- And I turn back and I'm not kidding.
The deer is up on its back legs,
like a man.
It is chasing us like a man.
- The baby's coming! It's coming!
[dark electronic music]
[grunting]
[yells]
♪
[screams]
♪
Ooh. Hello.
♪
[groaning]
[screaming]
♪
[cheers and applause]
You know him from his podcast "Come to Papa,"
please give it up for Mr. Tom Papa, everybody.
Let him hear it.
[cheers and applause]
- This is a story about why you shouldn't smoke pot
when you're ten years old.
I was ten years old,
and I come from a large Italian family,
and I'm one of 21 grandchildren,
and when I was ten we started having weddings,
because the older kids were older
and starting to get married,
so we started to go to these weddings,
which, when you're ten, is a pretty kick-ass party.
Up to that point, you're going to birthday parties
and you're just eating cake
and you're pinning a tail on a donkey,
and once you realize everyone cheats anyway,
the luster comes off and you're like, "It's time to move on,"
but you've got a ways to go
before some really good parties come,
and then the weddings started kicking in,
and we're like, "This is good."
We're seeing grown-ups, like, wasted,
and people are falling over,
and we're seeing girls we never saw before.
These are good.
And we noticed that the older kids,
who we wanted to hang out with desperately,
would all sneak out of the wedding with Uncle Al.
At some point in the wedding, they'd just kind of sneak away,
And we never got asked,
and we were bummed out 'cause Uncle Al,
his nickname was "Uncle Al, All the Kids' Pal."
And when you're ten you think
it's just 'cause he's fun to be with,
but the older kids were like, "No, he's really your pal."
And we were like, "All right, well, we--well, we want to go,
"like, how do we-- no one's asking us to go.
What are they doing?
So this wedding came, and we were like,
"All right, we gotta up our game."
So we wore our little ten-year-old businessman suits,
me and my cousin Kenny,
and we had our little Shirley Temples,
and we're leaning against the bar.
We had combs in our pockets,
we were--we were-- we were working it.
And pulling it off.
Totally p-- just--
A Shirley Temple in your hand when you're ten,
using the straw.
And our cousins, the two older cousins we really admired,
they were looking at us and they started laughing,
and we're like, "Oh, maybe it's not gonna happen."
But then they approached and they're like, "Hey,
you want to go outside and see Uncle Al?"
We're like, "Yeah. Yeah, we do.
Yeah, what do we do?" They're like,
"Just go out front and we'll meet you out there
and we'll take you over and we'll go see Uncle Al."
We're like, "All right, cool." And they split.
And we start walking.
And then my aunt comes up and she's like,
"Where are you two going?"
We straighten our little ties. We're like, "Uh, nowhere."
She's like, "Stay away from your Uncle Al.
He'll ruin your life."
And we're like, "Now we really want to go."
So we walk outside, and they take us to a car,
and Uncle Al is sitting in the car.
And they get in the car and they don't let us in the car.
They roll down the windows and we lean in
with our little ties hanging down,
and they put the window up to like, catch us,
like, we're just stuck in the car.
And Uncle Al has weed out on his lap on a magazine.
I mean, I'm a man now.
I am not ten. I am a man.
I have seen weed.
I have--I went to college.
I-I used to see Dead shows. I've seen weed.
I'm a man.
But to this day I never saw one person have a bud
that was so big as what Uncle Al had
on his lap at his niece's wedding.
And we didn't even know it was weed.
He just started breaking it up.
We thought they were just gonna,
like, smoke a cigarette. We didn't know.
That was badass enough if you were to just smoke anything.
So he rolls it up and they start smoking it,
and we're stuck in the window.
They just start blowing it in our faces
like we're a pet.
Like, you ever get a pet high? And you just blow it
in their face, and they kind of--
We were the pets in our little suits,
and they just-- blowing it on us,
and we're getting-- you know, we're not--
we don't know we're getting high,
we're just trying to be cool, and like, "Okay,
guess this is what you do with Uncle Al."
And they're done, they roll down the window
and we kinda fall out and they come out,
And I remember it was windy, and Uncle Al's bald
except for the side hair,
and the wind is blowing and his hair's all out like this,
and he just starts going, "Look at me, I'm Bozo the Clown.
I'm Bozo." He just starts dancing around.
And we're like, "This is why everyone loves Uncle Al,
he's a clown."
He's amazing.
"So, like, all right, well, you guys can't walk in with us.
You guys gotta go around the back. Be cool."
We're like, "All right. We'll be cool."
And they walk in and we walk around the back,
and as soon as we walk around the back, we're lost,
'cause we're high,
and we're ten.
We don't even remember
there's a wedding we have to get back to.
