Name: A Mortician | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #301
Uploaded: 2020-10-20T22:22:07.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'A Mortician | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #301' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-10-20. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'A Mortician | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #301' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-10-20. Transcript available.

A Mortician | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #301

today's guest is a certified death man he is uh he's that he's that sherpa that
helps you
through that last step into the final front here today's guest is here to talk
everything about
everything we don't know about death and being dead ladies and gentlemen it's
mortician frank giles
we are here today with frank giles thank you for being here
you're quite welcome it's an honor well it's um it's nice to have you in here
man it's nice to
have somebody that's really that concierge kind of for the for the dark arts
you're really right there
i mean you're that last you're kind of the bellhop for the devil or for god
really that's right that's
one way to look at it you know you were checking we're checking your
reservation we're gonna get
you there one one way or the other yeah yeah uh i gotta ask you this take me
through the process of
when you guys get a body okay the first thing that happens is normally a phone
call and that phone
call most of the time is going to come from either a hospice nurse a nurse at a
hospital nursing home
or either maybe even the county corner and they're going to call and they're
going to say you know
we've had a patient expire or we've had a we've got a client in need of your
services and they're going
to have they're going to say something like that and then we're going to go
through and get some
information such as you know their name where they're located who the next of
kin is and just some short
information and then the next thing that happens is we've got to receive that
body into our care
so it doesn't matter if it's at a house or a hospital or you know nursing home
wherever that
person dies we've got to go you have to go to that locale we've got to go to
that location
and most of the time see i'm in a small community in hopkinsville kentucky we
don't have
play people that you know take bodies to the morgue and we don't pick them up
in the morning
when they call us we're rolling that immediately oh it's a one-stop shop over
there that's right so
when you call if you call us at two o'clock in the morning we've got an
answering service that
answers our phone at night and so they're going to take down all the
information and then they're
going to call us we're going to wake up you know from dead sleep we're going to
put our suits on
we're going to go to the funeral home get the hearse and then we're rolling to
the location
now when you go to that locale do you show up do you go by yourself you take a
sidekick no we've
we always take two people because in the words of forrest gump you know when
you go to a house call
especially you don't ever know what you're going to get i mean somebody could
be dead in a bed
or they could be they could have died on the toilet like elvis i mean you you
really don't know
and you've got to go in there that's right we've got to we've got to bring that
person out of that
house no matter where they've died in the house whether it be the attic the
basement the bathroom
the bedroom whether they be a hundred pounds whether they be 500 pounds you
know we've got to
get that person and we've got to bring them out of the house into the funeral
home have you ever had
to call for backup you know you show up and they got somebody they're real girth
out you know somebody's
real just fully just you know just a real big dog or a big lady most of the
time they will tell us
that ahead of time you know somebody will try to give it give us a heads up and
say uh you might need
to bring some extra help or whatever you might want to bring somebody from the
gym yeah yeah you know
but i've taken as many as four or five people out to one house you know to get
a body or you know to
a hospital you know to make sure that we can get the body back and how do y'all
do you guys just like
everybody like on the count of three let's lift like that kind of deal or are
the bodies hard when you
get there are they still soft it depends on how long they've been dead
sometimes they're still warm
they're still soft and warm sometimes they've already gone into rigor mortis
and that's where they kind
of stiffen up but you know in the funeral industry one of the things that you
will use more than most
is a clean white sheet you know when we go we'll take a we'll take a white
sheet and it doesn't have
to be white but any type of sheet we'll roll it under them and everything get a
sheet under them
so we can lift up on the sheet you know we've got other devices that are
designed to do that that
have handles so if you've got a large person that you know that are rated for
you know 500 a thousand
pounds and everything so that you can because that's the thing about a deceased
person is they are what
they what's considered dead weight and so but if you've got something with
handles that you can use
it makes lifting it a whole lot easier okay so sometimes if it's a real big dog
or a real big gal
you got to really get that tarp under them or something real that's right you
gotta you've got
to get some type of body mover under them so that you can lift them up and get
them to your mortuary
cod um and it what's the uh biggest person you think you've ever retrieved out
there uh probably
just under 600 pounds man that's big huh that is big and so you get the body
now in a larger city
there is a they'll go to the coroner first or what is that what is the coroner
well the coroner depending
upon the county and the situation like for instance in in our county the coroner
responds
if someone isn't under hospice care or isn't under doctor's care and then he
responds and so for
instance like if if we walked in and just found you dead here today then they
would call the they
