 W. Sprague Ave.
Walker has invited me to join a number of his pals and other reprobates who will attempt to dismantle the veteran comedian’s character in an old school comedy roast.
When it comes to the roasting format, snarky and snide are just the starting points.
(Doors open at 7 p.m. with the show to follow at 8. Tickets range from $10 to $16 online at www.spokanecomedyclub.com and a bit more at the door. Proceeds from the event will go to the Second Harvest regional food bank.)
“We can handle being insulted,” Walker said when I asked why comedians are always roasting each other. “It’s really a compliment when other comedians like you well enough to question your gender, insult your sexuality or just strip and filet you.”
Walker should know. The veteran Spokane comic has been the main course for previous roasts in Seattle, Minneapolis and here.
Walker is an irreverent riot, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.
In 2006, he won the prestigious San Francisco International Comedy Competition, a multiweek affair that drew 30 far younger contestants.
Robin Williams, Dana Carvey and Ellen DeGeneres are all past finalists for the event.
Walker later discovered he was leading the contest throughout. “But I wasn’t paying attention,” he said. “I was just having a good time.”
Walker was just 5 years old when he caught the comedy bug.
“I sat on a balloon. It popped. And all the adults laughed. That was it for me.”
He entered the world of stand-up comedy in 1960 as an untested 18-year-old.
A booking agent told him if he could do five minutes without crying for his mommy he’d help get him on his way.
Walker did his five minutes, although his lack of material showed. The audience was quieter than relatives viewing a body in a mortuary.
“I thought they were polite.”
Walker, however, was undeterred. Soon he was appearing locally in Spokane clubs and then on tour, performing 40 to 50 weeks a year.
Few things are more fun than listening to an old comic tell his war stories from the road.
Take the compliment Walker said he got from Frank Sinatra after he finished a particularly grueling and early-hour show in Lake Tahoe.
“Tough gig,” Sinatra told him, “but you carried it off, kid.”
Walker said he was so flummoxed by Sinatra that he turned and walked straight into a pole, breaking his nose.
And how about the indelible memory Walker has of hanging out in Engelbert Humperdink’s hotel room while the singer readied himself to perform?
Walker said the star slipped into “pants that were so tight I thought they were sprayed on.”
Then with an obviously practiced move, Humperdink rolled up a sock and shoved it down the front of his britches.
“Aren’t you worried about athlete’s foot?” quipped the comedian with lightning speed.
Sadly, this epic joke really did fall on deaf ears.
The singer, Walker learned, was extremely hard of hearing from decades on stage with loud bands.
Strip joints. Rank dives. Walker’s career exposed him to a lot of seamy scenes.
When he was young, for example, Walker said he found himself performing three times a night at Seattle’s Colony Club for $150 a week.
The added insult was that Walker was also required to be the maître d’ when he wasn’t cracking jokes.
“I was hired for two weeks and held over three years,” snapped the comic. “I changed tuxedos, so a lot of the customers thought I was twins.”
From there, he said, he graduated to an illegal bottle club run by a low-level mobster named Frank.
“He wore his shirts open to his belly and a lot of gold chains,” Walker recalled, adding the audience was made up mostly of “pimps and whores.”
Walker’s time there ended when one of the patrons “breaks a bottle and guts a guy.”
Walker stood on stage in a petrified condition until Frank told him to make a run for it.
“I always got my money. I always minded my own business,” Walker said. “That’s why I have nothing against organized crime.”
Tuesday’s roast is organized by Walker’s 30-year-old son, Adam Lee, who is following in his dad’s comedy boot prints.
“He’s so talented,” said the proud father. “And he’s ambidextrous. He thinks out of both sides of his brain.”
Walker said he believes Adam has the talent to make it to the top, which is why he recently advised him to leave our lilac wonderland and take his comedy chops to the Big Apple.
Sinatra, of course, is famous for saying that if you can make it there you can make it anywhere.
But Walker claimed he has another reason for sending Adam to NYC.
“I told him he won’t have to worry about getting rectal cancer in New York,” the comic said. “Because nobody there’ll blow smoke up your …”
And that’s probably about all the comedy this family newspaper can take for today.
Doug Clark is a columnist for The Spokesman-Review. He can be reached at (509) 459-5432 or by email at dougc@spokesman.com.