Bio

The Short Version: You may have seen me on the Weather Channel with Lewis Black making sarcastic comments about the rain in Orlando. You may have read some of my nationally published humor. Or perhaps I’ve already chatted you up by the magazine rack at Publix. None of that matters now because it’s time you saw me in my natural habitat, a comedy club swarming with drunk people and waitresses pushing strong drinks and chicken fingers. I’m known for regaling the crowd with humorous fun-facts, self-help tidbits and pseudo intellectual, high-energy, buffoonery that would more than likely get most people permanently banned from Toastmasters. I’m a man of letters with a BA, an MBA and ADHD. And I’ve never met a stranger I didn’t freak out. In sum, I can’t wait to make you laugh and/or get this look on your face like you just bit into an over-ripened banana or a tainted cocktail peanut. In case you care, I’m eligible to reapply to Toastmasters in 2015. But why bother? I decided to join Rotary Club instead.

The Long Version: I was born in Winston Salem, North Carolina and raised by a pack of wolves who closely resembled very pale, secular Episcopalians. Several incidents colored my early years and virtually guaranteed that I would seek redemption and amusement by entertaining strangers in a number of different public forums. At age 5, I suffered my first head injury when my brother pounded me over the noggin with a wind-up ukulele after a Big Wheel ownership dispute turned ugly. Shortly thereafter I fell off a stationery Shetland pony at a birthday party. All of the parents came to my aid while my mother laughed her ass off. I later moved to Florida after my mom married some sleazy Navy guy. Who would have thought a Vietnam vet with a fetish for young Asian spin basket acrobats would have been a poor fit for domestic tranquility in the suburbs of Jacksonville, Florida? (He was last seen on Intervention chasing a shirtless Honduran around wearing nothing but cut-off sweat pants. For what it’s worth, one of the spin basket acrobats is now managing Dhat Phan.) The mean streets of Jacksonville provided little respite for a clumsy boy. And the hands of fate responded abundantly by playing patty cake with my cerebral cortex. Not only was I thrown off a motor-cross bike, I also banged my forehead on some slippery monkey bars. The latter incident rendered me temporarily blind; and for ten years I went around telling anyone who would listen that the cartilage in my nose was actually made of small potatoes. When I was 9 my mom hired a sullen and very butch female baby sitter who walked around strumming a black electric guitar. Every ten minutes she would look me right in the eye, rip a dramatic power cord and proclaim, “You’re the reason lesbians never smile.” Despite this rocky start and my naive befuddlement over her terminology, we reconnected 20 years later when I was selling used Jackrabbits at Lilith Fair. It’s important to recycle. I’m green that way. I had a brief career smoking pot and decided to quit when I kept on striking out in T-ball. It was embarrassing because I was 13 at the time. I also grew tired of the moniker “Jed The Head.” In retrospect the pot was probably self-medication for ADHD but it was 1977 and Ritalin wasn’t trendy at the time. The summer of 1979 ended an era of southern fried delinquency when my family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut to live with my grandmother, Constance Ludington AKA “Yummy.” She exposed me to an amazing education, both academic and musical, which gave me the inspiration and the tools to mine humor out of anything. Why we called her “Yummy” is still a mystery.