Work Text:
Richie Tozier's job means he gets paid to make people laugh - basically have a brain orgasm. And he makes himself laugh for all the wrong reasons - take your mind out of the gutter, that's unrelated to the orgasm part - but no money appears at his door as he sits on the sofa with another bottle of wine, sniggering to himself because of how pathetic it is that he can’t tell anyone that he’s gay at fucking forty years old.
The satisfying alliteration, and the hard consonants of the “fuck” make him smile: it’s the thought that makes him laugh. But no cash, and apparently he needs to live, so the shows have to continue. For the money, and because he’s Richie “trashmouth” Tozier and people love him and people need to see him in a stupid suit, moving like a person who isn’t him, with his fucking dancing feet, talking about girlfriends he’s never had.
In his last show, there was a joke that always made him feel like shit; one of those stupid bits plagiarised by his writers from fifteen different white men with neck beards, that begins with “I’m completely straight” and ends with “But homophobia is bad”, accompanied by some throwaway line about how lucky he’d feel if a gay guy hit on him that he doesn’t want to throw away. It usually gets a good laugh, but that’s not even the shitty part. The shitty part is the people who don’t laugh; the two women holding hands, or the man with the rainbow pin, who just fucking stare. He knows exactly what they’re thinking, because it’s what he thought when he first read the joke. “Yeah,” he can hear them saying, “We know homophobia is fucking stupid. We don’t need some random straight guy to tell us that.”, so he turns his eyes right to the hen party, or the young couple whose children are being babysat at home, grins like he finds it just as hilarious as they do, and moves onto the next joke with his fucking dancing feet.
He snorts, and takes another gulp from the bottle. “Well, isn’t life just shit.” he says to the bottle and the audience and the empty room and himself.
One thing that had been difficult for him to get used to in his career was the looking; when he was very young, he had started training himself not to look at one thing for too long. Because of the boys, obviously. He wanted to look, but if you look for too long, they hate you, so his eyes have been constantly moving ever since he first got called a queer in a middle school hallway. Like he always had something to hide, which, evidently, he did. Down, up, right, left, you never get the things you want, which is fucking funny. Really, it’s hilarious. But when he’s onstage, he has to look straight ahead. Yeah, good one. His audience can’t think he’s hiding anything, especially not that his girlfriends and ex-girlfriends are all based on stories from his manager, who “wanted to get into comedy but didn’t think he was cut out for the stage”. Fuck it.
It’s more different than most people think - keeping your sexuality tight in your chest when you’re a kid, compared to when you’re an adult. You can’t pretend it doesn’t exist anymore. So at forty, Richie treats it like an annoying pet, like a dog that follows him around, a pomeranian or something, that for some fucking reason will go away for a minute if he jerks off (still jerking off at forty - see, hilarious!), or goes to a bar where no, he isn’t the comedian Richie Tozier, but he does get that a lot, and yes, it would be fucking weird to see a guy like that at a gay bar at 1am on a Friday night, super mega incredibly straight as he is. God, this shit is fucking priceless! And sometimes he’ll go home with a guy, but sometimes he’ll feel too fucking dirty. Dirty little secret. How nuanced, what a callback, what a wonderful tragicomedy this would all make. He laughs again.
And sometimes, when he feels dirty, he kicks the dog, and he goes back, and when he gets undressed, the aging brown-eyed pretty boy he's gone home with will see that he's kicked the dog and say "Hey, are you OK? Why did you kick that dog?", and Richie will say it was an accident, and the almost beautiful man will pretend to believe him and ignore the scars on his legs.
That he got from kicking a dog. There's an extended metaphor for you.
Why do people love slapstick? Or, for all you “generation z” kids out there, those videos of little kids falling over and crying. Why does it make us laugh? Richie drinks and thinks about how funny he is. God, he is so funny, and interesting too! There’s so much to him. He’s so fucking well rounded, and slap repressed memories of a traumatic childhood on top; he’s like an author’s wet dream. He laughs because he’s so funny, then he grabs his laptop and types out a couple of jokes that will never get used, but they make him laugh again. People like to see idiots hurt, idiots and children. Maybe that’s because their pain doesn’t feel like forever. Richie’s pain did feel like forever even when he was a kid, so he decides he’d like to be an idiot.
Then his stomach turns, and he runs to the toilet and vomits out everything he had thought that night, and by the next morning those thoughts have been replaced with a headache and a shitty, shitty empty feeling in his heart, and he doesn’t look at anyone all day. You just can’t write this stuff.