SFBG: I know you grew up in Detroit. How long have you been living in California?

JW: Oh, I’ve been in California for over 30 years after I left Detroit. I moved to New York first. Then I moved here to California.

SFBG: Do you tend to play the East Coast or West Coast more these days?

JW: I actually play the East Coast more. There are very few places to play on the West Coast, up this way. You got Tommy T’s - it’s my first time there. There’s the place in San Jose.

I’m actually going back to NewYork to Caroline’s [Comedy Club] a few months from now. I’m going to do Letterman at the same time, March 25.

SFBG: I heard you and Dave are good friends.

JW: David Letterman and I are old friends. We used to work the comedy circuit together. I used to MC one show and then he’d MC the other one. He was broke and I was broke. He came out to California from Indiana with a red truck and a dog named Bob. That’s all he had. We still talk. I go and meet his kids, hang out, and talk about old times.

SFBG: The last time I saw you in New York, I brought my girlfriend and my mom, who flew all the way from Texas just to meet you. She’s kind of like your groupie. We thought maybe you could start calling the women that follow you around “Spooners”.

JW: [Laughs] That’s funny. Spooners! That’s wonderful.

SFBG: Do you think there’s any major difference in the kinds of crowds or the reception you get on one coast as opposed to the other?

JW: Generally, they’re pretty much the same. I mean, I’m not trying to insult anybody. I don’t make fun of people. They come to laugh, they have a good time. That’s the way it should be. I’d be a little nervous if everybody went home mad.

SFBG: I also heard you have a record coming out soon. Tell me about it.

JW: In March, I’ve got my CD coming out called You Gotta Coordinate. I’m rapping on it. These rappers are making a lot of money, so it’s about time I made me some of that money. I’ve been working this thing so long, it’s called 63 cents. I’m going to be the rapper now.

SFBG: Is there any of your stand-up on it or is it just music?

JW: No, I actually took all of the stand-up off of it. I wrote most of the songs and performed them. They’re based on my sayings “Don’t Nobody Go in the Bathroom…," “You Gotta Coordinate,” and “Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!”

SFBG: Do you do any old Motown crooning on it? You’ve got an amazing voice.

JW: Not really. Not much singing. A lot of funny sayings. There’s a good one called “Dance Now with Your Big Ass.” That’s a good song. I’m also going to be doing a special on Showtime March 28. It’s stand-up.

SFBG: Where did you do that?

JW: I shot it in Orange County of all places. They set up a place there for me, which I didn’t think was OK, but you gotta go with what they give you. It was a big theater, about 600 or 700 people. We shot it there, and it turned out OK. Top-of-the-line production - very good.

SFBG: I’ve seen this hilarious commercial you do for Eastern Motors on the Internet. Is that some regional car dealership or something?

Eastern Motors!

JW: Yeah, I did that commercial in Washington, DC.

SFBG: Where did that come from?

JW: At the Improv in Washington, DC, they use a lot of comics to do their jingles, and they offered me very little money to do that commercial. And I was like, “No way, I’m not going to do that. You’re not just paying for the person. You’re paying for the personality, too.” So they come back with a lot more money, and I said, “OK, I’ll do it.” It didn’t take us more than an hour to do. They took me out on the side of the street, said go park out there, do the jingle and run! And the cops were behind us yelling, “Don’t park here!”

SFBG: Most of the younger generation know you so well from the Friday series, The Wayans Brothers, Boomerang, but they probably don’t know you started out doing shows like Barnaby Jones, L.A. Law…

JW: Yeah, I did The Incredible Hulk, too. And Good Times, What’s Happening?, Hill Street Blues. Yeah, I remember all those - it was a long time ago. I was in The Jazz Singer with Neil Diamond.

SFBG: But somehow the image of you doing a show with Jed Clampett is hilarious.

JW: Yeah, Buddy Ebsen.

SFBG: I actually read that the episode you starred in also had Ed Harris, Madeline Stowe, and Sean Penn.

JW: That was Sean Penn’s first acting role. I had a scene with him, and he was a little, young dude. His father was a director, you know, on the Barnaby Jones series. There were some good directors on that show. There was one on there that also got me on The Incredible Hulk - he told me I was so great and I could get to the very top. And I said “Oh, really?!”

SFBG: Did you actually work with Ebsen in the episode?

JW: I didn’t work with Buddy Ebsen. I worked with Ed Harris. He was supposed to be the guy in the school that was selling drugs. He was a little young guy. The scene was funny, though. Because he was supposed to have given me some heroin and I was to just fall out. And then Harris was supposed to pick me up over his shoulder and carry me out to get rid of me. But he didn’t realize I was that heavy. So when he picked me up, we both fell over, and knocked all the cameras over. He said, “Jesus!”

SFBG: Before that, you were also a fashion and catalog model for a while?

JW: I was a fashion model and did commercials in Detroit. For a while in Detroit I was the top model, then I moved to New York and I fell off the totem pole right away. The guys were taller and much better-looking than I was. Figured out I had to do something else.

SFBG: How did you even start off in that direction, though?

JW: Well, I was working in a Cadillac Motors factory, in the plating department. So you put this stuff into a machine and had to wait three minutes to take it off of the hinges there. So I had three minutes in between so I started reading books and magazines and stuff, and one day, I was looking at this book with a picture of a guy standing next to a car, and I said, “I look better than he does.”

