by Don Steinberg In September, audiences were outraged when comedian Hasan Minaj admitted that some of his stand-up act wasn't reporting 100 percent true events. Parts of his anthrax bit were fabricated! Intrigued by this disclosure, we have searched through the annals of comedy to fact-check other prominent stand-up performers’ jokes. The results: Comedians have been lying to us for years! We are shocked by how much of what they have been telling us simply didn’t happen. Our findings so far:
Emo Phillips actually didn’t discover his wife in bed with another man, leaving him crushed and yelling "Get off me, you two!" There are no birth records confirming that when Sarah Silverman was born, the doctor slapped her and called her a whore. Stephen Wright seems to have embellished his account of seeing a restaurant sign that said “Breakfast anytime” and ordering French toast during the Renaissance. Due to HIPAA medical privacy regulations, it cannot be verified that Rodney Dangerfield went to the doctor complaining “Every morning when I get up and look in the mirror, I feel like throwing up. What's wrong with me?' and the doctor replied: “I don't know, but your eyesight is perfect.'" Although Joan Rivers did grow up in Larchmont, we could not find documentation that the town was so tiny they put a mirror up at one end. Anthony Jeselnik’s parents didn’t make him smoke an entire pack of cigarettes to teach him an important lesson about brand loyalty.
Woody Allen didn’t shoot a moose, nor the Berkowitzes, a couple in a moose costume. It now seems apparent that Bill Hicks falsified the anecdote in which classmates said their dad could beat up his dad and Bill replied, “Yeah? When?”
Mel Brooks has never been 2,000 years old, and a guy named “Bernie” didn’t discover women.