The Legendary WID
written by Tabitha Vidaurri
“There’s a method to my madness,” says prop comic The Legendary WID. “I’m not overly anal about it. I try to make it a little bit organized, but also a little bit unorganized. Sometimes the charm of the joke comes out in the disorganization. There are different dynamics. Sometimes I strive to make it hard for myself and go to the audience, ‘Well what do you want me to do?’ , and improv on that. It’s very satisfying as a job. I can’t imagine doing the same thing over and over again. I’m a little bit too hyper for that I guess.”
There are a few select individuals who have the honor of being considered a Philadelphia institution. The Legendary WID is most definitely one of them.
For over twenty years the WID has served as a pillar in the Philadelphia comedy community. His real name is actually Michael Baldwin. He earned the title “Legendary” because of his long and detailed resume which includes Comedy Central’s Make Me Laugh, Caroline’s Comedy Hour and the cult TV hit The Uncle Floyd Show. The WID part stands for “Without ID”, which was a nickname he took as a young man when he was arrested for hitchhiking. He is also sometimes referred to as a “Dark Weird Al” or “The Prince of Props and Puns”.
The WID began his career in comedy working at an antiques store in New Brunswick, NJ. “When the customers would come in, I would try and sell them something and I would take the stuff off the shelf and tell jokes with them.” He decided to take his act on stage from there. “I used to go out and tell jokes at gong shows, when the gong show was in recent memory. In the beginning I would bring the props in a backpack, fill two suitcases and hitchhike to my gig,” says the WID. “Thrift stores, flea markets, that’s my scene. I have like three giant storage spaces filled with my collectables,” says the WID. “After I got out of the antique business, I didn’t sell the stuff, I just hoarded it. That was why I became a prop comic. I didn’t know any others except for maybe Rip Taylor, so I just wanted to be a hip Rip Taylor.”
I met up with The Legendary WID at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Oregon Avenue, which is the neighborhood The WID lives, in the deep south of South Philly. He likes it because it’s quiet and within walking distance to The Laff House where he hosts the Wednesday night open mic. We drank coffee while I tried to process the sheer amount of experience and comedic knowledge that is inside The WID’s brain.
As comedian and friend John Kensil puts it, “WID reminds me of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, only his talent is puns and entertainment references. He knows obscure vaudeville history. He would tell me something and I would look it up and it would be true. He’d be great as a Hollywood trivia expert lifeline on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.” Basically, the WID’s mind seems to be as filled as his storage spaces.
Yes, The Legendary WID is a prop comic, which may make one have preconceived notions regarding his material, like the fear that his act may resemble a certain redheaded prop comic we know all too well. Trust me when I say the WID is in a league of his own. He does, however, acknowledge that people might think what he does is, well, weird. “There’s a lot of prejudice out there against prop comics. It’s a part of the business, like being a mime or a juggler. Its not pure stand-up.”
I was able to see The Legendary WID perform at the Ministry of Secret Jokes, a semi-monthly comedy show at Fergie’s Pub in Center City, Philadelphia. The performance area is in a small upstairs bar and an audience of at least fifty people was crammed inside. It was hot, it was loud, and the WID had at least three plastic tubs full of his props. At one point he dumped them all on the floor, so halfway through his set, he was literally standing knee-deep in props: deflated blow-up dolls, stuffed animals, masks, rope, fake fruit - you name it. He seemed to gain speed as he went, and the whole thing began to take on a sort of manic tone. He seemed to be out of breath, but he was also yelling a lot.
The Legendary WID’s comedy can be best described as an old-timey vaudeville show, but in a post-apocalyptic future. The standard formula for a prop comic is to hold up said prop and then make some kind of pun- it’s Comedy 101. The thing about the WID is that he purposely makes his setups elusive, so that there’s always this delay before you realize the punch line. You also never know how many puns he’s going to make with the same prop.
The WID leaves very little reaction time between bits, the only moments you get to register what is going on is when he’s frantically digging through his pile of props, usually muttering and dropping things at the same time. Sometimes his puns are really simple, like holding a toilet seat up to his face and saying, “I don’t want to look like an asshole here.” Other times he makes his jokes so absolutely convoluted by combining previous puns and props, in the end he’s standing there with an armload of seemingly unrelated objects and somehow it all makes sense. He’ll hold up an owl statue and yell accusingly at the audience “What?” until they tell him that he’s supposed to say, “Who?” Then he holds the owl over the toilet seat and says, “Who gives a shit?”
I was curious whether or not WID took his props to shows without sorting through them, or if he carefully selected certain things for each show. He explained that it is a combination of both. “I take it in bulk. Every comedic deal is different. Every show is different. So, I’ll just work with what I take. Sometimes consciously, I’ll say, well I want to do that one. But most of the time I just have a certain amount of props that I set aside.”
“Because I’m outrageous,” says WID, “people feel that it’s a license for them to be outrageous, too. Most of the time it’s a nice thing because it gives more fodder for the cannon of comedy. There have been times where I’m overwhelmed by it, but only a few times, and I’ve done thousands of shows. I like people, so if they are having a good time, it’s a fun thing.”
