Yahoo Lifestyle The Tonight Show: Comic Pete Lee Mines Loss of Home to Wildfire for Dark Laughs, Says ‘Dry January Is Over’
Stand-up comic Pete Lee was one of scores who lost their California home to the fast-moving wildfires ravaging the coast in Los Angeles. But rather than understandably excuse himself — as many of this week’s late-night TV guests have — from a scheduled Thursday-night appearance on NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, he used his visit as a sort of humor-based therapy.
After Fallon shared before-and-after photos of where his guest was living, Lee acknowledged that “some people are going to be mad at me” for mining his tragedy, one of thousands in the Los Angeles area this week, for laughs, but “my house burned down,” he argued. “I can tell jokes about this.”
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And one night this week while crying, write jokes about it he did. “I hope people wont think this is tasteless,” he said, before pulling out his notes and launching into an L.A. wildfires-themed set.
“When your house burns down, ‘Dry January’ is over,” Lee declared. “I was drinking like Prohibition was gonna start tomorrow.”
Lee said he was watching the news with a friend when they saw an on-the-street reporter standing in front of a row of houses on fire. The friend asked which house was Lee’s and he responded, “‘The orange one.’ It used to be white but now it’s blaze orange. It looked like the logo for a Guy Fieri restaurant.”
Lee noted that the house in fact belonged to some friends who had invited him to crash with them, a month ago, after his move to Arizona for a woman went belly-up. As such, “I’m a single guy right now,” he said, and in fact just the other night, he claimed, he and a woman were flirting at a bar when she popped the question, “‘My place or yours? ‘And I’m like, yours. I do not have a place.
“You’re not just a hook-up,” he told the woman in this scenario, “you’re part of my plan.”
Watch Lee’s bit above and tell us if you thought it was just the right tone of dark humor.
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