Give It Up for Greg Giraldo

- Greg giraldo, everyone.

Thank you, Dave.

I don't know if you guys watch a lot of hip-hop videos,

but, man, bitches are the shit.

Bitches are so much better than regular women.

They're always in a good mood.

They just dance around in their thongs

and their high-heel shoes, and you get to smoke bongs

and play the Xbox all day long.

They never seem to mind. Bitches never complain.

They never tell you to take your feet off the couch.

Or, "we gotta go see my mother."

Bitches don't even have mothers.

Greg giraldo, very simply, was the real thing.

He had the respect of real comedians.

Nobody was as good as him

and yet lived as hard as him

and delivered consistently like him.

- One of the most compelling things about Greg

was that there's an honest soul

inside of everything he did.

The thing about his comedy

was just being so raw and honest and real.

He just was such a real guy.

- I was in a subway the other day.

This guys screams across the tracks,

screams across the tracks, he goes,

"yo, Monica, yo, Monica,

yo, you got aids, yo."

And I thought, wow, that's how they tell you?

- He had this brain that was completely

this, like, supercomputer that just wouldn't shut off.

It helped him generate all this stuff,

but it also tortured him.

- From the moment he got on to the moment he got off,

he didn't take a breath, and it was all funny.

- We need a whole new energy source.

We need something else. It's not gonna be conservation.

Let's face it, Americans are not gonna conserve.

We're not gonna shift to smaller cars.

We can't! We have big, fat kids.

- He was also the kind of comic

that you went, "oh, son of a bitch."

It was right in front of everybody's face.

He found it and I'm like,

"what am I, an idiot?"

Gay marriage is fine

if you want to make Jesus cry.

I mean, if that's your thing. You know what I mean?

That's why we love him.

- There was a darkness about him

that transcended beautifully in his comedy.

That's what made him funny.

Otherwise, you know, you got Jim belushi

doing according to Jim, you know?

- Everybody thinks of him, you know, I think publicly

as kind of a roast comic.

Never in a million years

would I think of him as, like, an insult comic or a thing.

He was a heady comic.

He was not the guy in the club

that you thought would die.

- That's what you're calling it?

Give it up for Greg giraldo?

- Give it up for Greg giraldo.

- Give it up for Greg giraldo!

- The concept of me being interviewed

about Greg giraldo,

the great comedian who is dead,

would be so hysterical to us.

The west nile virus.

You know how they knew it was coming back

to the New York area?

They found two birds in whitestone, queens

that were infected with the virus.

Who finds these birds?

I grew up in queens.

We used to find dead birds all the time.

We didn't take them in for autopsies, you know?

We picked 'em up and we threw them at the gay kid.

That's what we did.

- The thing about, you know, giraldo,

that he wasn't a dick.

- Greg giraldo. - Oh, hi.

Yeah, this is where they all stop shooting.

- When you walked into a room and you saw Greg...

- Is everyone allowed to come?

- You know you'd be greeted with warmth.

- It's funny, I'm Italian. He's from queens.

But we always used to do this fake Italian greeting.

He'd go, "hey "

Some word that wasn't even Italian.

We'd just, like, hug each other.

But, uh, he was always upbeat, you know?

- They don't get that comics are dark, tortured souls,

that we don't need to dance around for attention.

Are you dark and tortured?

- He is. Kid's twisted.

- They do say that comedians are.

- He's like gitmo in his head.

- Greg's comedy was just real, you know what I mean?

There was no character. There was no persona.

Everything he did, like even in his roasts--

you know, his roasts were so epic.

He just blew everybody out of the water.

You're a vegetarian,

but you have no trouble swallowing a moose .

You liver is so shriveled, black, and dead,

if you put your ear to your side

you can hear it go, "what you talking 'bout, Willis?"

What a night.

A couple of trolls, a fairy, and a giant

all going after a sunken-eyed little monster

whose obsessed with jewelry.

It's like the lord of the rings.

- He kind of let the audience know,

this is the bar.

This is how hard-core this night is gonna be.

So either stay tuned or turn off your TV now, you know?

- Nichelle Nichols, farrah fawcett,

and Betty white.

I'll take women I would masturbate to 30 years ago

for $1,000, Alex.

He was one of those guys

that just went bam, bam, bam, bam,

and just tears.

Who would you?

You have the sex appeal of a school bus fire.

You look like Nick nolte ed a clydesdale.

Jon lovitz, you ing gay weeble.

Come on, jon, there hasn't been a more effeminate Jew

in the closet since Anne Frank.

- I think you can get to know his personality at the roasts,

but the real Greg, you know,

fans would get to know him if they went to see him live.

- A lot of my friends, you know, have a lot of money,

and they were calling me up, you know,

"hey, did you lose a lot of money in the stock market?

Did you get creamed?" But I've had a lot

of personal problems in the last few years,

so I don't have any money at all.

So they're calling me up. I'm like, "no.

"Actually I have exactly the same amount of money now

as I did when all this started."

Turns out investing all my money in Tequila and strippers

wasn't such a bad policy after all, you know?

He was such a life-force.

He was so animated,

so intelligent, so present.

It's the way he attacked a crowd.

- Now they have these DVD screens,

and people are playing porn driving around in these suvs

with porn playing on their DVD.

What the hell kinda--what if you get in an accident?

The whole car is totaled,

but the porn is still blaring away on the sidewalk.

- Giraldo belonged to the class of us

that were workers, that sat and wrote and tried,

and he was always prepared.

- He was like a ing miner.

You know, he was just-- excavate.

He would hit the joke and then hit it again

and then hit it again and then hit it again,

and he'd find more and more and more.

- I'm pissing in the sink because my crazy wife

has locked herself in our one bathroom,

and she won't come out

till I admit that I have a drinking problem.

Well, it's gonna be a long wait, buttercup,

so hang in there.

I'll always do stand-up.

My entire life is just trying to fuel this stand-up monster,

you know, come up with ideas

and come up with things to talk about.

I can't imagine not doing it.

But I also think that once you stop,

then you really stop for good.

This in-and-out thing, is just, it's too painful

to regroup and restart,

and you gotta be in it all the way.

- The story of giraldo for me was he was just a great guy.

You know, I'd like to say, oh, he was the guy of appetites.

Boy, you saw this coming.

It wasn't that way.

He was all of us.

- Greg's the oldest of three of us.

Myself, I was the second child,

and my sister Elizabeth was the baby of the family.

My dad was from Colombia, my mother from Spain.

Raised in queens, New York.

Typical middle class.

There wasn't anything that would jump out at you

as being anything, you know,

that led him into some crazy world of comedy.

You are you?

Greg giraldo.

- Okay, how long you been doing comedy?

35 years.

No, it'll be two years in march.

- We both, I started at the comedy cellar