would call and the police would come and the coroner would come and they would
do a death investigation
and if they decided that it was no foul play there's no need for an autopsy
then they're going to call
us and we're going to come get you so everybody doesn't get autopsied no no and
it all depends upon
your area one thing that most people don't realize with funeral homes and some
of the laws and things
is they are very state by state and even in the state sometimes regional as far
as funeral customs
and like in a bigger city they're going to be a lot more autopsies whereas you
know where i am
there's very few autopsies wow so it's just direct to you it's direct to right
farm to table really
exactly because in christian county we don't have a medical examiner a medical
examiner is the actual
person it's a pathologist that does the autopsies okay there's one in madisonville
kentucky that
covers the whole western part of the state of kentucky so there's one for like
a third of the state
so you know they can't send everybody to him otherwise he'd be overworked yeah
and so a lot
of times it's just you know uh heart attack or you know you know they'll go
through they'll ask the
family did he have any heart conditions what was his medical history and then
you know they'll make
their judgment based on that so if you had to get if you had to kill somebody
right if i'm a killer
all right you're a killer and what is there do i want to kill in a particular
type of county that may
not have that may be more rural that would probably be a better better way to
get away with it in a
smaller community because that way you know they don't have all the necessarily
resources have you
rolled up on a body and they're like yeah they just died naturally and you kind
of felt like they
didn't but it's not really your responsibility no not really we've got good
professionals that
they do their job and everything else now one time i did roll up on a suicide
and they had you know they had worked worked it and everything else and how
they do it
you know they said rope or gun i mean no it was you know self-inflicted gunshot
wound to the head
you know it was from the bottom or from the side i can't remember but the thing
about it was
they had when they'd gone through and cleared the scene when i went over there
to start my part
i called one of the deputies back in and i said um do y'all want this gun for
evidence or you know
because it was still right there oh wow they just left the gun there and it's
like okay before i touch
anything and ruin the contaminate this scene what is what's happening here and
they're like oh we
forgot to move that yeah i believe you did thank you captain obvious things get
a little shoddy out
there occasionally you know i guess it was the night shift you know oh yeah man
the night shift that's
like when you go to like a hampton inn or something and they got that night
manager
it's barely somebody that's even alive sometimes you know dude they had a blind
i was in knoxville
tennessee this is probably nine 12 years ago and they had a blind man working
as a night manager man
and he just looked trapped back there i felt like somebody just i don't even
know if he knew where
he was but you hit that bell and he'd come out there you know so night manager
can be anybody
um what about this so now you get the body okay all right so take us from there
once you get that body
um then what happens what do you do with it okay so when we get the body back
to the funeral home oh
yeah if the body is going to be embalmed then we go ahead and we start the embalming
process
immediately immediately if it's two o'clock in the morning we're going to start
embalming damn
because the thing about our business is you don't know when the next person's
going to die
you might you might go a entire day and not get anybody but then the next day
you might get four
back to back how often do people die um well for instance we at our current
location we'll do about
125 funerals a year okay out of one facility and then i've got another facility
that's going to do
about 120 calls a year what's the most dyingest time of year when do people
tend to really just say
all right i'm gonna die i'm dying normally normally your first quarter january
february march why
you know cold you know stress the holidays are over because you know i believe
that you know
somebody can have the will to live you know and in the end you know they've got
thanksgiving they've
got christmas they're waiting you know the family's coming in at christmas the
family's coming in at
thanksgiving but then in january they're like we won't see them again for
another year or maybe
maybe they'll come in at the summer and get depressed and you know hell with
that i'm out and you know
once you get depressed you know you kind of just you know how it was back back
when everybody was
under quarantine and you couldn't see your friends and everything else oh yeah
everybody got depressed
oh you couldn't even tickle anybody i remember that that's right they try to
take a guy to jail for
tickling somebody uh in pennsylvania so yes stuff just haywire man uh so people
will hold out for the
holidays hold out for that time with the family once the super bowl's over
though people are like oh
i'm dead that's right normally normally in the funeral business if it's your
first quarter and
your last quarter or your two busiest times okay and um so what you get that
body you know you pick
that sucker up how do you know if they're going bomb or if they're going uh
dust because we're going to
talk to the family what most of the time we'll talk to the family either by the
families there where the
body is if it's at the nursing home or if it's at their home the family's there
and we'll have a
interaction with the family and go ahead and talk to them about some
preliminary things
oh hell yeah permission to do the embalming and then we'll go back and
sometimes they might say
well no he wants to be cremated or you know we're going to do this you know and
so we want it done
different but but once we get permission we're going back to the funeral home
and we're going to start
that embalming process now if they go cream right do you do you how do y'all do
it y'all do stove y'all
do like bar like not barbecue but lik