Dead Comedians and Spicy Jokes (Part 1)

All the lousy little poets coming around trying to sound like Charles Manson -- Lenonard Cohen

The air in the grimy club was heavy with stale beer and disappointment. A lone neon sign buzzed weakly above the bar, casting a sickly green glow over cracked vinyl barstools and peeling wallpaper. On a sticky stage lit by a single dim spotlight, Danny clutched the microphone with sweaty hands. He had just delivered another joke—something about his ex’s cooking being so spicy it could exorcise demons—but the punchline fell dead silent.

No laughter, not even a groan. A glass clinked in the back, and someone coughed. The rest of the small crowd stared at him with glazed, disinterested eyes, as if watching a dying fish flop on a dock. In that moment, Danny felt the silence pressing in, thicker than the cigarette smoke curling through the air.

“Bring back the guy with the ukulele!” said Burt. A middle-aged man with a pot belly and a receding hairline. “This guy sucks!”, heckled Burt.

A flush of heat crept up Danny’s neck. He could feel his heart thudding against his ribcage, each beat louder than the nonexistent laughter. They hate me. I’m dying up here. Danny swallowed the sour tang of panic. The spotlight made him squint; beyond its blinding halo the audience was a sea of shadows. He imagined their faces—scowls, smirks, boredom—each one a dagger pointed at his pride.

A tremor ran through his voice as he spoke again, this time without a joke to cushion the hurt. “Do you think this is easy?” Danny said. His question hung in the stale air; a fragile challenge thrown at the darkness beyond the light.

For a heartbeat, there was nothing but the electric crackle of the neon sign and the distant drip of a leaky pipe. Then a chair scraped harshly against the floor. A few heads turned.

Danny’s grip tightened on the microphone stand until his knuckles went white. For an instant, a fierce mix of rage and despair twisted inside him, threatening to burst free. He imagined leaping into the dark crowd, imagined the gasp of the heckler as Danny’s hands found his throat... But that vision passed in a blink, leaving only exhaustion and heartache in its wake.

“Night after night… I bare my soul… This was my dream. This is my nightmare.”

Danny forced the corners of his mouth upward. He managed a smile—if one could call it that—a thin, painful grin that stretched his lips but not his eyes.

“Goodnight.” said Danny. He dropped the mike and exited the stand. Danny weep as he walked through the crowded bar, because he received a standing ovation, not because the audience liked him, but because he stopped telling jokes.

Danny clocked into the time clock hanging on the wall of the old, drafty pawn shop. The pawn shop breathed nostalgia. It had everything from silver coins to early Batman comic books. It even had an old Beta VHS recorder tucked away in the corner.

Frank, a jolly, fat, balding old man, chuckled as Danny entered the shop.

“How was your stand-up last night?" said Frank.

“I bombed as usual,” Danny said.

“I think you are being too tough on yourself.”

“No, I really suck.”

“I need to go and check you out sometime.”

“You’ll have a limited opportunity. “

“Why is that?” asked Frank.

“I’m thinking about just giving up and moving back home.”

“Comedy is a tough business, but at least if you decide to move back home, you know you tried”.

“It still sucks”.

“At least you won’t have regrets. There is nothing worse in life than regret. As long as you've done your best and given it your all, then you will be okay.”

“I don’t know if I’ve done my best”.

“Why is that?” pushed Frank.

“Because if you are as untalented as I am, how do you know if you have done your all and have given your best?”

“I think you are being too hard on yourself, kid. There are no shortcuts to learning craft.”

“I don’t want any shortcuts. I just wish I had more talent.”

Danny notices some new boxes stacked in the corner of the pawn shop.

“New inventory?” asked Danny.

“Yep, you mind going through it?”

“I don’t mind”.

Frank sighed and said, “Great, it looks like it is going to be a slow day anyway. I’ll see ya tomorrow.”

Danny sat cross-legged on the backroom floor of the pawn shop, surrounded by cardboard boxes that smelled like mold, motor oil, and the past. The place had that familiar thrift-store scent of someone else's life gone stale. His shift had started two hours ago, but his mind was still stuck on last night’s disaster—the dead-eyed crowd, the heckler’s voice like a slap, and his own smile cracking under the weight of failure.

