Since I never watch New Year’s Eve specials anymore – or not really ever, I watched Kathy Griffin for five seconds once and nearly killed myself – I missed Mariah Carey’s turd as it happened. I checked it out the next day and made two determinations. 1) The lip sync backup failed and 2) She couldn’t deal with it. Long story short, she wasn’t prepared.
Not that I am anywhere close to Mariah Carey in any aspect of my life, but I have a similar experience. No, not that I told jokes and the tape cracked as I stood on Times Square in front of millions on TV and thousands in person…more like 30 people. In rural Pennsylvania. With no camera. OK, it’s not very similar, but here’s what happened.
I hadn’t done a show in a month. Early on, I prided myself on practicing my sets, but I got a bit lazy. I also had a fiasco before the show. I showed up at a Bed and Breakfast that was the room they booked. For those that don’t know, that’s a house with an extra room. I walked in and the family was going to dinner. The guy was all kinds of pissed that I was there – turns out the dumb booker changed hotels and had emailed me, which I missed driving through the gaping hole of communication that is middle PA. I thankfully ran out – the guy’s four year kid was hiding in the room, which was a nice surprise as I unpacked my bag that made me want to sleep in my car – and went to the hotel.
All that meant I had NO time to prepare and hit a cold, cavernous stage. I realized instantly I was rusty as hell. I flubbed and babbled my way through punchlines and stuttered for nearly ten minutes until I got back in my zone. Luckily for me, the headliner that night sang parody songs for 45 minutes, so I looked like a champion, but I haven’t been that bad onstage outside of the first year I did comedy.
In summation, I think Mariah Carey was so ill-prepared, she couldn’t handle the screw-up, so she babbled like an ass and had no clue. She’s got more money than everyone else in Times Square combined, so I get it – no exactly slugging out the rehearsals, but come on. Of course, give me a couple million or so and I would probably be 400 pounds and drunk in about a week. The production team would have to wheel me out on a hospital bed and slap the bourbon bottle from my hand to get me to tell four jokes. Maybe I don’t blame her after all.