Richard Belzer, and that time he got us in to see Tom Cruise roast Matt Lauer
We were very sad to hear about Richard Belzer’s passing. It was reported that he died in France this week at the age of 78 after some years there dealing with illness.
His last words were reported to have been, “Fuck you, motherfucker.”
Damn, that is so good.
For a short time, Belzer and your proprietor were pretty good friends.
We know that sounds odd, and it was.
The year was 2008, we were into our second year as editor of The Village Voice, and Belzer was, well, you know, Belzer.
He was one of those quintessential New York characters, a comedian known for his unconventional and disruptive and sometimes simply incomprehensible performances.
He sticks out like a sore thumb in the movie Scarface, for example, in a moment that feels totally beamed into the film from another planet.
And of course he got mainstream fame for his lengthy run as Detective John Munch in the Law and Order universe.
But we didn’t talk about any of those things. For some reason, we just liked hanging out and talking about New York and the Voice and national politics. And he would tell me about his JFK conspiracies and I would tell him he was full of shit and somehow a friendship grew out of that.
We were both pretty interested that Barack Obama was disrupting things and looked like he was going to win the election that year. So for that week, I put Belzer on the cover of the Voice, showing him coming out of one of those old-fashioned New York City voting booths, the kind that gave you a satisfying ka-CHUNK when you pulled the handle and submitted your vote.
Fucking Belzer, telling New Yorkers to go cast a fucking vote in the 2008 election. That was a good week.
But it was what happened a couple of weeks earlier for which I will forever be in Belzer’s debt, and that lightly touches on the subject of this website.
On October 24, 2008, Belzer got me into a Friar’s Club roast.
For some time, he had been bugging me about becoming a member there at the club on East 55th Street. Not because I was a comedian myself, but mostly I think because the membership was aging and dying off and they needed some new warm bodies. I demurred.
I knew about the club’s long history of roasts, and that October Belzer told me a big one was coming up when Today host Matt Lauer would be in the hot seat. I told him that I was curious about it, and he got me an invite.
Belzer himself was taking part and would be sitting at the long table on stage at the Hilton in midtown. I was relegated to a table far, far in the back with some people I didn’t know. And it had been made very clear to everyone that there would strictly be no filming or photography of the event. They wanted the people on stage to let their hair down, and a lot of big television network tight-asses would be taking place.
They read out the warning several times. But I had a secret weapon. I’d carried in a note pad and a pen. While the event was going on, I held the pad under the table, just in case they were so uptight they didn’t want a journalist even taking notes, and I rapidly wrote down as much as I could.
After the event I ran back to the paper and rapidly wrote it up, thinking there might be other accounts of the night showing up in other publications. But that didn’t happen. It turned out that such detailed reports from a Friar’s Club roast were actually a bit rare, and so my story got a lot of attention.
Belzer loved it.
Just before the night started, news had broken that Tom Cruise would be showing up, which made sense given his famously combative interview with Lauer in 2005. And so this is what I recorded of Tom’s contribution to the evening:
Cruise was brilliant casting, because the rollercoaster he’s been on the past few years over his space-alien-worshipping religion started over two big events — the way he jumped all over Oprah’s couch expressing his love for new babe Katie Holmes, and for a confrontational interview he did in 2005 with journalistic cupcake Lauer. The Lauer interview in particular made Cruise not only appear unhinged, but it also made him look like a bully for the way he criticized Brooke Shields for turning to medication to deal with post-partum depression. (Those wacky Scientologists believe the best way to treat all maladies, particularly those of the mind, is with maximum adoration of 30’s pulp fiction author, L. Ron Hubbard.)
But today, Cruise was not only a good sport for showing up to roast Lauer, he really killed. Guy was hilarious and self-deprecating. He joked about how he and Lauer were actually best buddies and went everywhere together, how they pranked Willard Scott, and how they talked on the phone four times a day (and he had slides to go with it).
“Matt has also given me some great advice,” Cruise said. Things in 2005 were going great, Cruise went on. He’d just made a movie with Spielberg, and he was going to go on Oprah’s show. Matt, he said, asked him what he was going to talk about. When he said he was going to talk about the movie, Matt made an “angry sigh,” Tom said.
“Tom, don’t be glib,” Cruise said, imitating Laeur, “You’re in love. Go crazy. Trust me, people will love you for it.”
Tom then explained that Lauer also gave advice to Jeff Zucker (the NBC Universal CEO who was also sitting on the dais) to dump Leno, and Lauer also ran into OJ Simpson on the golf course and gave him advice as well. “Juice. Look, if those guys got your shit in Vegas… don’t be a pussy, just go up to that hotel now and take it. Trust me, Juice, people will love you for it,” Cruise said as Lauer, and got big laughs.
Cruise then said that his life is “going from international movie sets to amazing parties. And then from amazing parties to international movie sets. But Matt, you found happiness doing the same thing every day.”
The diminutive movie idol then turned to leave, and Lauer jumped to the microphone: “Can you stay? We can get you a booster seat.”
Al Roker couldn’t help adding his own Cruise jab: “Tom can’t stay because the space ship has to leave soon.”
Hardy-har-har. All in good fun.
Things got a lot dirtier as the evening went on and such luminaries as Katie Couric and Meredith Viera and even Martha Stewart took their turns with such legendary foul-mouths as Jeff Ross, Bob Saget, and Gilbert Gottfried.
Please gird your loins and go read my entire account of the evening at the Voice website. You will not be disappointed.
(Several years later, that story got a new round of attention when the allegations about Lauer abusing women came out into the open, and questions were being asked about how much figures such as Couric and Viera had known about it.)
We’ll save the last word for Belzer himself, who of course killed at this event, just like he did at so many others. What a legend.
The inimitable Richard Belzer then followed Zucker, and as is his trademark, abused the audience as much as he told jokes. And the best moment came when he tried to tell his final joke and kept screwing it up.
“It’s not all fluff and fluffing,” he said about Lauer’s lightweight reputation. Lauer had also done serious reporting, he continued. “Who could forget the time when he tracked down the exact membership…”
And that was the wrong word. So he started the joke over again. Five times. Finally, he dragged Lauer himself up to deliver the punch line:
“Who could forget the time when he tracked down the exact measurement of Ann Coulter’s dick,” Lauer said to a roar from the audience.
Ah, Belzer. The best.
Fuck you, motherfucker. And thanks for all the laughs.
Thank you for reading today’s story here at Substack. For the full picture of what’s happening today in the world of Scientology, please join the conversation at tonyortega.org, where we’ve been reporting daily on David Miscavige’s cabal since 2012. There you’ll find additional stories, and our popular regular daily features:
Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history
Avast, Ye Mateys: Snapshots from Scientology’s years at sea
Overheard in the Freezone: Indie Hubbardism, one thought at a time
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Absolutely brilliant eulogy, and a send-off that Belzer would have appreciated.
Thanks for that great recollection. Belzer seemed to be one of those people who got the joke about himself. You gotta get the joke about yourself, or you become intolerable. Cruise knows how to pretend to get the joke about himself, but it’s obvious to anyone who’s ever known him that he most certainly doesn’t.
RIFP, Belzer.