The Gaylord Dingler Story

In May of 2005, stand-up comedian, Todd Munson, wrote an article for the online magazine The Black Table detailing his encounter with -- and the subsequent disappearance of -- a strange man known as Gaylord Dingler.

Dingler, as it turns out, had been honing his craft as a stand-up at The Comedy Store on LA's Sunset Strip since 1977. Or maybe "honing" isn't the right word as he spoke the exact same material every open mic for 27 years. To some, the routine was a mark of unbridled genius. To others, it was like worn-out brake pads scraping against the rotors.

Whatever it was, as inexplicable as Dingler's career had been in the first place, The Comedy Store staple was gone without a trace shortly after New Years 2005.

Enter Todd Munson and filmmaker, Kjeld Gogosha-Clark. With Munson's article as the impetus, the two would pair-up to produce a documentary on the enigmatic, mustachioed funny man. The film, titled "A Machine Ripped His Leg Off: The Legend of Gaylord Dingler", is due for release in 2008.

Here, producer/comedian, Todd Munson waxes about his life as a comic and the hunt for one Gaylord Dingler.

Mark: How did you first hear about Gaylord Dingler?

Todd: First time I heard about Gaylord was when I met the man the very first time I performed at The Comedy Store back in July of 2002 -- which was a couple months after I started doing stand up.

Mark: He was performing that night, too?

Todd: The Potluck Show. Open mic. The Comedy Store is a legendary place as far as being where a lot of great comics got their start. Unlike all the other comedy clubs out there, the Store is the only club that is truly hospitable to new, up-and-coming comics. On Sunday and Monday nights since -- way back -- they've been having The Potluck Show.

Mark: Who usually does the potluck?

Todd: Anyone who thinks they can tell a joke. Everybody just shows up and tries to get a spot. When you add that to the cesspool of freaks who are the backbone of the "Hollywood dream" the result is a comedy show unlike any other. Even with all the madness, the Comedy Store is hands down the best comedy club around.

Mark: Which, being the first time, probably made you nervous as hell.

Todd: First trip to the Store I was crapping my pants on the inside with the kind of nervousness that makes you lose feelings in all your appendages. I'm not kidding when I say it's gotta be close to the same crap-your-pants feeling a bull fighter gets. I know that sounds stupid and pretentious but if you care about your work and you got into comedy for the right reason, that's the feeling you get. When you start out in comedy, other than a couple books that give you step-by-step lessons in how to be a hack, there really isn't any sort of manual to give you legitimate pointers. You're pretty much flying blind when you start and I just showed up at the Comedy Store with the same blissfully naive attitude of instant glory and success everyone else has when they step up the first time. Do a couple of spots and within a couple months be on Letterman or Leno. This comedy thing just looked like a piece of cake, ya know? Only later do you find out how many years of work it takes to get to that level.

Mark: But isn't that what any first-time comic needs to get up there? A little liquid courage, maybe, and delusions of grandeur?

Todd: Or elephantitis of the balls.

Mark: Whatever it takes!

Todd: Yeah, that "can do" spirit vanished the moment I stepped foot on Comedy Store property. I'll never forget what it was likethe very first time. Hopefully it will be the closest I land to my first day of prison when you step out into the yard for that virginal penal recess.

Mark: Nice imagery.

Todd: Well, there were easily fifty people vying for only twenty spots and it was just chaotic insanity. Mostly because so many of these guys were insane. Sorta like if the Island of Misfit Toys washed up in a Tijuana back alley. There were comics -- and, at the Store, that term is used very loosely -- playing bloody knuckles for money. There was a pretty rough looking tranny selling used porn. Another guy who turned out to be a Serbian-war-criminal-turned-comic who sold laser pointers and other stupid stuff. The whole scene was just so crazy it really can't even be described. It definitely made me question all the decisions I'd made in my life to end up walking into the eye of the storm like that.

Mark: So you show up and Gaylord Dingler is one of these crazy people outside?

Todd: Well, see, the front patio of the Store is pretty clique-ish. All the crazies do their thing in one spot. The semi-normal people group together and talk about how famous they're going to be by Tuesday. Between those two groups you've covered about 90 percent of the people there. That last ten percent would be the non-criminally insane, normal people. Ones with enough smarts that if you handed them ten dollars and asked them to go to the grocery store to buy ingredients to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, they'd come back with peanut butter, jelly, bread and maybe even change and a receipt. That other 90 percent would either get lost, buy booze, or buy the wrong ingredients.

Mark: Jesus.

