Jackie The Joke Man is content

JACKIE "THE JOKE MAN" MARTLING IS RUNNING AROUND LIKE a kid in a candy store. Except we're at a fish market in East Norwich, Long Island, and it's not Jujubes he's picking out, but beautiful, succulent-looking lobsters. Twenty of them. He darts to the other side of the store, blond ponytail flapping in his wake. We need seafood bisque, and some large shrimp, and baked clams. Jackie now has enough food to feed an army, but he's got to feed only me, his wife Nancy; his mother-in-law Eileen, and Jace, the other employee of Jokeland, the family cottage industry (the office is literally a cottage) whence all the Jackie The Joke Man T-shirts, comedy CDs, mugs, joke-in-a-boxes, screensavers, and other Jackie paraphernalia are shipped to the clamoring fans of the head writer of "The Howard Stern Show." The counterman dutifully tallies up the huge bill, and Jackie blithely has him put it on his tab. "Don't cheat me," he warns good-naturedly "It's weird being rich," he sighs as we lug the booty out to his spanking-new Volvo. "I'm not used to it."

But Jackie has also experienced his share of family dysfunction, specifically his father's alcohol problem. Through family connections in the local Republican party (Jackie's great-great-uncle was Teddy Roosevelt's coachman), Jackie's dad was named deputy superintendent of highways of Nassau County. But supporting Jackie and his two brothers and one sister meant hustling for more money, and at night the elder Martling would head off to Roosevelt Raceway, where he was entrusted with the responsibility of getting the horses to pee in a jar to test their urine. In between and after, he'd stop for a drink or four.

"I never felt abused," Jackie remembers. "But he was a remote guy; his whole family was. I'm not sure that if he were stone sober, my father would have said a word. Therapists keep trying to tell me I had a miserable childhood, but I still have my kindergarten report card that says I had a sunny disposition. So they say I must have been having fun to cover something up. But wait a minute, if I think I'm having fun, am I having fun or not?"

Jackie learned early on that one way to have fun was to amuse people by telling them jokes. In third grade he saw how his cousin Pete's popularity soared after he recited a dirty version of "Twas the Night Before Christmas." "I swear I remember every filthy joke I've heard since then," Jackie says. He became the class clown, the jokester slyly flipping the photographer the bird in his eighth-grade class picture. He honed his craft at a local country club, where he supervised the busboys for four years. He'd stand in the kitchen for hours on end, telling joke after joke to a deadpan Dutch pantryman named Jake. "That guy would not smile, so the harder that Jake didn't laugh at me, the harder I laughed at myself."

After graduating from Oyster Bay High School in 1966, Jackie headed to Michigan State University. "I did the math," he says. "There were 40,000 students at M.S.U. Forty thousand divided by two, that's 20,000 girls." Jackie went off to East Lansing and played the odds. "I fucked plenty of horrible women in college. Hey, you're having fun, you fuck an ugly one, you fuck a pretty one-nobody was keeping score."

The scoring was easy because, by the luck of the draw, he was assigned to the freak dormitory in the liberal-arts college. No jock Spartans for Jackie-he was living with the hippies, the potheads, and barefoot babes. "Those were very formative years," he recalls.

Jackie's college days and nights were filled with keg parties, bong blasts, shoplifted steaks, and, naturally, the pursuit of pussy. Once Jackie surreptitiously miked his dorm room, ran the line to a friend's room down the hall, then had his date hum the "Star-Spangled Banner" while she was blowing him, to the delight of his pals. No wonder it took him five years to graduate with a degree in mechanical engineering. And he still had no idea what to do with his life.

For a while he played guitar in a Lansing-area band, but quit when he overheard the drummer tell a friend, "One day we hope to tour Ohio." Reality check, please. Then he did construction work in Denver, until an old high-school friend, Chris Bates, lured him back to New York in 1973 to play music. For the next few years, they gigged around Long Island as the Off Hour Rockers. They were just two guys (later they added a keyboard player) playing acoustic guitars, telling jokes, and generally being assholes. It was a dead end. "We were too big for wine-and-cheese gatherings," Jackie remembers, "but too small to play the Hamptons."

