Work Text:
[Transcript of Richie Tozier's taped Netflix special, Hold My Fanny Pack, recorded October 25th 2019, released December 1st 2019]
[the lights go up. Richie Tozier walks onto the stage of the stage to audience applause and cheers, and takes his place next to the mic stand. He’s quite obviously had a recent haircut, and is actually wearing a pretty nice dark red blazer, but his white t-shirt says ‘Baby Slut’ in bright red Comic Sans, and his Converse All Stars have seen better days, like 1996. The audience continues applauding as Richie bows performatively, removes the mic from the stand and steps forward.]
How the fuck are you guys? I’d say I’m surprised to see so many of you here, but I’ve been reliably informed that my last special actually broke streaming records, so that would be a lie. [the audience cheers, and he curtsies] Yes, thank you, thank you. It’s been amazing, actually. You know how easy it is to win an argument now? People don’t even try it with me any more. They know that my answer to every single point is just gonna be the fact that I have a record-breaking comedy special, so they know not to bother. Except for my boyfriend, who will always try it. He’ll be all [he does his best Eddie voice; it’s better than last time, but still sounds like he has a perpetual head cold] “Rich, do you think maybe, for once in your life, you could stack the dishes when you put them away so that they don’t all come crashing down on my fucking head whenever I open the cupboard? I’m tired of embracing death every time I try and find a bowl,” and I’ll be like “babe, I would love to do that, but my comedy special actually broke streaming records, so you’ll have to speak to my manager first.” [laughter] And then he’ll take all the dishes out of the cupboard and stack them in the neatest fucking pile on top of my laptop, or in my sock drawer, or in the driver’s seat of my car, because my boyfriend has the perseverance of a fucking World War Two general and the pettiness of a six year old girl. So maybe he does win most of the time, actually. [laughter]
So, I didn’t tell you all before, but my boyfriend died. Don’t worry, he got better. [smattering of audience laughter] Wow, only like, eight of you got that reference. The rest of you can go fuck yourselves. You’re dead to me. Never darken my door again until you’ve acquainted yourselves with the classics. Jesus. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. I was telling you about my dead boyfriend, who is no longer dead, thankfully. A bit like Jesus, actually, although my boyfriend doesn’t like being compared to Jesus. I think it’s the sandals. Eddie would never wear sandals, on account of the foot fungus thing. And on the eighth day, God created athlete’s foot. [laughter] Anyway, I think it’s very sexy of him, actually, subverting the old ‘Bury Your Gays’ trope like that. Because like, yeah, he did do the really obvious thing and die, but then he was like, fuck you, queerphobic narrative convention! Not this bisexual man! And he came back to life. After, like, extensive CPR, followed by a three month hospital stay and two major surgeries, because, as many of you now know, being stabbed by an escaped cannibal serial killer is pretty bad for your health. But it still counts. And now he very sexily has a pulse and everything, and it’s pretty rad. I probably wouldn’t still be dating him if he didn’t get his pulse back, honestly. That might be shallow of me, I don’t know. Is it necrophobic to have a preference for people with pulses?
I can see that some of you are uncomfortable with the idea of laughing at my dead boyfriend. Don’t worry. I fully have my boyfriend’s permission to joke about his undead state. You’re gonna think I’m talking out of my ass there, but he actually asked me to joke about it. He did! He literally sat me down one afternoon and he was like, “you know that time I died?” which honestly, the fact that this is even a conversation that we’re able to have - that’s pretty fucked up, right? I don’t know any other couple who can open a conversation with that. “You know that time I died?” What the fuck kind of opener is that? Anyway, I was like, “yeah, babe, I was there and it was very traumatic for me, what about it?” and he was like, “my therapist says we have to talk about it so that we don’t get locked in a cycle of trauma that ultimately culminates in a phobia of the inevitable,” and I was like, “cool, that’s super cool, I feel like your therapist is wasting all of her best advice on the undead hordes, though,” and then he rolled his eyes and he was like, "beats me wasting all my money on your sister," and then I was legally obliged to high five him. [laughter] I know the law.
And now it’s great! It’s opened a whole new world of jokes, and he can’t even complain about them, because he fucking asked for it. We’ll be watching some zombie movie, like World War Z or something, and I’ll wait for a really tense part, where the zombies are all running towards Brad Pitt and trying to tear chunks off his pecs - and honestly, mood - and then I’ll just lean over to Eddie and be like, “is that one you, Eds? Can’t believe you didn’t tell me you were in this one,” and then he’ll elbow me and shout at me, “that’s not even fucking funny, asshole, I wish I’d stayed dead so that I didn’t have to hear your dumb fucking jokes,” but then we’re watching The Babadook [audience member cheers] - yes, it’s great, deserves way more than 6.8 on IMDB if you ask me, not that anyone did - and the first time the Babadook comes on screen, Eddie looks at me with this total shit-eating grin on his face, and he just says - [he starts laughing, has to wipe his eyes] he says, “you look really good in this scene, Rich, did you get a tan?” and I just want to, fucking, stand on a bench in a park and sing about how much I love him, and play Power of Love by Celine Dion on a boombox. He’s so perfect.
