Peter Bedgood: The Human Bean

Next on Gallery America.

This Tulsan is an actor, a cartoonist and a stand up comedian.

He found his purpose after things went a Little wrong at Work.

“This is why I am alive.

” We'll meet him and revisit some great Oklahoma City comics.

Starting now.

Hello, Oklahoma.

Welcome to Gallery America.

I'm Robert Reid, and I have a question for you.

Do you like jokes?

Well, good news, because this show is guaranteed to put a smile on your face.

It's all about comedy.

We start with a Tulsan who is a cartoonist, an actor, a stand up comedian is going to be performing here later who has an interesting story, because one day he had a really, really bad day at work but made everything clear to him.

You'll see.

Meet Peter Bedgood.

The human bean Welcome to the Hunt Club comedy Open mic.

Some would say this.

Man is a legend in the comedy scene in Tulsa.

Please welcome Peter bedgood.

I'm not very smart.

I saw a sign that said Hitchhikers may be escaping convicts.

And I was like, Oh, man, I got to help these people escape.

Get in the car.

Whyre you wearing orange?

Yeah.

So today's assignment, as usual, is to draw.

Doesn't have to be great.

It's just an exercise I have to do every day.

It helps stabilize me.

It's like journaling.

It's like visual journaling.

You've got to do it to stay honest with yourself.

I usually sit here and write bad ones for about 4 hours.

After about 4 hours of tries, I almost always most certainly land on something that I'm impressed with.

Some sort of joke or drawing.

But I started drawing human beings because they're really quick.

And I was a transporter at Saint John's Hospital.

And you got to move real fast.

So you have to have a real good rapport with nurses.

I noticed that they all liked me just a little bit more after I started leaving them.

These cute little cartoons that said things like, You're doing a great job.

Nurses are angels.

hey Peter Come see me when you're done with that transport.

Mr. Tracy, you want to see me?

Come in, Peter.

Sit down.

I was a good transporter.

I just wasn't good at being at work.

Peter, everyone loves you.

Thank you.

I better Get back to work then, Wait.

There's more.

You're good at your work.

Youre not good at being at work.

What are you doing here?

I'm a transporter.

I take patients from procedure to room and room to procedure here.

What are you doing here?

Oh, I was hired as a transporter to take patients.

You're fired.

What are you doing here?

What am i doing here?

After I was fired, I was told by a nurse that I should come by and check out the gallery they had.

Before you leave.

Hey, check out this gallery.

And I went and I was in tears when I saw they had taken all of the cartoons that I drew and put them up in the breakroom.

This is the moment that I realized what I am doing here.

I realized then and there that even though they're just stupid little cartoons, they can make an impact in someone's day.

So I keep doing it.

Like all these beans are little voices in my head, and sometimes they tell me things and they're great, and sometimes they tell me things and they're embarrassing.

And I don't want to say them.

And I'm like, Well, you know what?

You're the one saying it.

Little bean.

Here's here's one that can't handle me at my dumpster.

Then you don't deserve me at my fire.

And that is very funny.

Here's one of T-Rex as a waiter, and he's saying, Sorry about the wait, folks.

We're shorthanded.

That's a perfect example of dad jokes.

I illustrate dad jokes.

I try to not just be punny, but it's hard because I. I just am.

I'm very, very honey kind of person.

I did the thing out in L.A. for a while.

It was great.

I loved it.

I still do.

I love all of this stuff.

It's just such a long process to be an actor.

I really enjoy standup because you get to write the story and you get to perform the story and then you get the accolades.

It's just a better formula.

I just recently saw the movie Titanic, but I saw it on a busted VHS tape and only played backwards.

Turns out it's actually a happy story.

About 1500 people floating out in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean when out pops this boat from nowhere and starts sucking them all on board.

But it does end, sadly, because Leonardo DiCaprio loses his ticket and becomes the gambler and they take the boat apart.

Thank you, guys.

You know what?

I love you guys.

I stopped drinking some years ago.

I used to drink a lot.

And so if I didn't draw, it usually meant that I had, you know, put in put in too much time into something else that's not nearly as good or beneficial for me.

So it's not so much the cartoons, just it's it's like a life decision to try to do something every day.

