Watch or listen to the stand-up comedy special 'Boyish Man' (2005) by Gary Gulman on Comedy Buff. Transcript available. Tracks include: Double Stuffed 'N' Milk, Grapes vs. Grapefruit, Girl Scouts, and The Fortune Cookie.

Gary Gulman

Boyish Man

You got to look to the Oreo people, man. That's who the sugar cookie should look up to because the Oreo just was great and then kept getting better. Like Michael Jordan, just when you say, oh, he's the greatest ever, he just kept getting better. Like the Oreo cookie, we were fine. We were fine with the Oreo cookie. We were like, oh, it's perfect, it's perfect. And then they added Double Stuff. I will never forget that day.
The Double Stuff came out October 11, 1982. I saw the Double Stuff and I said, well, what's the catch? You know what I mean? I was taught if it looks too good to be true, it's too, you know, too good to be true. And I said, well, what do I owe you? Double the stuff, same price. How do you turn a profit? We don't care about money. We want to make you happy. Oh, well, you've succeeded. Oh, Oreo. Wow.
And they didn't stop there. They could have stopped there with Double Stuff. And they put peanut butter in the middle. Peanut butter in the middle of an Oreo cookie. My God. That's cocky, though. That's arrogant. That's like they went up to Nutter Butter, put their finger in their chest, and said, we got it. Yeah, we'll take it from here, Nutter Butter. I think we know what we're doing with cookies.
Yeah. We're Oreo. Maybe you've heard of us. Oh, yes, you have heard of us. Yeah, we're America's favorite. It's cute how your name rhymes, but we're going to take it from here, Nutter Butter. Then they put chocolate in the middle of an Oreo. Chocolate in the middle of an Oreo. My God. Delicious, but a little scary, isn't it? Because it's almost like, Oreo, have you been reading my diary? You know, that's...
It's been a fantasy of mine forever. You made it happen, and I thank you. My favorite thing to put my Oreos in, milk. Here's what I do with the... I take a double stuff, and I put two of them together, essentially making it a quadruple stuff, which we'll just have to wait for, but you can do it on your own. And I dunk it right in there. And you know when it's done? When it stops bubbling. Then it's done.
And when it stops bubbling, I go, ding! And I take it out and I eat it. Because it's delicious. Milk. It's the only thing I really like milk for. They advertise milk too much. I'm sick of it. Enough. All right, we get it. There's milk. What? Why are they advertising milk? Who are they targeting with this campaign? People unaware of milk? People sitting at home, oblivious to this drink, just mesmerized by the commercial, going, oh, yeah.
Oh, shit, yeah. That would go good with a cookie. Milk, you say? Am I pronouncing it correctly? Is it milk? Oh, it's not a silent K. I just don't want to make a jerk out of myself when I order it later. Or maybe there were people who were all bummed out, really depressed at breakfast. Oh, God, this Rice Krispies is so dry. If only there was some sort of beverage I could pour over it, kind of moisten it up.
I tried Dr. Pepper. It was almost too effervescent. The snap crackle was deafening and the pop, kapow! Talked about cookies earlier, and you're like, wow, this guy must be very unhealthy. But I also eat some fruit, you know, and grapes, my favorite. I love grapes. I love them. They had some downstairs, and I would bring some up for you because they're so easy to share. I'll just break off some and hand them out to you.
And, oh, man, even the grocery store, they're very generous with their grapes. They really are. Usually they're very anti-shoplifting, but they seem to have a very lax grape theft policy. As long as you don't lie down in the grape aisle and have somebody feed them to you, and slave girls fan you, they're okay with you snagging a couple of grapes. So I love grapes. Hate grapefruit. Hate it. Isn't that interesting?
That they have such similar names. No similar properties. Grape, delicious. A masterpiece. Way to go, God. Grapefruit, vile. Unedible. So bad it should be a vegetable. I hate the grapefruit. The only reason the grapefruit was even invented, the only reason was because God wanted us to have something to compare the size of a tumor to. That's the only reason. But then after softball was invented, they should have discontinued the grapefruit because it's awful.
I've had bad experiences with grapefruit. One time I thought I was drinking lemonade. Turns out it was grapefruit juice. My life passed before my eyes. I thought I had been poisoned. Turns out it was just grapefruit juice. Good thing I hadn't just brushed my teeth. I wouldn't even be here talking to you right now. I wouldn't. That combination of toothpaste and citrus fruit, my God, what a lethal combination.
My God. Oh, Colgate. Enough with the tartar. It's under control. What I need you to do now is invent a toothpaste that allows me to drink orange juice within six hours of brushing my teeth. Can you do that? Good. Make it so. But the thing I hate the most about the grapefruit is that it ruins a fruit salad. And I love a fruit salad, especially when it's served in a watermelon shaped like a bowl with a handle on the top.
Oh, my God. But the grapefruit ruins fruit salads. Its evil nectar seeps into all the good fruits and destroys it. Its philosophy seems to be, I'm bitter, now everybody's bitter. And I hate that. It ruins everything. And you go in after a peach, grapefruit. Try a pear, I got to you too, pear. God damn you, grapefruit. Damn you, straight to Hades. There's only one fruit that the grapefruit cannot destroy, won't destroy.
The grape. Another reason to love the grape, because the grape had the courage, the guts, the balls, if I may, to say to grapefruit, hey, stay the hell back. I've got a reputation to uphold, okay? I'm the grape. I'm doing very well for myself, and you're not going to screw it up for me, okay? I'm in everything. I'm in jelly, I'm in jam, I'm in juice, I'm in soda, I'm in gum, I'm in wine. Even when I'm dead, I'm a raisin.