Life’s been pretty good since my zombie boyfriend was raised from the dead. I have a record-breaking comedy special [audience cheers] and Eddie is now a Twitter celebrity, which is honestly hilarious. I give it, like, two years before he’s a more famous comedian than I am, and he’ll deserve it completely. But you know, there’s more to life than fame. We’re still just two forty-eurgh year old dudes with varying degrees of backache. We had a cat. Now we don’t have a cat. [audience awws] No, it’s not sad! The cat is very happily living with our buddy Bev Marsh. Between you and me, I think it might have designed her upcoming Autumn collection, but don’t tell her I told you. Anyway, we got the cat because - OK, my boyfriend found it in a dumpster. That part is sad. My boyfriend was walking home from - oh my God, from his fucking pottery class, what the actual fuck? How am I so in love with him? He’s such a nerd. He doesn’t even do the obvious thing, by the way, and make, like, clay dicks. Which is clearly what any well-adjusted person would do. No, he makes, like, little vases and dishes and shit, and every time he comes home from one of those classes and presents me with a new saucer shaped like a fucking sunflower, I have to excuse myself and just scream at a wall for ten minutes, because how the fuck am I supposed to live with that? It’s just too cute. I absolutely hate it. [laughter]
Although he did once make a key holder shaped like a little tortoise, and not only do I love it in the way that my friend Staniel loves his six year old’s shitty finger paintings and sticks them all up on his fridge and makes me say nice things about them whenever the kid’s in earshot, like “the post-structuralist nature of this painting is perhaps best evidenced by the artist’s bold choice to make her family bright green and also inexplicably give them all four arms, she’s clearly an artistic genius and definitely isn’t implying that she’s a hostile alien from Mars on a kill mission,” but it’s also the single most useful item that I own, because my previous key holder was just behind my couch cushions. Anyway, as I was saying, he was coming home from his terrible, awful pottery class, probably full of white women named Taylah and, fucking, Bree-Lakynn, and he heard a noise from a trashcan, and he looked inside, because he wants to get murdered someday. Again. Eddie Kaspbrak: You Only Live Twice. And inside that trashcan was this cat. And so Eddie took it home, because despite having a rampant case of Resting Bitch Face, my boyfriend has a heart of cotton candy. It’s probably, like, my fifth favourite thing about him. I’ll leave you to deduce the first four things. [audience laughs] Yeah, the fanny packs are top of the list. Not that he's worn one in, like, twenty five years. I've tried telling him that it's a hate crime not to wear them, but then he'll say it's bi erasure to try and make him do it, and there's no way I'm winning that argument. [laughter]
Anyway, for context, my boyfriend’s mom - look, there’s not much I can say about his mom without this turning into a therapy session, so I’ll just say that she and Dee-Dee Blanchard are currently exchanging parenting tips in Hell. [audience laughs] She told my boyfriend that he had all these ridiculous allergies growing up, like grass and nuts and having a healthy female role model. So he spent the first, like, fifteen years of his life absolutely convinced that he was allergic to half the known world, and probably about a third of the unknown. Dude used to freak the fuck out if you ate a peanut in the same state as him. [laughter] I’m not kidding! One time he tried to get out of a school visit to a dairy farm by saying that he was lactose intolerant. And like, he is actually slightly lactose intolerant, but it’s not like he looks at a cow and shits himself. So he had to go to the dairy farm, and I think he found his kin, because at last he could gaze into eyes as brown and soulful as his.
But anyway, his mom always said that he was allergic to cats, and he just never questioned it, because [he does jazz hands] that’s childhood trauma, baby. But then he, like, grew up, and he started trying all the shit that he’d always been too afraid to try before, because my boyfriend is basically the bravest person in the world, after Dwayne The Rock Johnson, and also a very good cook, it turns out, when he’s allowed to use more than, like, two ingredients. So he can eat nuts now - no, that joke is too obvious, stop it - and yoghurt, and life is great. Except that it turns out that, of all the things she lied about, being allergic to cats was not one of them. [audience laughs] He’s so allergic! He took this disgusting trash cat into our beautiful home, and by day two he was sneezing so hard that even I wanted to wear a hazmat suit around him. He once sneezed directly into my open mouth when we were making out, and I very nearly lost my erection. [audience laughs] Yeah, only nearly. He’s just that hot. And let me tell you, it takes a lot to get me to want to stay away from my boyfriend, but that cat just about did it. So we gave it to Bev, and they’re very happy together, and I can have sex again. [audience cheers]
And you know what’s weird? The number of people who we’ve told about the cat, and they’re just like, “oh, so you’ll be having a kid next, then!” Like my boyfriend being allergic to cats is a good reason to have a kid! Well, having a cat didn’t work out, so I guess we’d better procreate. It’s the next logical step. No! It isn’t, Susan! Is that a straight people thing? Are you all out there having kids because your cats are assholes who make you sneeze? That’s not a good reason! At all! And I resent the idea, you know, that we have to have kids now, just because we’re in our mid 40s and our bodies are slowly crumbling to dust. [audience laughs] Yeah, yeah, I can’t climb a set of stairs without wincing any more, but the night is fucking young, all right? I’ve decided that we’re gonna become dads when we’re 70. That’s my goal. There are so many benefits to that, and absolutely no negatives. I want to be the dad who picks his kid up from preschool on one of those fucking awesome motorised scooters - [he does his kid voice; it’s surprisingly accurate] “your dad has a shitty Prius? Ugh, how embarrassing. Such a Dad Car. Mine has a Scooterpac, so fuck you!” - and then we’ll go get pizza, because it’ll be the only thing that Eddie and I can eat now that we have to, like, gum our food and everything firmer than bread is a choking hazard, and then we’ll die before we have to live with a shitty teenager or pay for college. Winners all round. [laughter]
