“The only thing that ever brought me joy was drugs,” Jimmy said.
“You’re not serious.”
“Wish I was, kid.”
He’d been clean for four years when they met, and he was committed to staying that way. He said he felt great … but he missed being funny.
“I try to tell myself it’s okay,” he said with a shrug. “But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it every goddamned day.”
“The drugs or the comedy?” she asked.
“Both. I’ve never had one without the other.”
Being funny—razor-sharp funny, the kind of funny that can make an audience double over with laughter while cringing at the same time, the kind of funny that hurts as much as it entertains—was Jimmy’s gift. The only thing he’d ever wanted to do was make people laugh.
According to friends who’d known him for decades, he’d always been hilarious. But the business of being funny was a whole different animal than just cracking your friends up at parties. The pressure of being “on” night after night, whether he felt like it or not, was hard. He started doing cocaine as a young comedian to give himself energy onstage and to make his brain work as fast as his mouth did. Some of his funniest milestone moments—his first appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, for example—he was too high to even remember. At the height of his fame, he was taking cocaine and Adderall to perform, Xanax to calm down, Valium to sleep, and heroin just because it felt good. Without the drugs, the funny came slower, and the humor was diluted. And all his attempts to get clean, with rehab and without, were followed by periods of depression that would last for months.
When he got clean for the last time, the funny was gone. He could still tell a good joke, but the thing that made Jimmy Peralta Jimmy Peralta had left the building.
And then it came back. By accident.
Jimmy always donated a lot of money to charity, and he was often invited to local events. A few months into their marriage, Paris went with him to a black-tie fundraising dinner at the Fairmont, where he was awarded a plaque for his generous contribution to a charity that supported mental health services in underserved neighborhoods. When he went onstage to accept it, he said a few words of thanks, then impulsively threw in a dirty joke about one of the presidential candidates … and a donkey. The laughs and applause he’d received in the hotel ballroom that night buoyed him for days. And that’s when it all began to change.
Someone caught the joke on video and uploaded it to Twitter, hashtagging it #ThePresidentsDonkey and #JimmyPeraltaLives. Within a day, it was retweeted over two hundred thousand times. Chrissy Teigen even tweet-quoted it with a cry-laugh emoji, saying “I fucking love you Jimmy Peralta.”
And that’s when he realized he might once again have something to say.
Over the next few weeks, he wrote some new jokes, testing them out on both Paris and Zoe, the two people he spent the most time with. The two women, who didn’t agree on much, could agree on this: Jimmy Peralta was still very fucking funny, and the material he was writing was relevant to everything that was currently happening in the world.
When he had about twenty minutes’ worth of material, he tried it out at a couple of local comedy clubs. Eventually, he was invited to perform at other venues across the US, even making a surprise appearance at the legendary Comedy Cellar in New York. Audiences loved this new Jimmy. He was older, yes, but he was also wiser, more sensitive, more self-aware, and somehow funnier in 2017 than he’d been twenty years earlier. The older fans were glad to see him back. The younger fans were delighted by his no-bullshit takes on politics. And Jimmy took shots at everybody, political affiliation be damned. A two-minute clip of one of his jokes about a democratic politician caught in an affair ended up on YouTube, where it garnered over twenty-five million views.
In early 2018, Netflix competitor Quan called, and that’s when everything changed. Jimmy decided that at sixty-eight, he was ready for a comeback. Worse, he was doing it big. The first special was called Jimmy Peralta Lives. It debuted a couple of months ago to huge numbers, and cemented Jimmy as a star once again. The second one, scheduled for release in a few weeks, will be called I Love You, Jimmy Peralta.
There was publicity. Interviews. Their wedding photo made Page Six.
“This could be an opportunity for you to capitalize on, Paris,” Zoe said. “People want to know who you are, too.”
“No, they don’t. I’m not famous.”