Todd: Yep. So, that first time out there, I figured out who was who pretty quickly and I ended up in the right group. I hope so, anyway. But there was one guy who seemed to reign supreme over the entire goofy collection and that was Gaylord Dingler. He'd been there longer than anyone. Nobody really explained who he was but I could tell he was a different kind of crazy. Like he'd transcended into his own realm or something. Really, that first time, I only saw the tip of the iceberg as it pertains to "Gaylord the person". "Gaylord the comic", though, nearly blew the ears off my head. The first time I heard him say "a machine ripped his leg off" for the third time in a row, I thought my head was going to explode. There aren't strong enough drugs in this world to help you hallucinate the kind of things that came out of Gaylord's mouth and everyone there knew his whole act word for word and shouted it out along with him.

Mark: How did Kjeld approach you to do the documentary?

Todd: It started with the story I wrote for The Black Table after it got featured on the BBC's comedy website. Which still baffles me. Kjeld saw it there and, thanks to that invention called the internet, stalked me down. He sent me an email and we came up with a plan to meet. It was pretty crazy in that we lived close to each other. We made a plan to meet for coffee and he asked me to come up with some ideas or stories about Gaylord that weren't in the article. I just sorta wung it at the meeting and we hit it off pretty good. What's weird is by the time we met, I'd been going to the Store long enough for the place to seem completely normal. Maybe it was some off-shoot of Stockholm Syndrome in that you could tell someone a story about watching a guy drink hairspray in a sad, desperate attempt to get a buzz with a straight face like it was a perfectly normal thing to do.

Mark: When you finally started making the film, what did you think the odds were you'd actually find Dingler?

Todd: Well, considering we had every reason to believe he was dead when we started working it out, I don't think Vegas would have even given odds to finding the man alive.

Mark: The kid in Detroit who found him, what was he like?

Todd: Christo was hilarious -- a total riot! The night he found Gaylord, he was doing what any bored teenager in middle America does when they're looking to pass the time. He went down to his neighborhood 7-Eleven. And that's where he happened upon Gaylord. According to Christo, Gaylord was just standing outside sipping a 40oz and telling his bad jokes and just generally being Gaylord. Then he started spouting off about how he was a famous comedian from Hollywood and that's when Christo and his buddies called bullshit. Later when they went home, they Googled him and saw that his wild claims were at least somewhat true. Then they went straight back to look for him again. And, of course, Gaylord hadn't even moved an inch. Christo and his buddies called the Store and were promptly hung up on. Thankfully, they had the tenacity to call back a couple times and a comic by the name of Marc Ellis ordered them to get photographic proof. Needless to say, when I checked my email and saw a picture of Gaylord, I crapped my pants and wept tears of joy all at once.

Mark: So then you found yourself on your way to Detroit?

Todd: Well, there was some stuff that happened in between. But the trip to Detroit turned out to be a marathon of physical and mental endurance we couldn't have planned better even if we'd actually had a plan in the first place.

Mark: Nothing at all?

Todd: In the days before we left, we had a couple of questions for Christo about where we might find Gaylord. But we never heard back from him because it turned out he was grounded. Talk about one of the sucky parts of being fifteen. But -- thanks to everyone's friend, Google -- I ended up making a map off all the 7-Elevens within a five mile radius of the forwarding address we got from Gaylord's former landlord at the Harvey apartments here in Hollywood.

Mark: So you're like Munson P.I. at this point.

Todd: I wouldn't go that far. Although, I wonder if Google Maps is crimping the P.I. industry's style a little nowadays...

Mark: So there you are in Motown with a map of all the 7-Elevens...

Todd: Basically, we got to Detroit and drove a little ways out of town. You know Eminem's "8-Mile," right? Apparently the way Detroit is organized, 8 Mile Road is eight miles from downtown. Where the hunt for Gaylord began was right near 12 Mile so the area was this weird overlapping fringe where the 'hood was starting to get nice again. We got there on a Friday and it turned out that the area was this bizarre mix of hip hoppers and Orthodox Jews walking to temple for the start of Sabbath. When we got to Gaylord's part of town we stopped at the 7-Eleven we thought he'd most likely be at. We just wanted to check it out and pick up a beverage. He wasn't there but, then again, it was only four o'clock or so. But it was really strange in that you could see Gaylord totally hanging out there.

Mark: Was it on to the next 7-Eleven?

Todd: No. From the 7-Eleven we drove about a mile to Gaylord's last known address. It turned out to be a boarded up office building. Strange, but completely normal in Gaylord's world. From there we just drove around town for a few minutes to get an idea of what was around, then stopped at Wallgreens for some candy. And driving away from Wallgreens we went right past Gaylord. He was kickin' it at a bus stop alongside a couple of teenagers who were dry humping in the grass while waiting for the bus to arrive.