But it’s OK, actually, because there is one good thing about people constantly asking us when we’re going to have kids, and it’s this: it’s a great opportunity to make people real fucking uncomfortable. You’re gonna put me on the spot like that? Fuck you, I’m gonna put you on an even shittier spot. I’m gonna put you in a spot that’s so full of shit, you’ll fucking choke on it. Just look the person asking dead in the eye, get some tears going by thinking about the time I almost lost my erection with Eddie in my lap, and say, “Well, we’ve been going without condoms for a while now, but neither one of us has got pregnant yet. Maybe we’ve timed the window wrong, you know? I have one of those tracking apps, but it’s just not doing its job. One time, we thought maybe this is it, this is the time we finally get pregnant, but it turned out that my lactose-intolerant boyfriend had just treated himself to too much cheese on a pizza the previous evening. It’s really wearing us down. And you know, we’re trying. We’re fucking like rabbits on Viagra at John Mayer’s house, not even an ounce of birth control between us. There’s jizz absolutely everywhere, our house reeks of it at this point. You can’t even put your mug down on a surface without it getting stuck to the coffee table, and still not even a hint of a pregnancy. Thanks so much for asking, though.” ‘Are you having kids yet?’ Fuck you, is what we’re having, with a side helping of mind your own fucking business, Karen. [laugher]
Straight people are just the worst. Any straights in here tonight? [a few cheers; he wrinkles his nose] Ugh. Disgusting. Coming to my wholesome, family friendly show and spreading your straight agenda. You should be ashamed of yourselves. I’m kidding, obviously. I like some straight people. Maybe, like, six of them. And five of them are my childhood best friends, and they’re all very gay straight people, honestly. [audience laughter] They are! They’re straight people, but they just get it. They’re honorary gays.
Like Stan, for example. His full, legal name is Staniel Urine, but he goes by Stan, for some reason. [laughter] Stan is my absolute main man. I think the best way to quickly explain Stan is to tell you all that I bought him a 2000 piece jigsaw for Hanukkah last year with a picture of a blue footed booby on it, and he was absolutely fucking delighted. He sent me a photograph of him doing a thumbs up next to the completed thing in like, two days, and didn’t even comment on the fact that I’d specifically chosen a bird with the word ‘booby’ in its name, that’s how happy he was. He just nodded when I gave it to him and said “ah, sula nebouxii, a rare find,” and then didn’t say anything for like ten minutes while he fact-checked the box, and I nearly exorcised him. Staniel’s sense of humour is so dry that he’s basically a fire hazard. We were at Bev’s Christmas party last year and I gave Staniel my drink to hold, just while I really quickly made out with Eddie under the mistletoe for, like, fifteen minutes, and when I went back to get my drink, Stan handed me back an empty glass and said “your main orifice was occupied and I didn’t fancy my chances with the other one, so I drank your lemonade.” [audience laughs] No, don’t laugh at that! He’s an asshole! It wasn’t even lemonade, it was an elderflower pressé, and Eddie had got it for me because he’d read that elderflower is good for bowel health and he knew that we were gonna be eating a lot of red meat, and he wanted to be able to share a bed with me that night without fucking dying of asphyxiation. So Stan could have literally killed Eddie, is what I’m saying. [audience laughs, applauds] Don’t applaud that! My boyfriend has already died once.
Stan is also my accountant. He’s actually super in demand in the world of accountancy - I know, right, he’s so fucking lame - so I really lucked out when he said he’d be mine. It was actually a really laborious interview process, by which I mean that he came to my house once while Eddie was away on a business trip, and he found my folder of tax paperwork, and he nearly punched me in the face. And by ‘found my folder of tax paperwork’, I mean he stayed in our guest room and found all of my receipts from that year hidden under the mattress, and then he spent all night putting them into date order and making notes of all the deductibles, whatever the fuck those are, and then he woke me up at 6am the next morning, frogmarched me over to the kitchen table, and sat opposite me and stared at me without blinking for six minutes before threatening to call the IRS. So obviously, when he agreed to do it for me, I asked him what all the sweet tax loopholes were, and he gave me this disgusted look and he was like, “Richie, I’m not going to help you become a tax evader. That’s what marriage is for. Also, stop trying to claim Reeses Pieces as deductibles,” and that was when I knew he was the accountant for me. [laughter]
Staniel is a good Jew. He let them cut his dick off and everything. Me, I put the ‘ish’ in ‘Jewish’. [laughter] I’m, like, a challah Jew. I’ll turn up to any religious occasion if there’s bread. Staniel can make the bread. I just eat it. I’m like someone’s infirm Jewish grandma, just sitting in the corner eating bread with the other old ladies and talking about how cute Mrs Saunders’ grandson is nowadays. I was, like, ten years old before I knew that a kippah wasn’t just a type of fish. I thought that the Sabbath was just the one day of the week you actually bathed. My mom’s Jewish and my dad is just, like, a Mets fan, so we didn’t observe any of the religious stuff. My Jewish upbringing basically consisted of not even owning a menorah, exchanging baseball cards for Hanukkah with Manly Stanley, and pretending that I’d never even seen a foreskin so that I didn’t feel bad about raiding the bread table at Stanley’s bar mitzvah. [laughter] I’m barely even Jewish, is what I’m saying.
