Wayne took off sixty-five pounds and kept going after the bet ended. I gladly paid him the twenty thousand dollars. His entire lifestyle changed after that. Instead of money being a motivation for smart people to do stupid shit, I saw that money could be a motivation for stupid people to do smart shit as well.
If that sounds like I’m being mean by calling Wayne stupid, he’s earned it. He still owes me money, so I can call him what I want till I get it back. Wayne, if you’re reading this, pay what you owe and I’ll remove this paragraph from the next printing of the book. John, you too. I’m watching y’all, and now so is every reader of this book. They’ll know you’ve both paid up when this paragraph disappears.
But I’ll bet you a hundred dollars it doesn’t.
89
* * *
THIS CHAPTER STILL GETS ME EXCITED, PEOPLE
Eventually, the time came for the big show: the one for movie theaters, the one for comedy history. I’d put three quarters of a million dollars into this moment, making it the biggest bet I’d ever made. The setting: the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles.
I scheduled two shows—that way, I’d have a backup take of each joke. This ended up saving my ass.
Because of everything at stake, I had so much on my mind that I spoke too quickly on the first night and parts fell flat.
Afterward, I made adjustments, prayed, went back for show two, and did one of the best sets of my life. No metaphors here, just gratitude.
“Can you believe this shit?” I asked the guys afterward. “We’re gonna get to go see this at a movie theater!” At the end of the day, I’m still the excitable kid from Philadelphia who never got to do anything fun.
Since much of the set was about my childhood, I returned to my old neighborhood to film a short documentary about the environment I grew up in. I wanted to show that the people and places I spoke about were real.
I went to a family meal at Shirrel and Preston’s house, the same place where I was stuck in the kitchen snapping peas as a child. Most of my mom’s family were there, and as I was telling them I wouldn’t be who I was without them, I started crying. I never told them why I got so choked up, but it’s because my mom was the glue that held the family together. Since she’d passed, I realized that I’d barely spoken to our relatives, and I didn’t want them to think that this meant I didn’t love them.
* * *
Meanwhile, Will Packer was backing up his big talk with equally big actions. He introduced me, as promised, to Clint Culpepper, the head of Screen Gems, a production company responsible for thousands of films and shows. Clint somehow remembered me from a small part I’d done two years earlier in a drama about marriage and God based on a T. D. Jakes book, Not Easily Broken.
My friend Morris Chestnut had gotten me the part of his friend in Not Easily Broken, and he ended up cast in Think Like a Man, along with Romany Malco, who’d gotten the part I wanted in The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
During the first day of filming, after I did a few takes that followed the script, the director, Tim Story, said, “Hey, man, we got you because you’re funny. You got anything you want to try in this scene? Do this one for you.”
I knew from that moment that this would be a great experience, because he trusted me and wanted me to be the person I was on stage. So many of my films and pilots had gone wrong before because I wasn’t given the freedom to express myself and follow my instincts. I’d spent the last seven years on the road earning that freedom.
From then on, after nearly every scene I did, Tim said, “Let’s do a Kevin take.” I came to think of these moments as being “in my Jell-O,” because I had both support and wiggle room. Usually, these were the takes that ended up in the movie. For example, there’s a scene where I mouth off to Ron Artest of the Lakers on a basketball court, and I improvised trying to snatch the ball out of his hands. He was strong enough to lift me up and dangle me in the air while I was still gripping the ball. It ended up being one of the most memorable scenes in the film.
Everyone else on that set was also a team player. Nobody was selfish. Nobody wanted all the glory for themselves. In every scene we tried to set each other up to look great. The whole process was comedy heaven.
When the shoot ended, I had mixed emotions. On one hand, I felt like this might finally be the movie. But then I remembered so many disappointments before—a decade of dashed expectations—and tried to be careful not to get my hopes up again.
While Think Like a Man was in postproduction, I prepared for the release of Laugh at My Pain. AMC Theatres agreed to put my concert movie on ninety-eight screens. My combined social media following had soared to over seven million, so I could now reach more people with a single Tweet than with all the flyers we’d ever handed out combined.
I began promoting the film like there was no tomorrow (which, by the way, is another expression that doesn’t make sense, because if there was no tomorrow, then I wouldn’t have needed to promote it). Nearly every post I made online ended with #laughatmypain. I filled everyone’s feed with quotes from the movie and questions for fans until it became a trending topic.
I worked with the same dedication offline like there was a tomorrow. I looked at the way movies were typically promoted—press junkets, talk-show interviews, billboards—and decided once again to do something different that stood out.
I’d gotten to this point in my career because I’m a people person. I love to engage with comedy fans and show appreciation for them. So I decided that even though this was a movie, it didn’t mean I couldn’t mount an in-person charm offensive like I’d done in my early touring years. The weekend Laugh at My Pain was released, I popped up at as many theaters as I could get to and bought tickets, popcorn, and drinks for people who were there to watch the movie. I thanked each person for coming, took pictures with them, and made it a memorable experience.
Since so much of the film was about my dad, I brought him to the premiere, where he proved to everyone that I wasn’t making anything up. He kept calling out to celebrities using their characters’ names from TV. “Gina, come here and take this photo, sucka,” he yelled at Tisha Campbell-Martin.
When she didn’t respond, he got upset. “Dad, that’s just a character she played on Martin. Call her by her real name, Tisha, and I’m sure she’ll turn around.”
“Oh, she just one of them Hollywood people! Don’t ever get like that, son, or I’ll knock you on yo’ ass.”
In its first weekend, Laugh at My Pain sold two million dollars in tickets. It was the tenth biggest film at the box office in that period, which was extremely rare for a stand-up comedy film with such a limited release. AMC put it on more screens the following week, and in the end, Laugh at My Pain went on to generate nearly eight million dollars at the box office.