We're just wandering in our little businessman attire,
and we come around the back, and there's, like,
a golf course there and there's these little woods.
You know, like, little woods in New Jersey.
Probably three trees, but woods.
And there's a deer.
There's a deer just sitting there eating the grass.
And if you've ever been high in nature,
you feel, for some reason, like you're one with nature.
Like, there is-- like, it speaks to you,
whatever it is, a rock or an animal,
and this deer just kind of looked at us,
and we looked at the deer and then we looked at each other,
and made the decision of what
two ten-year-old kids in Jersey would decide,
which is, "We've got to catch it."
Now, if you're a man and you're in your business attire,
you don't just run into the woods.
Even if it was something great.
If it was a bag of money, you're like, "Let's change,
and then we'll go back and run into the woods,"
but when you're ten, you just start running
in your businessman suit.
And the deer took off and went into the woods,
we're in the woods, and we're laughing.
Now we're start--you know, this is the first time ever.
Ten? First of all, everything's funny when you're ten,
then get Uncle Al's crazy weed on top,
and now you're chasing a deer in the jungle.
We're just laughing our asses off.
We go running in there, the deer's, like, running,
and I turned to my cousin, I'm like, "Kenny,
"at what point-- like, if we catch it,
what do we do with it?"
And he just looks at me, like, crazy, like, in his crazy eyes,
he goes, "We're gonna eat it."
That's a disturbing thing to hear your cousin say.
We don't have tools, we don't have cooking--
we have nothing, no weapons.
His idea is we're just gonna start biting it
like another animal.
But I couldn't even focus on that because I'm looking--
I look over at the deer, the deer,
it's like a New Jersey deer that just heard what we were saying,
and he's stopped now and looking at us like, "What did you say?
You're gonna eat me?"
And he takes a step towards us,
and we're, like, laughing and we take a step back.
Then he takes two steps towards us,
and we take two more steps back.
And all of a sudden, there's, like, that moment
where you know you're under attack.
And we just start-- well, we're laughing.
Like, remember when you were a kid,
you would be so filled with joy sometimes with laughter
that your legs physically don't work?
Like, that doesn't happen as an adult.
You never laugh so hard that you can't even--
So picture two little lawyers.
Just--run-- [laughing]
So we got-- he's picking up speed.
We gotta get outta here, and--
I'm starting to get a little further than Kenny,
and then I hear Kenny let out a scream.
Like, a high-- like, there's a reason
they put ten-year-old boys in the choir,
because they can hit a volume and a pitch
that only angels can hit. It's a--it's higher than girls.
It's a-- [high-pitched scream]
So much higher than I can even do.
[high-pitched squeal]
In the woods, and I hear that scream,
it's fear and it's just, like, death
and angelic and I'm laughing,
and I turn back, and I'm not kidding,
The deer is up on its back legs,
like a man.
It is chasing us like a man.
I come in with my scream.
[high-pitched squeal]
Our suits, our little businessman suits,
and this thing is just coming at us.
Like, "You're not eating me."
We just gotta get outta the woods.
We just gotta get the hell outta the woods.
And we kind of make our way-- it's like,
he could have, like, attacked us,
but in his head, like, if I could read a deer's mind,
which when I was that high I kind of did.
He was like, "I'm just gonna scare these little guys.
"These are the smallest businessmen I've ever seen.
"I don't even know why they're in the woods,
"but I'm just gonna do the back leg thing
and get 'em out of here."
[high-pitched scream]
So we make our way out of the woods, we're crawling,
we're mud-covered, we're crying, we're not laughing anymore.
We're crying. We're lost.
And we see up, "Oh, there's the windows of the party,
of the wedding, and we come up and we're just, like, so out--
we're--like, we are wrecked.
I don't know what-- I don't--
I don't know I'm high, but I know this is a weird day.
This is a day I'm gonna remember.
I don't know what they blew in our faces,
but I don't want to be at a wedding,
I don't want to be a businessman.
I don't want to hunt deer with my face.
We see Uncle Al, he's in there
in the middle of all the parents,
and he's telling some animated story
and they're all looking really pissed off.
And he's laughing with his Bozo hair.
And we're like, "We can't"--
we gotta sit down and catch our breath,
and we sit on these lounge chairs
and we're just like, "We are wrecked."
And all of a sudden my aunt, the same aunt, comes--
I remember the sky was blue, and then all--
we're just finally chilling out,
it was just peaceful for a minute,
and then her face just came in the middle of that scene
and went, "What did I tell you?
Your uncle's in there ruining your life."
And we never got high again until, uh, we were 11.
Thank you guys so much.
[dark electronic music]
♪