And when Eddie and I started dating - oh my God, you guys, he’s the cutest, and no, you can’t have him, he’s mine, I lost the receipt - he did this whole thing where he wanted to [he makes air quotations with his fingers] connect with me to my Jewish heritage. It was adorable. Except I’m so shitty at being Jewish that he now knows more than I do. He asked me what halakha was once and I just shrugged and I was like, “I don’t know, babe, isn’t that the dance that the New Zealand rugby team do to scare the shit out of people?” and he was like “that’s the fucking haka, dickwad, and it’s sacred to the Māori, so fuck you,” and then we spent like two hours on Skype to Stan as he explained halakha to us. Honestly, I didn’t understand a single fucking word, but it’s absolutely not my fault, because Eddie’s hair looked really good that day and I just stared at him the whole time. It’s an affliction. [laughter; someone wolf whistles] Anyway, he and Stanley have, like, challah parties now, where they make bread and talk about me behind my back, and I can’t join in because I’m almost as bad at baking as I am at being Jewish. My boyfriend is a goy and he’s a better Jew than I am. Go figure.
As well as Stan, there’s Bev. Fucking Bev. Bev is the kind of person who walks through a puddle in $700 shoes. Bev is an even scarier redhead that Queen Elizabeth I, because if anyone tried that Sir Walter Raleigh shit with her and put their coat over a puddle to save her shoes, she’d strangle them with their own scarf and then jump right into the puddle herself. I’ve said before that my boyfriend was my gay awakening, but that’s a total lie. Bev was my gay awakening. And not in a mean way! It was like, every single one of my friends had the biggest crush on Bev. Of course they did! Have you seen Bev? I swear to God, every single one of my friends - including Eddie, the little horndog - spent twenty five hours, eight days a week, trying to get Bev’s attention. It was like, Bev, please copy my Math homework! Please take my lunch money! Please punch me in the fucking throat and then bury my twitching corpse in consecrated ground! Anything, as long as we’re making eye contact and you know that I exist! [laughter] And that’s how I knew that there was something seriously fucking wrong with me. Because obviously I thought that Bev was the coolest person in the entire fucking world, but if she’d ever tried to copy my Math homework, I would have physically fought her to the ground. And I would have lost, and that would have been on me, but you get my point. [laughter] Bev was always way too cool to be one of our gang, and I’m still half convinced that she’s just doing, like, outreach work, but I’m grateful every day to be one of her kids.
Bev is the kind of person who replies to a text with nothing but emojis and it’s somehow poetry. She taught me to blow smoke rings to try and impress Eddie, which obviously didn’t work because he told me that cancer isn’t as attractive as I apparently think it is, and also we were twelve. [audience laughs] Yeah, we grew up in a rough town, clearly. Bev looks almost exactly like Molly Ringwald and she makes fucking rad clothes for a living, and sometimes she lets me wear them to award shows so that I look just slightly less like I’m waiting for the strike of midnight to turn back into a sewer rat, and everyone wins. Every single time I wear one of her designs, the headline the next day is something like, ‘Richie Tozier spotted looking like less of an actual piece of shit, for the first time ever we can actually stand to look at him without puking out the wedding buffet we ate back in 1993’ and I have her to thank for that confidence boost. [audience cheers]
So yeah, to know a girl as objectively fucking rad as Bev and not immediately fall deeply in eternal, bone-crunching love? You have to be gay. You’ve absolutely gotta be a raging homo. Luckily for Bev, our buddy Ben is not gay. He also has, like, 28 abs. [laughter] I know what you’re thinking. That’s not how abs work. Well, I can tell you that it is for him. The rules aren’t the same for gods. And also, he fell asleep on the couch once and Bev sent me a photo and I counted. There were at least 28. Maybe more. It was hard to tell because my glasses were steaming up. The good thing about having a friend as crazy hot as Ben is that I know my boyfriend’s never gonna leave me. He would’ve done it already! [laughter]
No, but really. We’ve been to Ben’s hot tub. We’ve seen him shirtless. There’s literally a photo in our living room of the whole gang of us at Bev and Ben’s house, and we’ve all just been swimming in some lake near their house - because yeah, they’re those fucking people, they have a summer house near a lake and I absolutely loathe them, the perfect assholes - and in the photo, Ben’s wearing this designer white tee, the deepest V-neck you ever saw, draping artfully off his perfectly hairless chest. His shoulders are wider than America’s poverty gap. His waist is trimmer than George Michael’s beard, requiescat in pace. His hair is artfully tousled, like he’s just been running his hand through it nonchalantly as he considered an important Physics problem. His smile is whiter than the population of Maine. He looks like the kind of guy who actively enjoys giving oral sex. [laughter] And this photo is up in our living room, right above our TV, and so my boyfriend sees it every day. The ultimate temptation. And yet my boyfriend chooses to sit on the sofa next to me, with my Hobbit feet in his lap, and just watches the TV. His eyes don’t even stray. If he hasn’t left me already, he’s not gonna do it now. It’s a real confidence boost. Although it also reminds me that human beings can actually look like that, which is frankly a personal insult to me. [laughter]
