John Pinette, A Short Tribute

Recently, in my Amazon Prime Video queue, a face I hadn't forgotten but had not seen in quite a while showed up. The late John Pinette's stand up special I'm Starvin became available for free viewing to people with Amazon Prime accounts.

I'm Starvin' was the first performance of Pinette's material I ever viewed. Watching it again made me see, yet again, just how funny this man was. I proceeded to rewatch and listen to all the material of his we still have available to us, including his wonderful comedy album Show Me the Buffet, and his specials I Say Nay Nay and Still Hungry.

Now, I said before that George Carlin was my measuring stick for what I consider to be funny, and that remains true. What made Carlin funny to me, like I said, was his poignant and often dark observation humor coupled with his masterful and clever wordplay.

John Pinette was no George Carlin. But, he didn't need to be.

What made John funny to me was his genuineness. He came from the school of comedy started off by Richard Pryor: using your own life, your own experiences as material. John was a master at this.

His viewpoint (the lens out of which his comedy arose) mainly extended from being a Chubby Guy in a country so affluent that it had a surplus of food. Most of his jokes were centered on how big he was, how he knew people saw him in public eateries, and about his relationship with food. (I can tell you as a Chub-Chub myself that the best way to describe that relationship is with the word problematic--you need it to live, but too much of it will kill you. Ain't that a sumbitch?)

This sort of gentle, personal, inoffensive humor is just as good as so-called "serious satire", and it can be enjoyed by anyone because everyone can relate to it in some way. In short, he was funny because he was just funny.

For instance, how many of us have ever been standing in a line at some place like a grocery store, a fast food joint, or a coffee shop and just wanted to howl at the moon in exasperation? How many of us have been exasperated by the insane foibles of our family and just wanted to kvetch about it? How many of us could wish we could make jokes about a place we went to go to dinner but just didn't have the verbal acumen to describe the experience?

Well, John had that ability. He could take something ordinary, pedestrian if you will, and make it into this hilarious experience.

Sadly, just as he was hitting his stride and becoming more well known to the non-comedy nerds of the world with his televised specials, John died in April of 2014, the same year that claimed fellow comic legends Robin Williams and Joan Rivers. He was only 50.

However, in that time, John Pinette left us enough comedy specials and albums that he'll keep us laughing until we shuffle off this mortal coil, and he did it by making the ordinary extraordinary (and by only occasionally losing his cherub-like demeanor).

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