To me, this is why I am alive.

This is why I'm here.

To make these cartoons, to make art, to make the drawings and the paintings and the jokes.

It's.

It's all of that stuff.

I wish it was doing something really impressive right now, like finishing the Sistine Chapel for you.

But I'm just drawing a human bean that says, don't wait until your teeth are perfect to smile.

Hed probably be saying, like this: don't wait until your teeth.

Are perfect to smile.

You can follow Peter bedGood on Instagram to see daily human being creations.

Just follow him at p BedGood.

Now let's travel back in time.

We're going to go into the gallery archives and look over a decade ago at a who's who of great Oklahoma City comics.

And now a trip back into the Gallery America archives.

Nobody will ever see this face because I'm fat.

I've receding hairline.

I have a very bad mouth.

And the closest I get to be on television is public television.

And I to sit there and look at you guys, you're going to sit in the back and not sit up front, even though you know, the microphone is not working.

What is the matter with you guys but doing comedy?

For about five years, I performed in Kansas City, in Minneapolis.

I performed all over New Mexico.

And in Texas, I mean, Myrtle Beach.

I've been all over the place.

Kansas City in problem.

A huge, huge debt for me.

It was really it was really big.

She's the problem.

She loves Pinterest.

Pinterest is a website dedicated to ending relationships.

One terrible do it yourself project at a time.

Okay.

We talk to a lot of comics and they go, Well, how did you get into this club?

How did you get in here?

That's a great club.

How'd you get in?

Well, it's because I got in my truck.

I took the day off, and I drove five and a half hours to do a spot and open mine.

And I made sure that I killed in front of people that needed to see him.

And then I drove all night back to work the next day.

I'm married to a very wonderful woman.

She's very lovely.

Thanks, James.

I have a wife.

I leave.

I leave this crazy lifestyle, and I go home and sleep next to her every night.

She's by far one of the most important things to me.

She's helped me become more funny because she's back to me every step of the way.

So that's one thing.

There's a lot of comics that they're wanted to bail on them.

So then things get hard and my wife packed her bags like I did for the long haul.

I think that's the most important thing to me is to have I do have that normal aspect of life.

And because I do that, I can tap into I can connect with people that do live a normal life.

Guys that.

Are out there, if it's a casual question or something wrong with asking.

Two strange, beautiful.

Women in the front row, you around?

You got a car?

Feel good about a.

Relationship right now?

I've got a fiancee.

I'll be here for you.

Are you ready for that?

That's not true.

I love my fiancee so much.

Here's a joke that she really likes.

I'm lucky to be with the most beautiful woman in the world right now.

My fiance, who supports what I do 100%.

And to find that in this business, because it's so selfish, what we do, it's very selfish.

And I don't mean that to demean what we do, but our egos are 90% of the reason we get on stage.

Most of the time we need that validation from strangers.

What is not a joke to you?

And then let's do it.

Let's get down to brass tacks.

I'm going to give you a category.

Okay.

Three different categories that you pick.

It sounds good.

Not great.

Four categories.

Here we go.

Cats, hair.

Now I know the work I put in.

I know the time I've spent.

I know what I've lost and gained from doing this.

And I believe in myself not to be the best at this point in my career, but to be as funny as I possibly can be with the time I'm given by God to get on stage and tell jokes, I just have to fight.

I'm getting through life, you know.

It's hard.

You know, you look at me and you're my friend.

Are you are you doing okay?

I don't care if you're a comedian and you do this and it's what you enjoy and it's what you want to do with your life.

You go a few days without doing comedy.

It hurts you.

You want you want to be on the stage.

You want to be talking to people.

I fell in love recently.

I fell love the girl at the bank.

She works at the bank I go to.

She's one of the bank tellers there.

Let me tell you guys something.

There's nothing harder than hitting on a woman that knows exactly how much money you have.

You're just like for a refill or anything.

My parents don't like that I do this, but you're, you know, deprecating yourself for the amusement of others.

And that can be a very strange thing to do, especially to maybe your family who doesn't understand that.

And then I said, I don't know how to do that.

I don't know how to look at cars.

And he looks at me the same way my father looks at me.