Hot on Ben’s perfectly sculpted heels is my good buddy Micycle. That’s his given name. He goes by Mike these days, but Micycle is his legal name, and you should call him that on Twitter. He loves it. [laughter] Now, my buddy Mike is also ridiculously good looking. I once reached past him to grab a packet of Doritos that was on the table next to him and my arm scraped his cheek, and his stubble took off about eight layers of skin. I needed a skin graft and eight weeks of physiotherapy. His muscles are legally classified as a deadly weapon. They tried to confiscate his arms at airport security. The constitutional right to bear arms actually refers explicitly to Mike’s bare arms [audience groans] I know, I hate that one, too. Mike unfortunately only has 27 abs, through no fault of his own. Legend has it that God did originally bless him with the full set of 28 to match Ben’s, but then took one look at Micycle’s huge, throbbing brain and decided to even the playing field a little, and removed one of his abs. [audience laughs and whoops]
Because Micycle, despite clearly being born to be a male model or perhaps a pornstar, is a fucking librarian. That sounds like a joke, but it sadly isn’t. I know. I’m livid about it, honestly. He gets a face and body like that, and he doesn’t even have the good grace to let us drool over it. Not even for pay. He doesn’t even have an Instagram! But there is one upside to him being a librarian, actually, and that’s that I get to make fun of him for being jacked in the stacks. [audience laughs] I think he’s also solely responsible for the nationwide increase in literacy rates, because every single person in a 50 mile radius now has an incentive to go the library. [He salutes] Thank you, Micycle, for your service.
And then there’s Bill. The famous author, Bill Denbrough. [audience cheers with recognition] Billy Boy. Big Bill. That’s a weirdly homoerotic nickname I gave him as a kid, before I even knew what homoeroticism was, and I stand by it, because although Bill grew up to be even shorter than my pocket-sized boyfriend, I’ve seen him in swimming trunks, and… yeah. The nickname holds up. [audience laughs, someone whoops]. Bill is a gem of a human, with the good looks of a boyband backing singer and the talent of… a boyband backing singer [audience laughs] - but he’s also the reason that I’m not as hot as the rest of the gang. Billiam punched me in the face at the age of thirteen, and my face never recovered. [He gestures to his own face] All this is your fault, Billiam. Before that killer left hook, I had a promising modelling career ahead of me. The cheekbones of an ingenue. The jawline of Handsome Squidward. Then he socked me right in the kisser, and nope, it’s all gone. Rearranged every single bone in my face. Changed my very DNA. But it all worked out in the end, because I grew up to be 6ft 4 and Billiam is so short that he sometimes has to ask Eddie to reach things for him from the second highest shelf, and that, my friends, is karma. [laughter]
Some of you may have heard recently that I actually got the lead role in the adaptation of Bill’s latest book, which is, I can confirm, absolutely true. [someone cheers] I know! I bet you didn't even know that I could act, right? Well, psych! I’ve been acting straight for forty years! Where the fuck is my Oscar? I deserve a lifetime achievement award at this point for services to the Academy. But yeah, I get to play a character named [he makes air quotations with his fingers] ‘Richard Toulouse.’ [He pauses; the audience laughs] Just write my biography next time, Billiam, God. I’ll give you a lock of my hair. And I can’t say anything else about that, thanks to those sexy Hollywood NDAs, but I can tell you that Bill describes ol’ Richard at one point as being - and I quote! - an ‘impractically tall man, who dresses like he’s half a foot shorter and half a decade younger, who wears glasses but doesn’t wear braces, although he probably should.’ [audience laughs] So yeah, I read the script, and the script read me right back. To fucking filth. But that’s Billiam for you. An absolute angel, but one of the Biblical kinds, with, like, a thousand blazing eyes and a sword for a dick. God made Bill short so that the rest of us stood a chance in the face of his chaos. [laughter]
Anyway, that’s enough about straight people. Back to the gay shit. I’m sorry, were you expecting a longer straight interlude? Well, fucking deal with it. I have more decades of repression than I can even count to make up for. I used to be too scared to even think the word gay, in case there was a telepathic homophobe nearby and they beat me up. Like Charles Xavier if he wasn’t a gay icon. [audience laughter] I’ll never get those years back, so instead I say I’m gay, like, every other sentence now. It’s great. I’m owning that shit. It’s so freeing! It’s like, what day is it today? I’m gay, and it’s Tuesday. I think I’ll have tacos for dinner, because I’m really craving Mexican food, which is unrelated to me being gay, except for the part where both are true statements of fact, because I’m gay and want tacos. Oh, do you want to go before me in the line at Walmart? I only have two items, and also I’m gay. It’s amazing. Someone once told me off for playing the gay card, and I was like, excuse me? I didn’t put this fucking card in my deck, but now that it’s there, I’m gonna take it out every now and again, because I’m very gay. Bite me. But not in a gay way, because I have a boyfriend and we’re very committed to one another. [audience laughs]
