Richie Wayne

Richie Wayne was famous for his easy flowing schtick in the style of the great, old Catskills men who worked a room for 90 minutes all with prewritten material. They were proud of their stock of jokes, rich with tradition and rigid with form, but seasoned with each man's own style. The value of the bits was in the universality, and the talent of the men was in the way they searched the room for a place to apply the routine, and the crowd howled with the belief that they were seeing something spontaneous. Richie thought it was poetic, the subterfuge of their comedy mirroring the characters they created, and the subtext, the mechanics for the pros to appreciate.

He was born with a congenial face, chipmunk cheeks and the thick, feminine lips he would purse to exaggerate his lines. Through the 90s he wore his hair parted in the middle and mildly gelled, two peaked waves over his eyebrows, like extensions of their arching. In the next millennium when he was too old he cut it shorter but kept the same unruly, comedic quality. Richie had done movies and TV, his popularity rooted in the familiar humor of his old Jewish mother voice, or rough Scottish brogue. He could be coarse and juvenile but he was never offensive.

Richie practiced transcendental meditation and was certified as a yoga instructor. He studied old comedy films like a quarterback preparing for a game, looking at body language, tone and inflection as well as content. He read books about theater, and was an expert on the indigenous clowns and fools or most European countries. Even though his own material was chaotic he had always carefully measured it out, and cut it to fit the situation. Richie was dismayed when he opened the shooting script after arriving on his newest movie and found the instruction "funny improv."

His son was 20 and funny and did not use Richie's last name, he wanted to have his own identity untainted by the inevitable nepotism he would be accused of. Sitting on set waiting for the scene to reset he visited his son's blog, a tumblr page called "Pictures of Limp Bizkit bumper stickers." That's all it was, photographs submitted of cars driving around with Limp Bizkit bumper stickers, it had millions of hits. Richie was having trouble with his scene, where he makes a speech and tries not to cry in his typical, over the top way, choking up his voice and blowing great bellows of air through his nose like he had eaten a spoon of horseradish. No one else understood his problem. "Who was carrying on like this?" he asked. Was it Richie doing schtick in the middle of the movie? Was it the character doing a bit just like he was Richie? Was this how the character really was, was it authentic?

The director looked at Richie and shrugged. "Does it matter, it's funny. It doesn't mean anything."