Be forewarned: Bobby Slayton’s material is offensive to everyone. At times, even he seems appalled by it. “I can’t make jokes about my daughter’s period, can I? That’s not right.” But Slayton, who headlines at Hooters just off the Strip (that he was signed by that particular hotel chain should provide an idea of his target audience), survives and succeeds because he plays no favorites. His material cuts across all cultures, genres and genders. “I’m genuinely offended by the human race,” he says. “Everyone has let me down on every level: Religious people, fat people at the mall, minorities, my family, the president, my wife, everyone.” It was from that warped perspective that Slayton sat down to disassemble a few jokes he uses in rotation during his stand-up performances. We provide our take on the joke, on a scale of 1 to 10, on the official Las Vegas Weekly Laugh-O-Meter.
JOKE
“I hate it when you go to a Chinese restaurant and the waiter doesn’t speak English and just agrees with everything you say. I was in New York a few months ago, visiting my family, and we meet in Chinatown for dinner. My aunt Sheila, who looks like a typical old Jew from New York, who has her eyebrows shaved and drawn on her head, looking like a Klingon, who sounds like Jerry Lewis, is trying to talk to this waiter who does not speak English, let alone old-Jew English. And my aunt is saying, ‘Oh, I don’t waaahnt pork. Is there pork in heah? WHA-A-A-A-A-H!’ And the waiter is going, ‘Yah-yah-yah! You want pork? You want pork?’ ‘No, I don’t waaahnt pork! I don’t waaaahnt spicy!’ ‘You want spicy-pork? Spicy-pork? Eight ninety-five! Eight ninety-five!’ ‘I don’t waaaahnt the pork! What are you, deaf?!’ This is going on for 20 minutes, back and forth, like this battle of ancient cultures. You ever get these guys who, all they do, is agree with whatever you ask them? ‘Sir, I’ve got my kids with me. Is it spicy? Is it sweet and sour?’ ‘Oooh, yessir! Spicy-sour! Good! You get that!’ ‘Are their crayons in this?’ ‘Ooooh, everything crayon-good! Yessir! Crayon-vegetable good, yah-yah!’ ‘Hey, you know your head is on fire? You know that?’ ‘Oh, yah! Everything head-on-fire, yah-yah! Ooooh, boy! Head on fire!’”
BACK STORY: “I used to go to this place in New York that had a Polynesian theme to it, tikis all over the place—I really liked it. It doesn’t exist anymore, but there was a waiter there who did not speak English and just repeated everything. So I said once, ‘Are there crayons in this? You know your head’s on fire?’ and he nodded. The rest, about my family and my aunt, was made up.”
JOKE
“You know those urinals that are lower than the others? The ones that look like they are for little kids? They aren’t! They’re for black guys!”
BACK STORY: “I was actually at a urinal—probably at the low urinal—when I thought of that. It’s funny, because black guys in my audience love that joke. They like the stuff where I talk about them being well-endowed. But only half the audience will get that joke, because women don’t have much experience with urinals.”
JOKE
“I won a bunch of money here at Hooters, so I treated my wife to a romantic weekend. I got her a suite with a bubble bath, took her on a helicopter ride to the Grand Canyon, where we renewed our vows, took her to the Fashion Show Mall to buy her a bracelet, a romantic dinner. We’re walking along the Strip and we see these people holding hands, and she says, ‘That’s so romantic. Why don’t you ever hold my hand?’ Hold your hand? Why? What are you, a chimp? Are you afraid to cross the street? I need my hands—I might want to flip someone off, pay for something. Why don’t you hold my [male member]?”
BACK STORY: “We had seen someone holding hands once, and she said that. I built a story around that, about winning at Hooters, all this stuff you could do in Las Vegas that would be romantic, so the audience is with me and following me all the way through the bit. There are a lot of couples in the audience who are usually in town for a romantic weekend, so it works.”
JOKE
“I had a porno star in the audience the other night, and she really doesn’t like performing sex scenes. She says, ‘I fake my orgasms, I can’t wait for this guy to get off me, and all I can think about is getting paid and having dinner later.’ I said, ‘Wow! I’m married to a porno star!’”
BACK STORY: “This popped into my head one night after I had a couple of porno stars in my audience. No lie. I knew who they were. I’m a fan. I’m not crazy about it, but I knew them, and we had a drink after the show and she said exactly that. The joke just came to me after she said it.”
JOKE
“Several years ago there was a movie called White Men Can’t Jump. Everybody thought that was funny—white men can’t jump! And it’s true, white men can’t jump. I can’t jump. But you would never, ever, get away with calling a movie Black People Can’t Seem to Shut the [Bleep] Up in a Movie Theater.”
BACK STORY: “I was in the theater when that movie came out, and I think I thought of that then. It might have been that someone said it to me. But if Dave Chappelle can talk about white people, George Lopez can talk about white people, I should be able to talk about black people. That joke sets up my whole act. Again, it’s a joke that black people in my audience laugh at. I’ve used it forever, since that movie came out.”
JOKE
“Jewish women—listen to them some time. Listen to Fran Drescher [in an over-exaggerated Fran Drescher voice], ‘Heeelloooow! Heeeelloooow!’ I think Jewish women are the single biggest cause of homosexuality in the country.”
BACK STORY: “I use a couple of Jew jokes. I almost have to, because of the nature of my material, because I am Jewish, I should have Jew jokes, too. But I’m not like a Woody Allen or Jackie Mason, who use it as the basis for their whole act. It’s just a part of it.”
JOKE
“I see these moving walkways taking people into the Mirage. They’re going 0.1 miles per hour. Are we getting so fat and lazy that we’re unable to even walk around? Pretty soon we’re going to have moving walkways around the buffets! I see people coming away from these buffets looking like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, just piling it on. I want to tell them, ‘You can go back! They are not going to take it from you!’”
BACK STORY: “Some of this stuff I come up with just by observing people, walking around, and I feel obligated to make jokes about it.”
JOKE
“My wife loves foreplay, and I hate it. What’s the point? I don’t need foreplay. I don’t use it when I masturbate, do I? No! [runs hands over chest, pinches his nipples] It’s totally unnecessary!”
BACK STORY: “My sex life with my wife is a constant source of material. It’s not because we don’t like to have sex, or that she’s not hot or anything like that. It’s because we are never in the mood at the same time, and I don’t need foreplay! Don’t need it.”