Then one night in 1975 he happened to be at Catch a Rising Star, one of the then hot new comedy clubs in New York City. It was open-mike amateur night, and when one of the comics bombed and left the stage before his time was up, Jackie leaped onto the stage and told an old, stale dirty joke that immediately brought the house down. When the emcee complimented him on the joke, Jackie had a revelation. "If the emcee at Catch a Rising Star hasn't heard that joke, maybe other people haven't either. Maybe I'm sitting on something here."

Jackie began researching in earnest. He pored through bunches of old dirty-joke books, collecting every joke he could. By 1978 he'd worked up enough nerve to do comedy gigs at Dixon's, a club in Long Island. Soon he was promoting a comedy night at a local bar named Cinnamon's. That same year, he self-distributed his first comedy LP, What Did You Expect? Then he hit on the idea of creating a telephone joke line that someone could call up, hear funny jokes, and then get hit with a plug for Jackie's latest show and albums. Dial-a-Joke, (516) 922-WINE, was born.

Jackie leads me up the stairs of his parents' house to the attic, which harbored the first Jokeland. And there they are: ten tape recorders, lined up in a row, still spewing out dirty jokes to the faithful who've dialed Jackie's joke line for the past 20 years. Upward of 8,000 people a day call 922-WINE and hear Jackie laughing, whooping, and hollering dirty jokes. All around the attic are faded posters from those early days, along with glossy photos of Jackie with then unknown comics Eddie Murphy, Paul Reiser, and Bill Maher. Jackie finds a 1980 wall calendar marked up with bookings. "I've been hustling for a long fucking time," he remarks as we walk down the stairs and out to the car. It's time to go to the current Jokeland and cook those 20 lobsters.

The Joke Man now resides in Bayville, a sleepy little town on the North Shore, about five minutes from East Norwich. He owns three houses here-one where he and Nancy live, another that's rented out, and a third, Jokeland, where Nancy and her mother, Eileen, greet us and begin preparing the seafood. Howard and the rest of the gang continually ridicule these modest domiciles, which are under constant siege from the vagaries of the nearby Long Island Sound. But in some ways they're the houses that Howard Stern built.

Jackie wasn't exactly on fire when he met Howard in 1983. Two years earlier, Jackie had hooked up with Nancy Sirianni, a local girl who left her job managing a recording studio to guide Jackie's nascent comedy career. (They were married in 1988.) Together, they promoted comedy shows at Governor's, a comedy club in Levittown. For one week a month, Jackie would hit the road to perform. He also sold jokes to Rodney Dangerfield (at $50 a pop) and Phyllis Diller (who paid $3 a joke). When a friend in Washington, D.C., told him about this outrageous, disc jockey who was leaving D.C. for WNBC in New York, Jackie sent Howard a package of his three homemade comedy albums. Howard listened, amazed at this character who seemed to know every dumb dirty joke ever invented, and invited him up to the studio.

"Here I am at 30 Rockefeller Center, pictures of Carson and Donahue and all on the walls, at this big-time radio station. I was star struck," Jackie remembers. "But there was Howard, this big Jewish guy with a bad mustache and short hair, acting goofy. I just hung out on the air and laughed a lot. And at the end of the day, Howard asked me to come back the next week."

Best of all, Howard plugged the joke line during the show. Jackie had reached hundreds of thousands more potential callers in a matter of minutes than he had in five years plastering Dial-a-Joke stickers all over Long Island. Soon Jackie was bringing other comedians to the studio to play "Stump the Comedians," a game in which people called in with the beginning of a joke that Jackie and his pals would have to finish. Jackie never failed-his encyclopedic knowledge of jokes did not let him down.