And then I handed him 20 $500 and then he handed me the keys and I left in his car.

That's how my car went for me.

I broke up for the girl, which should tell you a lot about her, because my life, she had to be awful.

No, she signed.

I broke up with a girl.

I started a teen company when I was 21 at the local comedy club in the city.

I went and visited a girl in South Carolina that I really liked and I thought it would go well and it didn't.

And so on the flight back, I was like, Man, you know what?

People told me I'm funny.

I want to try to stand up.

So I just wrote on a nappy.

It was a Wednesday.

I wrote on a napkin some jokes, and then I went to the open mic and told them and it wasn't awful.

On the end of the sandwich.

You know, it and everything.

That's great.

Don't go to Niagara Falls on the trip that we planned.

Sandwich.

I'm uncertain about if I'll make money or make a living as a standup or make a living, you know, doing what exactly I'll be doing.

But all I know is that I have to be funny first and foremost.

I got to always do that.

And then I'm going to be nice and I'm going to be myself.

And if I can't get where I want to go about being funny and being nice and being myself, that's okay because I did it the best way I know how that is.

It's art.

How's it going?

What do you want to know?

Let's get over.

It.

That's a little more than Snow White Night.

So we have some local folks come up and show you their stuff.

Something like this happened right here at home.

And he'll watch me of our TV show, which is what I call infidelity.

Not cool, bro.

There's so many times when you go up and the audience is just silent or, you know, that they just aren't, you know, getting you or they don't they don't like you and you can feel it and it's physically painful and you want nothing more than to run away.

But that's how you learn.

And besides, if you're going to be mad at something for eating too much and staying thin, you should be mad at plants.

Think about it.

What do they do all day, sunup to sundown?

They absorb light.

They literally eat all day and they don't exercise.

But have you ever seen a fat flower?

I know I haven't.

Around here I have.

I would say the range of 60 local comics that regularly come out and do open mics and do showcases and a lot of them are incredibly talented.

Not very many of them are women.

There are many gold mining series to watch.

Just in case you're interested at the end of this one season, this guy says It's okay.

We didn't find any gold this time.

We'll be back next season.

That gold can run, but it can't hide.

That's kind of weird, right?

Because gold actually can't run.

And, like, all it does is hide, boom.

Oh, play on the.

Swings OC But like, look at these swings.

They're for babies right now.

I can only really do it a couple of times a week because I can't just be out of the house at night when they're home from school and stuff.

So as they get a little older, I plan on putting more time into it.

If you is sick of my puns, it too bad you don't have to have a great crowd to do a show, but it really it definitely helps.

A lot of factors can come in if you're having a stressful day, like anything, anything can really just throw you off.

But I think this is also kind of what we do to pull ourselves up for a stressful day.

You know, we have a bad day and we come there and get a big laugh and then you're like, Oh, everything's fine now.

And maybe you're going to get $10 out of that.

So the fact that I'm ruining your night doesn't concern me one bit.

It really doesn't.

I don't care.

I don't care what else you have.

What else do you have?

What better entertainment are you going to have to see a £400 man pretend like he's not breathing hard.

I got a pretty good thing going.

You can see the full episode on our archives.

Just go to our YouTube channel, search for Gallery America and you can see that full episode.

And if you're wondering what happened to those comics, they're all still active.

Justin Smith moved to Nashville.

He recently did a YouTube comedy special, Just Search for Coronation Madison.

ALLEN The waiter is still active.

He does comedy specials around the country.

He did one in Hoboken and Zack Smith a few years ago was voted best stand up comic in Oklahoma City.

Next, we're going to do something completely different.

We're going to meet a Baltimore artist who I how do I say this uses butt puppets.

And we're also going to meet an artist who creates art for an audience of one Avalon.

I think I have a deep desire to create fantastical worlds.

Oh, oh.

Oh.

Living.

Yeah.

I also have a fascination with the human figure, which is kind of a through line through my visual art puppetry, set design, an immersive theater work, my performance, I'm take a look at some point through working with puppets, I was shoved on to a stage and I loved it.

And I realized that I love using my own body to express my art as well as my visual art skills.

I like sort of keeping myself on edge a little bit in terms of what I dream up.