He sighed and cut open another box, this one labeled Estate Sale – Unknown Origin. Inside, he found a tangle of VHS tapes, an old Polaroid camera, and a rusted lunchbox plastered with faded Garbage Pail Kids stickers. His lips curled into a grin. He always had a soft spot for nostalgia—cheap relics from a world that felt safer, even if it never really was.

As he dug deeper, his hand brushed velvet.

Danny pulled out an object wrapped in a brittle yellow newspaper. He carefully unwrapped it, revealing a mask.

It was a court jester’s mask—ornate, cracked in places, and unnervingly lifelike. The paint was faded but still vibrant in spots, the reds and golds glinting under the harsh lights. Four small bells dangled from each corner, and though they looked ancient, they let out no sound when he shook it.

The face was twisted into a grin that felt too wide. Too knowing.

Danny stared at it.

For a moment, he couldn’t breathe.

Something about it felt… wrong. Not just old, but ancient. Not just crafted, but formed into being. The eyes of the mask—empty, black holes rimmed with smudged paint—felt like they were waiting for him to do something.

He tilted his head. “What the hell are you?” he muttered.

A shiver worked its way down his back, even though the room was warm.

He looked around the dusty backroom like someone might be watching. Of course, no one was. The place was dead quiet. Still, something crawled under his skin.

With a grunt, Danny tossed the mask onto the floor beside the box. It landed face-up, staring at the ceiling with that frozen grin, bells motionless.

He wiped his hands on his jeans and tried to shake the feeling. But as he turned back to the next box, he swore he heard the faintest sound—one of the bells, giving off the tiniest chime. Just one.

He froze.

Waited.

Silence.

Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was just in his head. After all, that’s where the voices usually liked to hang out.

Danny exhaled through his nose and tried to laugh, but it came out dry. He didn’t look back at the mask. Not yet.

But it stayed there, face-up on the scuffed linoleum, grinning like it knew his darkest joke hadn’t been told yet.

Danny sat alone in the back room of the pawn shop, the overhead lights flickering like they couldn’t make up their minds. The shop was closed, the front door locked, the world outside dim and quiet. He had found an old TV cart on wheels, the kind teachers used to roll in for movie day and hooked up a battered VCR to watch one of the tapes he'd dug out earlier.

He sat cross-legged on the floor, bottle of cheap whiskey sweating beside him, and watched the grainy footage of Sam Kinison screaming about marriage and hell and broken dreams. The image warped every so often, tracking lines dancing across the screen like ghosts. But the sound, Sam’s voice, cut through clean and raw.

Danny laughed loud, alone in the silence, taking another swig from the bottle. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, eyes watering from the burn.

He glanced to his right.

The jester’s mask lay on the floor exactly where he had thrown it. Grinning.

Those hollow eyes hadn’t moved, but they felt closer somehow, like they had inched toward him just a little while he wasn’t looking. He shook his head and chuckled.

“Alright, creepy bastard,” he slurred, standing up a bit too fast. “Let’s see what you’re really about.”

He stumbled over and picked up the mask. The velvet was cold now, like it had been buried in snow. The paint shimmered under the lights, darker than blood, gold dulled like old teeth. The bells didn’t ring, not even when he shook it.

Danny giggled and slipped it on.

For a second, nothing.

Then—

Heat.

Electric. Buzzing.

His chest tightened. His breath caught.

Suddenly, the flickering pawn shop vanished. He was somewhere else. Some club. Some other time.

Laughter roared around him—real, full-throated laughter—and stage lights burned hot against his skin. He wasn’t watching Kinison anymore.

He was him.

Not a perfect possession, he still felt like himself, floating just behind his own eyes, but the words that flew out of his mouth weren’t his. The tone, the growl, the rhythm, all Kinison.

Only these weren’t the famous bits.