It was a brazen act that cemented Jackie and Howard's relationship and led indirectly to the sumptuous lobster lunch that Jackie and I were about to enjoy. While Jackie was hanging out with Howard on the air one day, he slipped him a note with a joke on it. To Jackie's amazement, Howard read the line and it got big laughs. Although to this day the two have never discussed exactly how, Jackie found himself writing for Howard.

At first, he wasn't even paid. In fact, soon after Jackie came aboard, there wasn't even a show. Despite having the highest-rated afternoon show in New York, Howard was fired by NBC. Shortly after he resurfaced at K-Rock, however, Howard called Jackie and asked him to rejoin the show, for one afternoon a week. This time, at Nancy's insistence, Jackie asked for parking money. Then in February 1986, when Howard moved to the morning drive-time slot, he asked Jackie to come up with a price for appearing two days a week. Two days led to three days, sometimes even four days. Jackie summoned up his courage and decided to quit touring. In August he was offered a full-time job on "The Howard Stern Show." The only problem was that K-Rock's general manager, Tom Chiusano, arrived at his salary by multiplying his day rate times five. Jackie, in his naivete, had grossly undervalued his services.

It's no secret around "The Howard Stern Show" that Jackie wants more money-he's resigned from the show four times in various ploys to get his salary raised-and he's taken a lot of shit for it on the air and in private. But part of the blame has to be laid at his own feet. When Jackie first joined the show, Howard persuaded his own (and Robin's and Fred's) agent, Don Buchwald, to represent the newcomer. Astonishingly, Jackie turned Buchwald down. "I figured Robin gets what falls off of Howard, and Fred gets what falls off of Robin. It didn't make sense to have the same guy representing me," Jackie reasoned. So for years he did his own negotiating, which led to walkouts and letters of resignation (which, in sublime Stern style, wound up being read on the air). "I've never been a troublemaker, unless trying to get your due is trouble making," he says. "Then, yes, I'm absolutely a troublemaker." Nowadays, Jackie is represented by a lawyer and a manager and, after his last walkout last year, seems at least reasonably content. Anyway, he looks content polishing off his third lobster.

"Look, it was just a ballsy thing where I got up my nerve and handed Howard that first joke to read, and it's developed into a seamless thing," he explains. "And with Fred writing down notes too, Howard now has three different senses of humor at his disposal. It's this monster coming from three different angles."

Over the years, Jackie has become a larger-than-life, Falstaffian character on the show. Endless stories have been told about his drinking exploits, his potsmoking antics, his sometimes repugnant attempts to embrace life in all of its base aspects. Tales have been told of a drunken Jackie on a cross-country trip tossing his fresh urine out the front window of his car-only to have the wind blow it into the backseat, where it splashed in his mother's face. Legend also holds that he's taken shits out of car windows mid-moon, painted his face Indian-style with the fresh menstrual blood of a college girlfriend, and posed for a picture at a Super Bowl party while inserting one of his fingers in the anus of a New York Giants hater who had GIANTS SUCK painted on his butt cheeks (and then ate chicken wings without washing that finger). "I'm out there living a little," Jackie shrugs.

Not surprisingly, Jackie's antics, whether fact or fiction, have become fodder for the show. But when the rest of the gang piles on, he lets it roll off his back. "I would say I take more abuse than anybody on the show," he allows. "Number one, I don't have a choice. And number two, I write some of the horrible things that Howard says about me. I mean, there's nobody more generous than I am, and every time Howard calls me cheap it makes me fuckin' nuts, and he knows it makes me nuts. But do you think he's gonna stop? I could give away my fuckin' house and he'd say, 'Oh, you cheapskate, you just didn't want to have to pay the electric bill.' There's no way to fight back."