Mark: Wait a minute, they were dry humping?

Todd: I'm serious. They were full-on dry humping.

Mark: And there's Gaylord.

Todd: Yep. From the time we stopped at 7-Eleven to the time we spotted Gaylord wasn't even half an hour. Just the idea of going to a city and running into the person your trying to find so quickly sounds impossible. But it happened.

Mark: And you guys just pulled up to him?

Todd: No. While Gaylord was at the bus stop, we did a couple of drive-bys to see what he was up to. He looked the exact same. The only change was he got a stylish new leather jacket. Our plan was to tail the bus once he got on it but when the bus arrived, he stayed put.

Mark: What about the dry-humpers?

Todd: They got on. Turned out Gaylord was just hanging out telling jokes to the folks waiting for the bus. He scared off some girls who showed up for the next bus. We flagged them down to find out what was going on and they were, like "That dude's whack. He was bugging us with stupid jokes." Then I asked them, "Did his dog just fly in from Chicago?" and they about crapped their pants.

Mark: That's perfect...

Todd: By this time Kjeld and I were in the zone the Crocodile Hunter would get into when he was stalking an animal in the wild. We had a pretty good stake out running on Gaylord. And then when he went on the move we tailed him to see where he was going. Finally, just as a test, we pulled over a little ways up the street so I could walk past him like I was minding my own business. Just to see if he'd notice or recognize me. I got about ten feet away when he said in his smooth, yet gravelly, voice. "You're Munson from the Comedy Store. Do you live around here, Todd?"

Mark: As if you had bumped into each other at Ralph's in LA or something...

Todd: Yep. We talked to him for a few minutes and told him what we were doing. It turned out that someone had printed and laminated that Black Table article and he carried it around with him as proof he was a famous comic. We carefully picked his brain for a few minutes and he was, like "OK, you found me.Thanks for coming. I'll see you around." And we were like, "Oh, no way Jose! We came 2000 miles for the good stuff!" So for the next five hours or so we hung out with him in the parking lot of a Family Dollar to gain his trust. Let me tell you, that's a very entertaining way to spend a Friday evening.

Mark: Was it what you expected?

Todd: Expectation-wise, Gaylord was still Gaylord.

Mark: When you interviewed other comedians for the documentary, what sense did you get from them about Gaylord? Respect? Contempt? Something in between?

Todd: When we first started interviewing comics it was like pulling teeth. Every comic is weird in their own way. There's no questioning that. Also, just about everyone is friendly with each other so there's a good rapport amongst comics. However, it was a little work getting comics to commit to interviews because some of them just didn't see the point in making a movie about Gaylord. On the other hand, a lot of them got it from the get-go and thought it was genius. It didn't take long for the curmudgeons to come around once they saw everybody else spinning hilarious tales about Gaylord. Among the comics, Gaylord commanded nothing but respect. Nobody really ever hated the guy. But Jay London was a bit sore because Gaylord "adopted" his signature "thank you, thank you". So there's a little beef there.

Mark: How much footage did you shoot?

Todd: We've got somewhere over 200 hours.

Mark: How long was the first edit?

Todd: The first edit, which we're paring down right now, clocked in at about three hours. I know Gaylord could kick Ben Hur's ass, but a three-hour Gaylord epic is just too much for anyone to handle. Right now, what we're really trying to do is tighten the editing amongst all the comics. The problem we're having -- and it's a good one -- is that the vast majority of comics we interviewed are just so funny that it hurts to cut anything. But at the same time, a lot of their stories overlap in that a lot of the same folks witnessed some major events in Gaylord's comedy career. So, really, it's just a matter of crafting the editing/storytelling in a way that three comics could be seamlessly chiming in on the same anecdote.

Mark: What kind of buzz are you getting on the film so far?

Todd: The response has been encouraging. Kjeld took a 20 minute teaser to Sundance and got a good response from a number of companies. Then again, what you've got to love is that nobody is ever in the mood to pull out their checkbook. Basically what Kjeld got was a lot of, "Send it to us when it's finished. We want to see the whole thing and then we'll decide." Boo on them, huh? Come on, you gotta step up to the plate when it's Gaylord Dingler!

Mark: Any word on a distributor? Or a possible release date?

Todd: No solid word on a distributor but we're going to enter it in every festival we can. Hopefully we'll be having the premiere sometime in June.

For more information on the up-coming documentary go to the Working Class Films website.