I like to shock myself a little bit sometimes when I'm designing a set, it tends to use a different part of my brain than I use when I'm performing.

So in my design work, I'm often dealing with numbers, I'm dealing with measurements, and when I'm performing, I tend to want to shut that part of my brain off and be a much more intuitive maker.

But the fun for me with these owner characters and darlings, Incredible Museum, was being able to inhabit two characters at once, a puppet character that I fabricated, living on the lower half of my body and a human character that I acted inhabiting the upper part of my body.

I have less of an end goal with my art than I have a desire and a drive to just make in the first place.

Honestly, Works is a performance company that makes weekend long, week long, month long performances for one person.

Audiences started doing Odyssey Works because I was a poet and architect and I was concerned with the fact that you create a piece of work.

It goes out into the world and some people get it and other people have a totally different experience of it than you were intending.

And I got together with my friend Matthew and we said, What if we just found that one person who got it and made our work just for them?

Okay.

Big reveal.

What is the Odyssey Works box?

It's it's it.

It's a tour through our work.

Here and the USB drive will get the audio tour.

And all the instructions are right there.

And we wanted people to have an experience of our art that wasn't watching a video or reading a book.

And that's my favorite and something that was tactile and human and something that brought you deeply into this way of working.

It's its own performance.

So you open the box, you take off the lid, and there it is.

It's this treasure that you found like a buried treasure, and you have a book.

And this book was made for the piece was a forgery of an Italo Calvino book.

Stories are symmetrical and lovely.

It's the bologna.

Everything beautiful, everything's symmetrical and it becomes baloney.

And the stories fall apart.

They become images.

Even the page numbers fall off.

Messy stuff, our kind of work.

And we wanted to make a piece that connected the two.

This was the DNA diagram themselves.

There are scripts that's Carls diagram, mind, body.

Over time the aim is the exact same aim that I think most artists have, which is to create a deeply felt experience just to see the world, see you.

I am so inspired everyone by the comedy we've been seeing today that I am going to try my first up stand up comedy right here, right now.

And I know what you all want.

Knock, knock jokes are prepared.

A couple knock, knock, you guys.

Now this works, right?

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Thank you.

Pakistan.

Pakistan.

Paki-stanwich you might get hungry.

You know, replenish the body energy.

Now, knock, knock.

Who's there?

India.

India.

In-di-avent you don't pack a sandwich.

Theres probably food trucks just bring some cash money.

You can get a taco or a sandwich now.

I thought that one would work.

Well, clearly, they need to be working on my jokes.

I think I'll turn it back to the professionals.

Here are some bonus jokes from Peter Bedgood and Fred emmer.

Have a look at these.

My name is Frederic Emmer.

I'm a mortgage lender by day.

I do jokes by night, but I didn't always used to be a mortgage lender.

I just spent a year as a cross-country running coach.

So here's what you need to know about starting to run cross country.

You want to start with the small countries.

Vatican City, Liechtenstein, Monaco.

Get to work your way up to those 12 time zone countries like Russia I saw a sign that said concealed weapons classes, I was like, that's easy- its a gun.

You hide it.

Thatll be 75 dollars.

Loreal said theyre going to stop testing the products out on animals, which is cool , no more animal torture.

But now some of the only animals are complaining.

They're saying, hey, it's the weekend, I'm a possum, a little lipstick and rouge never killed anyone.

I'm Peter Bedgood.

Thank you very much, everyone.

Have a great night.

Thank you.

That's all the time we have for Gallery America.

Thank you so much for watching as always.

You can see past episodes by going to our robust archives at OETA .

TV slash gallery America.

And don't forget to follow Gallery America Online on Instagram, @ OETAGallery and on Facebook.

We'll see you next time.

Until then.

Say ARTY Oklahoma, you're hired.

Yes, it's your fire.

Is the first one.

The second one is “youre fired ” No.

And poke near the bottom.

Yes, Tom.

No, no.

Listen, you surprise them with your club.

If you can't.

He's not surprised.

You're using the entire first one to throw the gag.

Where we have three chances.

to use the gag, use it on the second one of the first generation third and five I the 25 by the amount that your.