Jackie opens another Heineken and offers me a third lobster. My eyes wander the room here at Jokeland. Stacked in one corner is a pile of recording equipment, Nancy's home studio, which is being relocated to the soon-to-be-renovated garage out back. (Doting husband Jackie has been supporting singer-songwriter Nancy's music ventures for some years now, the latest being a group called The Scoldees.) On one wall hangs a framed poster proclaiming Private Parts the number-one-grossing movie, with a platinum Private Parts CD next to it. Over the bathroom door hangs a sign that reads RECEIVING. My eyes stray to a huge barbecue grill on the patio. Top of the line. Must have cost a fortune. Not. Nancy rolls her eyes and relates the story of the free grill. Seems a Weber distributor who was a fan of the show heard that Jackie needed a grill for a party he was throwing at Jokeland and offered to give Jackie a top-of-the-line grill in return for being invited to the party. Afterward, they couldn't get rid of the guy; he began pestering them for invitations to all of their parties.

"I like to barter for stuff," Jackie says.
"I want to pay for everything," Nancy retorts. "We can afford to buy the beer. We don't have to invite the beer distributor to the party."

Not now they don't. Jackie is on a major career roll. Last year Simon & Schuster published a collection of his dirty jokes. He recently signed a deal with Oglio Records to distribute his new CDs. (The first, Hot Dogs and Donuts, is in better music stores everywhere.) He also has his own Website, a regular column of jokes in this very magazine, and has been playing class venues everywhere from Las Vegas to the Westbury Music Fair. So has success mellowed The Joke Man?

"Maybe I worry a bit less," Jackie reflects. "Now every year I've got a little bit more money and a few less years it has to last. If the show closed tomorrow, I could do cruise ships for the rest of my life, going around the world half the year. It's like Jackie Mason says, 'I never have to work another day in my life. Unless I want to buy something. That's a different story.'"

If the show ended tomorrow, I suggest, he could always go into real estate with all his houses.

Jackie winces. "Fuck you. Look, the bottom line is our houses are small, on small lots, because it's Bayville. There's no such thing as sprawling pieces of land here. We could spend the same amount of money and go inland a mile or two and get a nice big place. But I love it here. You ever been to the other house?"

Next thing, we're piling into the Volvo. Jackie drives a few blocks and parks in front of a modest house near a marina. This is where Jackie and Nancy live. We park in the driveway, and Jackie gives me a tour of the back. There's a shed that's been converted into a workout room. A large Jacuzzi on the rear deck. Another huge gas grill. We enter the house. There's a giant television that dwarfs the small living room. On the second floor is the master bedroom.

"We actually tore a hole in the wall and built an extension so we could fit a nice-size TV in here," he says, demonstrating. Then he's off, rushing up the narrow stairs to a converted attic. He wants to show me the view of the marina. Years ago, when they first bought this house, there was this tiny, slatted-up ventilation hole in the wall of the attic. Jackie got stoned one day and started bending the metal slats. Each time he'd go up to the attic, he'd bend them a little more, until one day he clawed at the slats and-eureka-he realized they had a water view from that vantage point. So they tore out the slats and put in windows, and now Jackie can actually see the marina where he stores his beloved jetty.

Ah, the infamous jetty. Another much-discussed topic on the show. After the disastrous winter storm and flood of '92 (when Jokeland was under six feet of water), Jackie, walking along the beach, came upon a four- by 20-foot ragged wood dock slip that had washed up on the sand. It lay there until that summer, when Jackie painstakingly cleaned and painted the wood, then floated it 50 yards out from shore, where he anchored it. Voila, instant jetty! Each winter Jackie dutifully stores this hunk of wood until the first harbinger of summer, when it's time to relaunch the jetty so Jackie can rush home from work, grab a couple of Heinies, swim out the 150 feet, and bask on that slab of wood for hours on end. It's a good life.

Jackie stares wistfully at his water view. "Hey, I love it here. I love coming home and swimming and going to my computer and then going back swimming. We're in fuckin' Oz. We got our little hot tub, our little restaurants. It's our little shithole of the world."

Jackie smiles contentedly. Then it's time to go downstairs and get on the computer and check out the new 3-D animated Joke Man performing on his Website. And maybe eat just one more lobster.

Updated: 2-August-1999

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