It’s like, everyone wants to talk about being gay when it’s some bald fuck named Brent Straightson on Fox News talking about the gay agenda, or some dipshit on Twitter ranting about being forced at gunpoint to watch two women kiss on their favourite TV show, or some piece of shit getting paid to write articles about how trans people are, like, converting our children, but when it comes to actual queer people talking about this shit, they just want us to shut the fuck up. And do you know how many sitcoms I’ve sat through in my life - and I’m 43 years old, so I’ll tell you now, it’s a lot - where the punchline is just ‘ha! He was gay all along!’ Like, that’s the joke. ‘She had such a crush on him, but he wears trendy shoes, and his boyfriend is Latin American! Turns out that he's... gay!’ That’s it! And people used to call my material lazy. Which, you know, it was, but that’s so not the point. [laughter] So now you’ve got all these queer comedians - like me, hello, I’m gay - and we’re doing it ourselves, talking about our own shit, making our own jokes where being gay isn’t the punchline, it’s just part of the joke leading up to a punchline about, I don’t know, Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and you want us to shut up? Fuck no! [cheers]
The only time people don’t want me to shut up about being gay is when they can get a headline out of it. That sounds very cynical, but it’s totally true. I did an interview once on some lame-ass breakfast show to promote the last tour, and the interviewer dude asked all the boring questions you always get, and then at the end he was like, “ooh, Richie, what would you do if Idris Elba walked in here right now?” and I was like, “oh jeeze, I’m not sure. I guess I’d, uh, ask him how his day’s going, whether he’s doing OK, maybe ask if he needed any tips on running a Twitter account, because social media presence is everything in the year of our Lord 2019,” and the host just gives me this dead-eyed stare as though I’d just lifted my leg and taken a piss live on air, and he says, “wouldn’t you have anything else to say to Sexiest Man Alive, Idris Elba?” and then I realised that it was a gay question. They were doing that thing, where they try and turn the most boring, milquetoast interview into some scandalous little clickbait by inserting some convenient gay into it. Like, whatever answer I gave was going to be used in the title of their YouTube video. And so obviously I fixed the camera with the biggest smile I could manage at 7 o’clock in the morning, and I said, “I would ask him how dare he wear the mantel of Sexiest Man Alive when my boyfriend’s dick is the Eighth Wonder of the World.” And then you fuckers kept sharing the clip on Twitter and it went viral and my manager nearly had an aneurysm. [laughter, cheers]
It’s funny, because the whole idea of anyone knowing that I was gay used to make me break out in hives, like whenever Eddie holds a cat. Like, one time I was at a house party at college, and someone started playing David Bowie, and I left! I fucking left. I denied myself the aural perfection of Space Odyssey, because clearly being in the room when a song by a man who, uh, performed a different variety of masculinity was playing would give the game away that I once jerked off to the Ziggy Stardust cover art. [audience laughter] But now, it’s the total opposite. If I’m talking to someone and they don’t immediately clock me as a pure organic homo, I’m throwing hands. It’s like, bitch, do you know how many years of self-loathing and repression and crying into the mirror whilst listening to Boy George it took for me to get to this point? You’re gonna acknowledge my gay or else. I earnt this gay. I worked for it. This is my gay. You don’t get to choose to ignore it. Being read as straight is the ultimate hate crime. I need you to make a list of everything I’m doing that makes you think that I’m straight, so that I can stop doing it immediately. Except for dressing well. That goes against all my ethics. [audience laughter]
And that really came to a head - oh man, I should not tell this story, it proves to you all that I’m still an asshole. Not that you needed the proof, you’ve probably seen my Twitter account, but anyway. [laughter] It was just after my first show, you know, the one where I loudly and proudly announced that I was a solid 10 on the gay scale, and my boyfriend had come up to New York with me for the taping. We were doing the whole tourist thing, because Eddie actually used to live here, and so he was showing me all these places he used to hang out, and we had a fucking great day. And then we decided to round it off by having a fucking great night, too, and check into our hotel a little early. So we get to the hotel, and the receptionist is there, and she’s like, “do you have a reservation?” because that is her job. And so I’m like, “yeah, it’s under Tozier,” and she looks it up on the system, and then she goes bright red, and I can see her just sort of look between Eddie and me, and she says, “you only have one double reserved. Do you want me to get you another room, or find you a twin?” and in my head I’m just like, absolutely fuck you, lady, and I just lost it. I was like, “uh, excuse me, but I don’t appreciate your heteronormative assumption,” because my boyfriend taught me that word a few weeks before, and fuck you, it’s a great word. And I carry on, “I am a proud gay man, and I made a reservation at your establishment because it’s 2019 and gay people are allowed to share beds now, and we can even vote, so no, I do not want you to find me another room, because my boyfriend here and I are very happy to share, and if I’m very, very lucky, we might even do more than sleep in that bed, Theresa. Are you happy with that?” [laughter]
Then the receptionist just kind of blinks at me, and then she says - and this is the moment, guys, that I realise that I am a piece of shit - she says, “yeah, I was at the taping of your show. I just… didn’t know that you two were together.” In that moment, I realise, shit, she totally gets that I’m gay. This is not the problem for her. She has no issue with this. She could not give less of a shit if she tried. She’s wearing a fucking bisexual flag badge. [he pauses; someone laughs] The issue is that she thinks that my boyfriend is too attractive for me. [audience laughter] Like, there’s no way that this haunted mop can be dating that fine specimen! And cool, you know, she was right. My boyfriend sent her a fruit basket. He follows, like, six accounts on Twitter, and she’s one of them. I think he might have invited her to Thanksgiving.