These were jokes Danny had never heard before, raw, wild, brutal lines, pure fire that scorched everything sacred and left the crowd gasping for air between laughs. Jokes too sharp for today, too bold. And yet they flowed out of Danny like water bursting from a dam.

He screamed. He laughed. He stomped. The sound of the crowd was deafening.

Then—snap.

Reality crashed back like a wave slamming against stone. He tore the mask off and hurled it across the room. It hit the wall with a dull thud and slid to the floor, face-up, smiling.

Danny stood frozen, chest heaving.

The pawn shop was quiet again. Kinison’s tape had finished. The VCR hummed softly, waiting.

Danny stumbled back, collapsed onto the cold linoleum, and sat there staring at nothing. His skin was pale, clammy. His hands trembled.

The laughter was gone.

But he could still feel it. Still hear it in the back of his mind. Like something had been waiting in that mask… and now it had tasted a stage again.

He sat there for a long time, unable to speak. The room seemed darker now. Smaller. The mask didn’t move, but he didn’t dare look at it again.

Long before neon lights buzzed above bar floors, before microphones hummed and crowds howled in laughter, there was a boy named Vaelric who made a king chuckle once and bleed twice. But that part of him is long buried, burned out of his name like a wick. The world no longer remembers Vaelric.

Now, there is only the vampire.

He remembers the old world like a song half-whispered in the dark. Stone walls, torchlight, and the thick scent of hay and blood. A time when jesters wore bells on their heads and sharp words on their tongues. He was one of them once. A fool, they called him. But only fools tell the truth and survive for at least a while.

After the turning, he wandered for centuries. Not searching for prey. He had more than enough of that. He searched for the fresh voice of what he had once been: a voice that spoke truth through laughter, a mouth unafraid to bite kings with jokes sharper than daggers.

He found it again, briefly, in the smoky cabarets of the 1800s, in the vaudeville stages that danced with spitfire wit, and in the defiant mutterings of underground clubs where language was raw and nerves were still tender. He listened. He fed. Not always on blood, sometimes just on the warmth of the room, the trembling energy that pulsed from the stage to the back wall like a living vein.

But it was the twentieth century that stirred his hunger like never before.

He stood in the shadows of Greenwich Village as Lenny Bruce cursed and cracked truth open with trembling hands. He laughed, truly laughed, for the first time in a century. When Carlin took the mic and burned down the temples of polite society with wordplay and rage, the vampire leaned forward in the dark, lips curled in approval. Pryor, Hicks, Kinison... They were prophets to him. Each joke a sermon, each set a kind of sacred bloodletting.

He never approached them. Not directly. He sat in the back. Always listening and always remembering.

He loved them.

He loved the risk, the recklessness, the feeling that something real could be torn out of the air, shaped into sound, and thrown like a spear into the audience. Sometimes, it wounded, sometimes it healed, but it always meant something.

But then the laughter changed.

By the time the mid-2000s crept in with its phone screens and its polite applause, the jokes had grown... quiet. Not soft in delivery—but safe. Measured. Declawed. There were still laughs, yes. But they were smaller now. Laughter with edges filed down, blood drained, and danger removed.

He could smell the comedy without consequence. It made him sick.

One night, he sat in the back of a club, watching a comic read their set like a blog post. They smiled with sincerity. They said all the right things. The audience nodded. They laughed, but it was the laughter of agreement, not surprise, rebellion, or fear.

He didn’t laugh.

He hadn’t laughed in years.

His skin had paled further. His hunger had turned inward. There were no fools left, only performers. And he had no taste for performance.

He returned to the crypt he had sealed long ago beneath the rotting floorboards of a forgotten theater. The boards creaked with the memory of better voices. He stepped inside the coffin like a man slipping into a familiar coat.

The lid closed.

And silence swallowed him.

There, the vampire slept, not out of exhaustion, but disappointment. A slumber born not from the weight of centuries, but the weight of boredom. No pulse from the world above could stir him. No clever joke or brave fool came to wake the hunger in his soul.

Until now.

Part 2 Coming Soon !

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Happy writing, happy watching, and as always—
Stay scary.
– Kevin Frasure