Dave Holmes, a longtime actor, comedy writer and former MTV “VJ” from that network’s final era as an actual music outlet, took an assignment to write jokes for this year’s GayVN Awards presentations in Las Vegas—and he has now penned a memoir of his experience for Esquire Magazine.
Holmes is better known as the author of the book Party of One, his first-person account of his years at MTV, and in the words of a Daily Beast profile, “more than a tell-all about his days hanging out with 2000’s most ridiculous celebrities, it’s a sharp and sharp-witted reflection on what it was like to grow up gay and feeling like you never belong.”
But according to his Esquire article, Holmes also felt out of place at the GayVN Awards, not because he is gay, but instead due to the fact that, in his words, “I am not, in a general sense, great at the dirty joke. I lack the confidence, the poise, the unbroken connection between brain and testicles to pull one off effectively.”
His next hurdle, he found, was the task of familiarizing himself with the nominated performers—and the films for which they are nominated.
“The nominated actors are sometimes in dozens of movies a year. A Brad Pitt can get an Ad Astra and a Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood out in a twelve-month period,” he writes. “But a porn performer can do a scene in a different movie every single day if he wants to. Two if he’s young.”
The 48-year-old Holmes also found the youth of many presenters to pose a problem, when it came to the pop culture reference points in his one-liners.
His joke for the Best Actor category—“Sean Penn, Tom Hanks, Daniel Day-Lewis: If these guys are such great actors, how come we’ve never seen them get off?”—fell flat because the presenter had never heard of Daniel Day-Lewis.
But Holmes was happier with the delivery on his “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” joke, written for Angel Rivera, Diego Sans and Joey Mills, who announced the winner of Best Three-Way Sex Scene (pictured above).
In the end, however, Holmes did experience his familiar sense of non-belonging, when he realized he failed to fit into any recognizable gay porn “type,” he wrote.
“As a guy in his 40s without big muscles or an overall air of gruffness, I am disqualified as a daddy, so I don’t have a brand that will succeed here,” he wrote in the Esquire piece, published last week. “I am largely invisible, which for me in a queer space is a familiar and comfortable state of being.”
For more on the GayVN Awards Show, click here. Find the list of winners here.
Photo by JFK/FUBARWebmasters.com