For what it’s worth, I’m not saying that I’m, like, a gay icon. I don’t think I should be an icon to anyone except for people who want to look like they haven’t washed in three days. [audience laughter] I saw a Buzzfeed article once that had some headline like ‘10 times Richie Tozier was a queer icon,’ and it’s like… really? You saw some kinda famous dude who looks like a broomstick made of prosciutto and cuts his hair with kitchen scissors say that yes, homophobia exists, and you think that makes me a queer icon? [laughter] Fuck no. I’m not, like, perfectly describing the universal gay condition when I talk about how my boyfriend’s cute little butt makes me want to write a sonnet, or how I have like a Pavlovian erection to fanny packs, or how I was too scared to look my own doctor in the eye at my last prostate exam because I was afraid he’d think I was a big ol’ queer and punch me in the face. I’m just talking about me, myself and I. It’s not like we’re a fucking hive mind of people who all feel the same way about everything.
The absolute best thing that anyone can say about me as a gay icon is that I provide representation to a very marginalised group of people: gay men who don’t know how to dress well. [audience laughs] Yeah, I’m thinking of applying to host the next season of Queer Eye and just putting every single contestant in, like, an old Hawaiian shirt and Crocs. I’ll be like, “as a gay man, I always dress for maximum comfort, just in case I have to run away from a gang of homophobes with knives. Here, put on these sweatpants with a ketchup stain on the crotch,” and ratings will soar. [audience laughs] I live to subvert stereotypes. I may be the only gay in my relationship, but my boyfriend is the one who can dress. Except for his weird fanny pack aversion.
And you know, speaking of my boyfriend… [he pauses; the audience laughs, and he grins] I know, I really feel like I barely talk about him any more. Let’s rectify that immediately. You know the weirdest thing about being gay? It’s the way I can look at my boyfriend and constantly fluctuate between ridiculous levels of horniness and just being downright jealous of how good he looks. [audience laughter] I mean, look at him! He looks like the guy they’d cast as James Bond if it didn’t mean they’d have to blow half their budget on CGI-ing him 5 inches taller. And then there’s me, and I look like a totem pole wrapped in ham. [laughter] It’s actually almost funny how much better looking he is than me. [someone says ‘awww’; Richie holds up a hand] Don’t give me that. I don’t need your pity. I mean, I’ll take it, but I don’t need it. What I need is extensive dentistry and possibly a hair transplant. But in the absence of those, I guess I’ll take the pity. [laughter]
It’s like, I am absolutely the best placed person in the entire world to appreciate just how good my boyfriend looks in a suit, because I’m gay and also have eyes, but I’m also very happy that I get to be the one to take it off. It’s like, a visceral relief. It’s just ludicrous how much better he looks than me all dressed up in black tie. I’m the fucker who has a job that means we have to go to fancy award ceremonies and shit, and yet he’s the one who can wear a suit without looking like a pencil doing an impression of a penguin. He looks so good, you guys. I have this theory that straight men are just men who haven’t seen my boyfriend in a suit. [laughter] Whenever we have to go somewhere fancy, like a five star restaurant, I dread it. I break out in hives, but you can’t even tell because it just looks like my regular dry-ass skin. I have the complexion of a dried out salami slice. [audience laughter] I just know that we’re gonna get to the restaurant and someone’s gonna ask me to, like, take my boyfriend’s coat. He looks like he owns suits. I look like I rent them from a costume store. He looks like, fucking, some hotshot in the CIA who has a wife half his age and a mistress who does part time underwear modelling, and I look like a depressed telemarketer going to his sixtieth job interview. [laughter] He looks like he’s going to - I don’t know, to the fucking Emmy Awards, and I look like I’m going to my great aunt’s funeral. It’s hateful! [laughter]