“The WID was the first live comedian I ever saw,” says Doogie Horner, fellow comic and host of the Ministry of Secret Jokes. “I had seen comics on TV, but this was different—the crowd was drunk and belligerent, crammed into a dingy warehouse, but the WID seemed unfazed. He welcomed their heckles—literally. He said ‘Alright, c’mon, heckle me. C’mon!’ So somebody yelled something, and the WID instantly responded with a hilarious retort. Then someone else joined in, and the WID shot him down too. Then nobody else wanted to heckle. And everyone paid attention.’”
There was a heckler sitting in the front row the night that I saw the WID perform, and it was true that the WID seemed to be feeding off of the energy. “I play exasperated; I conjure false emotions. Either anger or happiness, it’s a method acting sort of thing. People will go, ‘Oh you got so mad at that guy!’ and I’m thinking to myself ‘I wasn’t mad at that person at all, I was just setting up my joke.’ Or they’ll ask how did you let that person get away with that. I didn’t let them get away with anything, they were just digging their own hole and giving me something I could riff off of.”
However, he admits to not being completely impervious to audience interference. “I’ve gotten angry a couple of times when it wasn’t going my way, or if there were disturbances, but after I awhile I thought, ‘It’s not that important.’ I’m not saying that’s the key to success business-wise, but I found it to be the key to keep your mental stability and your status as a normal person. “
“I made an early decision to be happy while doing this,” he continues. “I like to be happy with my job, and I think if it gets too stressful, well, you’ve seen the pratfalls of comedy; drugs, suicide, arrests…so much negativity. I try to keep it light. I know I’ve saved a lot of shows when they were going downhill and I still had the energy and enthusiasm to go up and give a good show even though the audience stunk or the mic didn’t work.”
“Once you get trapped in the comedic label, you gotta be funny,” says the WID. “People treat you differently if you say you’re a comic. It seems like you’re bragging. I find it hard to say, ‘I’m an artist.’ Maybe because I’m a middle kid out of seven from New Jersey with a slight inferiority complex."
“I enjoy the job I’m doing, I’m lucky to still do open mics after being an established comic all these years cause it keeps me hip.” WID refers to his eight-year stint as the host at the Laff House. “I can make a Lady Gaga joke or an Obama joke without seeming dated, because I try to keep up with things. I get to hear things straight from young comedians mouths. I try to see what’s going on, and one of the best ways is to see what happens on an open mic.”
I asked the WID if he felt like he was a mentor to younger comedians. I’ve heard only good things about him from other Philly comics, many of which started out at the WID’s open mic. “I allowed people to bomb. If they bomb I say, ‘Eh, you’ll do all right next time.’ I looked at it in a more nurturing sort of way than I think other hosts do. Other hosts don’t get involved. I’m from a big family, so I got involved with everybody that came across my path. I’ve always tried to be fair and I think that’s why they like me.” However, he wasn’t afraid to give criticism. “Every guy that went up there, I fought with them when they got too dirty, too unfunny, or too mean. I wanted to set a good example because I’d done it for a long time and I saw that people who are successful are people who try to be funny first instead of trying to be dynamic in a dirty or shocking sort of way. That might come out in them, but they got to learn the basics first.”
The WID describes himself as a technophobe. He uses a cell phone and the Internet, but only because he has to. Since he began his career in a time when it was safe to hitchhike, I was pretty curious as to what he thought about the state of comedy these days, and how the Internet has changed everything.
“People have more choices now for their entertainment buck. I think that they want contact with real people again,” he explains. “Being online is a natural occurrence, and I think people are used to that now, so they want something different, and something different in this cycle will be a live performer. And let’s face it, the ticket prices to go to other venues, like to see a play, are astronomically high. People always need a place to go and have a date and not have it be music or be a play. They need something that is a live contact that is minimalist. A lot of comedy, even if it’s four people up there on the stage at the same time, is minimalist. I embrace the new cycle that’s coming through and I think it’s a reaction to the technology glut that’s been out there since the introduction of the home computer – you need the humanity of a live performer.”
“Because I was an antique dealer and I have been a comedian for this long, I see the change in people,” says the WID. “ The audiences have gotten smarter. Now if you reference something, they can reference it, too. But smartness is sometimes impersonal, you have to have something to bounce it off of that is not a machine.”
I asked the WID if he felt like there was another stand-up comedy boom currently happening like the one in the Eighties. “Fashions and entertainment will always have their cycles, and I’m lucky enough to have stuck with comedy,” he explains. Determination is probably a better word than luck, though.
“It doesn’t matter what rung of the ladder of show business I’m on,” says the WID, “I’m going to enjoy it, as long as I don’t have to be too business-like. It’s fun for me, I get something out of it intellectually, and it boosts my ego to get applause. I am happy with the state of comedy these days, and there is a boom going on. We’re pretty lucky to be in the business now.”
For more information on The Legendary WID,
visit myspace.com/widcomedy