Comfort zone is no place for Ralphie May's audiences
-TribLive

It was hard to miss the plus-size Ralphie May when he performed on the first season of NBC's "Last Comic Standing" in 2003. But if his cartoonish girth, pop-eyed baby face and baggy clothes got the audience's attention, he proved he wasn't just a walking sight gag by slinging a killer set of jokes.
He came in second. But May made the most of the opportunity. He's got at least three platinum CDs and a fan base that includes everyone from urban blacks to the Wal-Mart camo demographic. In 2005, he was the only white comic to perform on "The Big Black Comedy Show."

"When you look at my audience, it's white, black and brown," he says. "It's 18 to 70."

May goads his audiences out of their comfort zone, the same approach used by many of his influences -- Lenny Bruce, Sam Kinison, Richard Pryor and Doug Stanhope. Onstage, he looks like a personification of the id as it might be drawn by Robert Crumb. He broaches taboo subjects with a profane, cringe-inducing frankness, his voice pitched somewhere near the register of an evangelical preacher rhapsodizing on the wages of sin. His subject matter is everything that's unfit to print.

"I just find that if you allow any wavering in what you're talking about, what happens is that people perceive that wavering as a weakness or you're incorrect or you're not 100 percent behind what you're believing," he says.

In one bit, he talks about fat people as the last remaining group that can be safely ridiculed. In the movies, he reminds the audience, they're usually stereotyped as gluttonous, flatulent, clumsy buffoons. He then describes what it might be like if a black person or Mexican was caricatured the same way. It's highly descriptive, sick, wrong and pretty funny. It's so over-the-top, you know he has to be kidding.

"All the comics I've ever admired, whether it be Lenny Bruce, Buddy Hackett or Richard Pryor, all these guys share a commonality," May says. "They're a tour de force. When they speak, there's no room for rebuttal. They've thought it all out. Even the pros and cons of their argument, they raise openly and debate in the midst of their conversation. And it's a beautiful thing to watch.

"They wanted to be funny and they wanted to make you think."

One of Bruce's most notorious routines involved the n-word and how we should use it as often as possible in order to deprive it of its power. May tackles the same subject. Words, he says, are just that. He says he's been called every variation of fat, lazy and redneck, and it doesn't bother him.

"I do 15 minutes on how we can get rid of the word 'N,'" he says. "The best way is to overuse it every day. The sharpest knife in the drawer is the one you never use."

May says he performed at the Steelers training camp a year ago, where he laid into strong safety Troy Polamalu.

"I asked if he was really Samoan. He goes, 'Yes.' (I said) 'You're the smallest Samoan I've ever seen in my life. What are you 11, 12 years old?'"

He even chastised quarterback Ben Roethlisberger for his 2006 motorcycle accident.

"I told him this to his face. I said, 'How can you not wear a helmet when it's your job to wear a helmet?'