Sometimes we’ll be at home, getting ready for some awards thing, and I take one look at him, and I’m not even horny, and I’ll be like, “babe, get out of that suit right now,” and he looks at me funny and he takes it off, obviously expecting me to just jump his bones, but I just sigh in relief, because the competition’s over. [laughter] Don’t get me wrong, he obviously looks way better than me naked, too, but I already know that. I know that my naked body looks like cottage cheese in seran wrap. [audience laughter] At least when I put on a nice suit, I get to convince myself that I might stand a chance of measuring up to the guy. Not literally, obviously. I tower over him. He barely measures up to Staniel’s six year old. But metaphorically speaking, I put on a fancy suit, and I do my hair a bit so that it almost covers up my sevenhead, and I’m like, maybe I’ll actually look like I could be my boyfriend’s date tonight, and not his deformed family butler, Igor. But no! It never works! He’s just too hot! So I tell him to take it off, and then we go to the restaurant like that, just butt-naked. [audience laughs] No, obviously we don’t. They’d kick one of us out if we did that. Probably me, for having the audacity to stand anywhere near him and contaminate his aura. And then they’d hire him to just, like, stand in the foyer naked. Because he is a whole meal. [audience laughter]
That’s one of the greatest tragedies of my life, actually. Because as all you fellow oldies out there know - [someone cheers; Richie points at them and gives them a thumbs up] yeah, this old fuck gets it! Acid reflux, am I right? So yeah, there’s my boyfriend, the snack, the whole meal, and sometimes we’ll get home from one of those fancy awards things and he’ll finally take off the suit, and he’ll be like, “we still have a couple hours left before our circadian rhythms are completely fucked, if you don’t want to go to sleep yet,” and then he’ll do that thing he can do with his eyebrows that makes my whole body quiver like a Regency heroine, and then there’s me, just… with stomach ache. [audience laughs] It’s awful, don’t laugh at me. My boyfriend is just so hot, and I’m so old, and he’s old too, but he’s spent the last twenty years exercising and eating, like, fruit, when he wasn’t dead, and I’ve spent the last two decades on the sofa. Life is pain. So sometimes Eddie is just there, looking like a three course dinner, and I’m absolutely ravenous, but I can’t eat a damn thing. But you know what, he just gets me a Tums and we watch Blue Planet instead. So there are some good things about being old. [cheers]
So, here’s the thing. Life is good. Is it perfect? No. I still don’t have any abs, even though I’ve asked Ben and Mike to just give up, like, two of theirs each, and they’ve flat-out refused. We don’t have a cat, and there’s a not insignificant number of people on Twitter who think that I’m paying Eddie to be my boyfriend, because he’s crazy hot and they’ve never seen him get excited about Tupperware. [laughter] I recently discovered that there’s a whole website dedicated to posting photos of my worst outfits and writing haikus about how homeless I look, and it has more followers than my Twitter account. I pulled a muscle in my groin last month attempting to get up from the sofa. I’m not even engaged to my hot zombie boyfriend, despite literally begging him on bended knee to propose. But you know what? I’m Richie Tozier, I’m gay as hell, and that’s enough for me. [audience cheers] Goodnight, New York! You’ve been absolutely fine.
[audience cheers and applauds; the lights fade as Richie waves to the audience and walks offstage. People listening closely over the sound of the applause will probably hear someone saying, “I’m not a fucking zombie, dickwad," and then, after a short pause, "nice show though, you Babadook looking fuck."]
[Twitter, retrieved December 2nd 2019]
Richie ‘My Fiancé's Gonna Be A’ Tozier ✔ @richietozier
Can't believe that @netflix wouldn't let me re-record the entire show for accuracy now that I don’t have a boyfriend any more :( this is heartbreaking :( a hate crime :( homophobia in action :(
Eddie Kaspbrak ✔ @ekaspbrak
replying to @richietozier @netflix
Happy anniversary, dickwad.
[embedded video: Richie Tozier’s Hold My Fanny Pack, except every time he says boyfriend, it’s me saying fiancé]
Richie ‘My Fiancé's Gonna Be A’ Tozier ✔ @richietozier
replying to @ekaspbrak
Babe!!!!!! You can’t do shit like that when we’re not in the same state, how am I meant to show my appreciation? A dick pic doesn't even begin to cover it!
Eddie Kaspbrak ✔ @ekaspbrak
replying to @richietozier
Eh, you probably have acid reflux anyway.
Richie ‘My Fiancé's Gonna Be A’ Tozier ✔ @richietozier
replying to @ekaspbrak
I’ll take a Tums, babe ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) ;)
Stanley Uris @surisaccounting
replying to @richietozier @ekaspbrak
I’m blocking and reporting you both for targeted harassment.
Richie ‘My Fiancé's Gonna Be A’ Tozier ✔ @richietozier
replying to @surisaccounting @ekaspbrak
We weren’t even talking to you, let us have deeply erotic cybersex in peace!
Stanley Uris @surisaccounting
replying to @richietozier @ekaspbrak
Every gross thing you say to each other in the public sphere is targeted harassment to my eyeballs.
Eddie Kaspbrak @ekaspbrak
replying to @surisaccounting @richietozier
Go and do a jigsaw about it, Stan.