Making a Living as a White Male

Jeff Wayne, stand-up comic, stomps through the minefield of political correctness. He announces, first off, that he likes to drink and is fed up with people going through rehab.

“How do you like these phony baloney Hollywood celebrities?” Here he mimics their whimper--part confession, part boast: “ ‘I’ve been to Betty Ford! I’ve been to Betty Ford!’

“So have I,” Jeff Wayne says. “I always drive by and throw a six-pack over the wall. . . . ‘Test your faith.’ That’s what I tell them, by God.”

The audience laughed loud and hard. From there, Wayne moved on to rabid anti-smokers, then anti-red-meat-eaters, then animal rights activists. Then he went after bigger game--militant gays, feminists, minorities. Wayne, in case you haven’t figured it out, is a straight white male, and not apologetic in the least.

Dave Drozen, who won six Grammys producing Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx and George Carlin for Laff Records, watched from the back of Pasadena’s Ice House as technicians recorded Wayne’s performance for the first compact disc on newly minted Uproar Entertainment. The CD will be out by the end of January with the title: “It’s OK to Be a White Male.”

*

A few days after Jeff Wayne’s sold-out performance at the Ice House, Republicans swept to victory across the land. More than any other demographic group, straight white males were responsible for this phenomenon. For many white guys out there, the ballot was a way of saying--after decades of activism and government action promoting minority rights, women’s rights, gay rights, after years of wearing a muzzle of political correctness--the playing field looks pretty level from here, so enough is enough.

USC law professor Susan Estrich, long active in Democratic Party politics, summed it up in an essay in the Dec. 18 New York Times magazine. Titled “The Last Victim,” the Estrich article told how her cousin, Ben, described as neither a racist nor a sexist, believes “that equality has been achieved and that women and minorities are now seeking special benefits at the expense of white men like him. He thinks white guys can’t get jobs anymore. He’s afraid that if his house burns down, he won’t be rescued because the firefighter will be a woman who can’t lift him. In his view, this is what the Democratic Party has come to stand for.”

Newt Gingrich must have seen this coming--that the time would come that the grumbling over such programs as affirmative action and minority set-asides would ring out like a chorus at the polls. Such programs, after all, were never promoted as permanent fixtures of the social landscape but as temporary corrective measures. The birth of such programs was painful and bloody, so it’s hard to imagine that their demise will be painless and bloodless.

Jeff Wayne’s job, meanwhile, is to find the humor in all this. Still, there are moments when he sounds like he’s running for office.

“It is definitely wrong to deny a woman or a minority a job based on that,” he declared. “But it is also wrong, in my belief, to give them a job based on that. I believe somebody should be given a job based on: Can they do the job?”

The line got a lot of applause. And it set up a punch line.

“If I’m going in for brain surgery, I don’t care if you’re a . . . dolphin.” And here his voice trembles with fear: “ Make me well. “

The angry white male and the fearful white male are often one and the same.

*

A kernel of truth, a bit of recognition, is required for a joke to succeed. “I’m like everybody in this room. I didn’t get to pick the time period I was born in. I didn’t get to pick my race or my gender. . . . I believe we’re all created equal. . . I tell all women and minorities, ‘Don’t blame me for the past. You want to dig up my grandpa and kick his ass? You go right ahead.’ ”

How much of Wayne’s routine is an act? Not much, it seems.

Jeff Wayne is a 38-year-old family man who, when he isn’t on the road, lives in Arleta with his wife and kids. His is just about the only white family on the block, he says. He’s so conservative that he thinks Pete Wilson is a disgrace to the Republican Party. On the other hand, he didn’t like Proposition 187, either. To him, the choice between Feinstein and Huffington “was like choosing between syphilis and gonorrhea.”

He tells one joke about his son’s teacher who refused to enlighten the kids about Christopher Columbus because “it was distressing to Native Americans.” Instead, the teacher lectured on the creator of tollhouse cookies.

The story, he swears, is entirely true.