Yeah. Yeah, I don't go rotten, I go raisin. How's that? How good is a raisin? A raisin is so good it makes bran palatable. That's how good a raisin is. No other fruit can pull off that feed. Cherry bran? No, thank you. Raisin bran? Two scoops, please. Huh. They are bitches. You may have been a Girl Scout, but they're clicky. That's all I'm going to say. They're very clicky. They don't talk to every girl, and that always bothered me.
You had to be in the Scouts, and I didn't like that. But they make a great cookie. I've got to give the devil her due. They make a great cookie. That Samoa, have you ever had that Samoa? My God. My God. The Samoa. You can't eat just one Samoa. Never. You bargain with yourself. You're like, well, I'll have one row of Samoas. Did I say horizontal? I meant vertical. I'm going to have a vertical row of Samoas, because they're so good.
I've never been to Samoa. I don't know where Samoa is, but let me tell you something. That island is anywhere near as delicious as the cookie that bears its name. Well, set a course for adventure. Your mind on a new romance. I'm heading for Samoa. Quick, fast, in a hurry. Don't worry. They have one cookie, and they knocked it out of the park. So great. And you're like, well, they only had one cookie to work on.
What's so tough about that? The Chinese couldn't do it. They have one cookie. The fortune cookie. What a piece of shit cookie the fortune cookie is. My God. They give it to you for free at the end of the meal. No thanks. I'll take one of these cherries out of the sweet and sour chicken pot. That'll be good. That'll be my dessert. No thanks. It tastes like a manila folder. I've had it before. It's awful.
It's awful. Not one of them had a decent brownie recipe. Or rice pudding. You got all that rice. Putify it. No? And it's not like they're not capable people. They're incredibly capable. The Chinese. They've given us so many great things in the world of arts and science and math and literature and crime prevention. Those handcuffs. I love those handcuffs. They're a big improvement over our handcuffs.
Ours are very rigid. They're having fun with their handcuffs. And in the world of fire. Fire. They're fire drills. The Chinese fire drill. I love it. Yeah, there's fire. But you're running around the car. There's laughter. That's a great quality to have. To be able to laugh while on fire. That's a special group of people. They were smart though with the fortune cookie. I will give them this. Because the reason the fortune cookie is still around is because they're genius with marketing.
Putting that fortune in there, that's what makes the fortune cookie. That's why it's still around, the fortune cookie. Because yeah, you get a lousy cookie. But inside that lousy cookie, hope. Yeah, I just cracked my tooth in this cookie. But I have a winning personality. And that's going to help. That's going to help. That's going to help. I like to get the wake-up call when I'm in the hotel room.
I prefer the wake-up call because I hate alarm clocks. It's a bad invention. Beep, beep. No. No. Because everybody has the same reaction to the alarm clock. No matter how many hours you've slept, 10 hours, 12 hours, 6-month coma, everybody has the same reaction. Beep, fuck! That's a bad invention. And the snooze button aspect, that's a waste. My snooze button gives me nine minutes. Nine minutes is not a snooze.
90 minutes, that's a snooze. Has anyone ever woken up from the nine minutes refreshed? I was exhausted nine minutes ago, but now, right as rain. I am, oh my God, I'm glad they only gave me nine because 10 would have been overkill. I would have been groggy had I had that extra 60 seconds. Oh my God. Ever live with somebody who's addicted to the snooze button? My girlfriend, addicted to the snooze button.
She'll start hitting that thing at 4 a.m., stop at 2 p.m. Completely oblivious that there might be somebody else within hearing distance of this racket actually come back to me at the end of the day. Honey, I didn't wake you up this morning by hitting the snooze button 65 times, did I? Oh, no, no, baby, of course not. No, sweetie, snuggle. No, no, no. In fact, I wake up every nine minutes on my own.
That's my natural rhythm. That's my rhythm. In fact, I didn't even wake up. A lot of times I'm having a dream in which school buses are backing up every nine minutes for seven hours. But then I finally, I finally met somebody later and she was, you know, she was very sexy. She had a tattoo, which I love, and I wanted her to like me, so I got a tattoo. And it hurt so much. I don't know if you know this, they use a needle now.
When I was a kid, you licked it, you stuck it right on there. Instant tat, the ice cream man tat. Now this guy goes in there with a needle, he makes a little zzz, zzz, zzz, right? And I was like, oh, stop that, stop that immediately, please, that hurts a lot. The problem was I was going to get something really big, I was going to get the bat signal. Because I love Batman. Sometimes to this day, I'll be in my apartment alone and I'll just look in the mirror and say, I'm Batman.
I'm Batman. Who are you? I believe I just told you. I'm Batman. But the bat signal is huge, that would hurt a lot. I mean, this hurt a lot, zzz, that hurt a lot. So I talked it over with a guy and I got something still cool, just small. And you've probably seen these. I got a comma. And, well, it's more of a statement. It means stop. Okay, continue reading. That's what that means. It's tough. You better make sure you really want a tattoo before you get it because it's permanent.
Once the trend is over, you can't get rid of it. You know what I mean? It's a permanent trend. It would be like if in 1984 I said, you know what, everybody? I'm putting on these leg warmers and I'm never taking them off. I'm going to get physical and never stop. I'm going to take my passion and make it happen. Shaka Khan, let me rock you. So I'm over this girl's house and we're kissing. We're making out.
We're Frenching. And all of a sudden she looks in my eyes and she whispers. I love it when a w