Printer-friendly
Send to e-mail
PDF version
Audio: Shelby Chong talks about doing stand-up comedy
Twenty-six years. That’s how long pop-culture icons Cheech and Chong worked on separate careers.
One year. That’s how long they have been back together, selling out venues and signing movie contracts, with no end in sight.
Tommy Chong, a Canadian with Scottish-Japanese ancestry, and Cheech Marin, a Mexican-American from California, became a match made in comedy heaven when they joined up at a topless club Chong owned that held improv nights.
But like all duos, they had their rough patches over the years.
When they finally graced the same stage together in 2008 — a first since the mid-’80s — it was too easy. The two-decades-long layoff had no effect on the quality of their performance, according to Marin.
“I was surprised that we kept a straight face looking at each other,” Chong said.
And after starting comedy together almost 40 years ago, they still had that onstage chemistry — although Marin admits he’s unaware of what those ingredients are.
“If I knew that, then I would bottle it up,” he said.
Almost certainly the answer lies within their humor, which was well-represented in a conference call in advance of their one-night-only Wendover show next weekend. They chuckled about lawyers and Chong’s prison sentence.
“We are each other’s best audience. I can think of things and Cheech can pick up my thoughts and laugh — and vice versa,” Chong said.
Marin quickly snapped back, “Unlike my ex-wife.”
There had been whispers for years about an eventual reunion of Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin after a harsh split in the 1980s. Chong even remembered hearing about it behind bars in a California prison in 2003.
“That was when it was kind of in the air,” Chong said.
Marin was a regular visitor of Chong’s at the prison. But it still took four years until they appeared on the same stage.
Founding fathers
Cheech and Chong became trendsetters with their albums and movies, and quickly became synonymous with pot humor.
“I am very proud of the fact of being known as the father of the stoner movies,” Chong said.
“You know, we always said that we were middle-of-the-road dopers, and that was the norm,” Marin said.
The two hope to return to the big screen next year — to a box office that has been flooded with pot humor of late.
Said Chong: “If anything, we were amazed at how long it took” for the popularity of stoner humor to grow — especially considering that the pair’s movies appeared around 1980. He says the Dave Chappelle movie “Half Baked” — in which Chong co-starred — was one of the major stoner movies since the Cheech and Chong films.
The context has shifted with the stoner films of today. Back then, Chong said, they were masterful at intertwining Latino, hippie, black and white humor together.
“We weren’t just a couple of guys that were trying to get home after they got high or lost their car,” Chong said.
Next year, Chong and Marin plan to start a new tour called “Get It Legal.” It’s based on Chong’s experiences after being busted by a federal investigation into a company Chong’s son started — called Chong’s Glass — which sold water pipes that could be used for marijuana. Tommy Chong allowed his son to use his image to market the business.
The FBI busted Chong’s Glass for selling pipes to a fake company the feds set up in Pennsylvania — one of two states in the country where water pipes are banned.
Chong entered into a plea agreement, in which he would plead guilty and the government would not prosecute his wife, Shelby Chong, or son. He was sentenced to nine months in a minimum-security prison.
But that didn’t make Chong shy away from his association with marijuana. If anything, it has made him an advocate of the legalization of marijuana — through the tour coming next year.
“We are going to focus a lot of our energies on laughing at the drug laws,” Chong said. “We can laugh at the politicians that made them.”
Whether in a Canadian improv club decades ago, or theaters this year, the formula has not changed for Cheech and Chong.
“Cheech and I just keep doing the same routines that we did 30 years ago,” Chong said.
“And they are as relevant now as they were 30 years ago.”
PREVIEW
l WHO: Cheech and Chong, with Shelby Chong opening
l WHEN: 8 p.m. Oct. 30
l WHERE: Peppermill Concert Hall, 300 Wendover Blvd., West Wendover, Nev.
l TICKETS: $30-$90, sold out. (888) PEPP-TIX.
