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Art of no expression
The comedian has a new look, a new wife and new material, but he's still Emo Philips with that nasal voice. And don't count on seeing him break into a smile.
By MAGGIE COUNCIL DI PIETRA
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 7, 2000
I knew Emo before he was Emo.
He's from my old neighborhood in the southwest Chicago area. I was a snot-nosed teenage program director of a little non-profit coffee house in the mid-1970s when I first booked the comedian, whose real name is Phil Soltanek, but who was calling himself Phil Jasper that week.
After some debate, he was paid our upper-shelf price of $20 for the night.
Philips/Jasper was unlike any act I'd ever seen. Even when I tried to explain when he was booked and for how much, he never broke character.
I remember a great sense of relief when he showed up to perform on the night he was booked. His act was peppered with brief bursts of accomplished slide trombone and effortless piano segues between explosions of self-deprecating humor at a pace that dictated settling back for the ride.
His deadpan persona never went away, even when you saw him in the local library or 24-hour restaurants. To encounter Emo was to find a smile; you'd say hello, he'd get you laughing, then he'd turn away or disappear.
These days, the comedian has a new 'do, a new wife, a new waistline and new material, but he's still got the same nasal congestion he had 20 years ago when he was honing his act under a variety of names before Chicago club and coffee house audiences.
Emo doesn't put on airs. He admits he's put a few pounds on his lanky figure, perhaps on his recent honeymoon in France, where "Meals take four hours and they eat duck fat all day long, but manage to stay slim," says Emo, reached by telephone at his mom's house in that same old neighborhood in the southwest Chicago area.
Gone is his trademark Prince Valiant/bad hair day page boy, replaced with an updated spiky top and stylish squint glasses. Why the change? "It's a new millennium, you know, time for a new look . . . okay, I had head lice, are you happy?"
Emo's manager, Nick Nestoro, said from his Los Angeles office that Emo married "a normal girl," but Emo remarks that term is an oxymoron, before quickly adding, "She is the most normal I could ever hope for."
"The best thing about being married is that we can go to a romantic spot now without me having to worry about whether or not she's expecting me to pop the question."
Philips is as deadpan on the phone as he is on the stage.
He doesn't do the trombone anymore ("I let that slide," he says) but has picked up the clarinet, although he doesn't use it in performance. He still uses his musician's sense of timing in his comedy.
Jay Leno once called Philips "the best joke writer in America." Philips' brand of comedy is cerebral and loony, accentuated by his dewy, cocker-spaniel eyes and innocent eyebrows, his movements which seem gangly and droopy but mask agility with clumsiness.
Philips' knowledge of the history of comedic film is extensive, and hearing him talk about it affords a peek at a deep, intelligent, very private personality, of which only a fragment is displayed onstage at any moment, as if to display all of it at once might lead to spontaneous combustion.
Questions he doesn't want to answer are gently washed away with quick observations or questions of his own. He is very polite, which he might attribute to his Baptist upbringing, well-informed and as down to earth as a surreal individual can possibly be.
Philips seems to create a detachment from reality with his comedy. He pokes fun at all of humanity, using himself as the straight-faced ticket taker on an intellectual Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.
When I mention that other writers have likened Philips in part to comedy trailblazer Buster Keaton, Philips responds, "When people say I remind them of Buster Keaton, I think the image they have is one of Keaton standing there smiling. You know, the deadpan stuff. Not the jumping onto moving trains and hanging upside down stuff."
Emo's career swung up in the 1980s, with frequent appearances on late-night television, where I first heard him say, "Some days it just isn't worth it to gnaw through the leather straps."
He won the 1985 New Music Award for best comedy album with his release E=MO2, scored a memorable part involving a table saw in the movie UHF and has appeared more recently on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, the Comedy Channel's Dr. Katz and in a guest star spot with old friend Weird Al Yankovic on VH-1's The List.
The past few years, Philips has delved into other media, moviemaking and producing. He and a friend wrote and co-produced a version of Meet the Parents, which Universal purchased for a small fraction of what they're paying Robert DeNiro to star in their recently-released version.
"Universal had some creative input, though," he says. "We had a cat, and they made it into a dog."
He's really not complaining, though. "My feeling is," he says, "if you can just make one person laugh . . . you're doing better than Tony Danza."
- Maggie Council Di Pietra is not a comedian, but a freelance writer living in Tampa.
At a glance
WHAT: Emo Philips
WHEN: Friday, Saturday and Sunday
WHERE: Side Splitters Comedy Club, 12938 N Dale Mabry Highway
COST: $16, $18
CALL: (813) 960-1197
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