So this Cadillac factory I was working in Detroit had a summer break - before the new cars come in and they have to do construction on the assembly lines. You’re off for three or four months even though they still pay you your money. So I started going around to modeling agencies because I knew I looked better than that guy in the paper. Yep, Cadillac Motor cars. I got the hell outta there, boy!

So I went to some of the modeling agencies and asked if they were looking for new people. And they said, yeah, they were always looking for new people. They asked me if I’d ever done any work before, and I said, "Yeah." I lied. And the next day they sent me out to Hudson Department Store, and I got the job right away.

SFBG: I would think that the clothes were pretty far-out in those days?

JW: No, I was wearing like navy jackets, green pants, and dress shoes and things. They were very sharp. Playboy used to actually have a fashion show every year, and we would model in front of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. It was top of the line. And here I am shocked to be doing this: a guy from the factory with calluses all over his hands from picking up that damned muffler! That was a big turnaround for me.

SFBG: How long did you model?

JW: I did that two or three years.

SFBG: I’ve read you come from a real musical family back in Detroit with all these connections to Motown.

JW: I used to live near Motown in those days. See all those guys going back and forth. I saw Stevie Wonder, when he was just a little kid. I saw Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye. The Temptations, I used to go to school with those guys. I used to walk over there and watch them guys rehearse and record. Hitsville!

SFBG: Your brother wrote some songs there, right?

JW: My brother [William] used to work with David Ruffin’s [of the Temptations] brother Jimmy Ruffin and he wrote “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted” for him. That was the biggest hit he ever had.

SFBG: And Lamont Dozier’s [of the famed Holland-Dozier-Holland songwriting team] your cousin?

JW: Yeah, Lamont is a distant cousin. Yeah, I knew a lot of those guys. But a lot of them are gone now. But yeah, all of them used to be over there, boy. That’s when Motown was hot.

SFBG: So why didn’t you ever try your luck at singing? You sing a lot in your act, and it’s really amazing.

JW: No, no singing for me. I was mostly on the outside looking in. I was just admiring how amazing David Ruffin and the Impressions were. How they could move and sing, just how unbelievably good they were. I was too scared of my voice, I wouldn’t open my mouth.

When I was going to acting classes and stuff, I used to do impressions of that kind of stuff. And when I moved out to California, I was trying to do stand-up, not be an impressionist. But Mitzi [Shore, owner of the Comedy Store] didn’t like comedy as much as she loved impressions and if she thought you should do that, she’d say, “You should learn to do some voices.” I didn’t let her know I could do impressions, but I had to do them to get into the club.

So she’d let me come up on Monday nights and try out for a spot for the rest of the week. You wouldn’t get paid for it, but you could get a spot if she thought you were good enough. But she loved impressionists. So the first time I tried out on a Monday I did some impressions, and she gave him the whole week. So I’ve been doing impressions for years.

SFBG: After all the past and present TV work, I wonder what your feelings are about working in the medium. So many comics complain how tough and restrictive it is to have to deal with TV when they’d rather be working the clubs.

JW: Oh, I’d rather work TV than the road. Because the road…it’s tough, oh yeah! And at least on TV, you can come home every night.

SFBG: You’re always so great in film, too. Are you doing anything else in the near future?

JW: I stopped doing films. They don’t want to pay me anything but scale. I’m not working for scale anymore. Nuh-huh.

SFBG: And the cartoons you do too? I know you’ve done Saturday morning stuff like Kim Possible and the Proud Family.

JW: Yeah, and The Boondocks. Ever seen The Boondocks?

SFBG: No, that’s on cable, isn’t it?

JW: Oh, yeah it’s very controversial. They use profanity and the n-word and all that.

SFBG: Is that a good gig?

JW: It’s good, but I don’t get paid any money for it. Not like Shrek. Eddie Murphy gets $5 million to do his part in Shrek and he’s got a studio down in his basement where can he do it. So that’s really cool. But I got to drive over to the studio for some chump change.

SFBG: What really happened to The Wayans Brothers show on the WB? That was such a great series, and it just disappeared.

JW: Well, they weren’t paying us any money, and I wasn’t coming back until they gave me the money they owed me. And Shawn [Wayans] and Marlon [Wayans] were asking for more money, so they just canceled us. We were shocked when they canceled it. And I doubt we’ll ever get back together because the WB folded.

SFBG: You three guys together always seemed to be magic.

JW: We had a lot of fun together.

SFBG: Last thing, you’ve got these great greeting cards on your Web site. What’s going on with them? Are they selling?

JW: No. I think they’re really funny. I can’t believe it. I guess people would rather buy cards at Kroger’s or Ralph’s. I went to Hallmark to sell them there, but they were like, “Whoa, these are too heavy for us.” That’s alright, I’m eventually going to sell them. But I made about 80,000 of those greeting cards, and I only sold about 10. Somebody better buy some of my greeting cards. People look at them and say “Oh, these are so funny! Now take it back.”

John Witherspoon
Through Sunday, Feb. 10
Tommy T’s Comedy Club
5104 Hopyard Road, Pleasanton
(925) 227-1800