Jesus Jokes, Identity Theft, and Mob Facts

A graphic of Tony Nappo edited to appear as multiple people sitting in a circle as a spoof of Alcoholics Anonymous. At the top and bottom of the image is text that reads

/By Tony Nappo / Apr 18, 2017

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Nappoholics Anonymous is a weekly column featuring twelve random thoughts by actor Tony Nappo. Some are funny, some are poignant, some bother him, and some make him weep from sadness while others make him weep for joy. Here are his thoughts: unfiltered, uncensored, and only occasionally unsafe for work.

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1. On Sunday, Jesus rose. And then, on Monday, Richard Rose.

2. This week, when questioned about Kaepernick still being unsigned due to his anthem protests last year, Sean Spicer said, “That’s nonsense. He’s a terrible quarterback. Even Hitler wouldn’t have signed him.” I’m starting to think Sean Spicer doesn’t even know who Hitler was.

3. Congrats to Sugith Varughese for landing the title role in the upcoming Mirvish offering Knock Three Times: The Tony Orlando Story. This is a major victory for diverse casting in Toronto theatre. When contacted for comment, the National Italian-American Foundation said, “That guy was Greek and Puerto Rican. What do we care? Just stay away from Sinatra.”

4. I just landed the lead in a new Hollywood film franchise called The Fat and the Furriest.

…And they said quitting the gym would never pay off. Fucking idiots.

5. A woman once called me trying to sell me identity theft insurance. I said, “Listen, I’m gonna stop you right there.” She asked why. I said, “Because you’re wasting your time. Anyone who wants my identity can fucking have it. What you SHOULD be doing is calling up identity thieves and selling them insurance against ME.”

6. Age-Appropriate Hits for Bon Jovi Fans

5- Living on No Hair

4- Dad Medicine

3- Dead or Asleep?

2- You Give Love a Back Pain

1- Bedpan of Roses

7. Trump’s “Mother of All Bombs” is dropped and kills over ninety people. For 16 million bucks, MY MOTHER could have done that!

8. Roman guard to Jesus: “Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that we gave up crucifying people for lent this year.”

Jesus: “Great. What’s the bad news? … And what the hell is lent?”

10. My Jesus story:

The first play I did out of school in New York was a show called The Passion. It was a dark, raw telling of the story of Jesus, who I played. There was an insanely intense actor as Pilate who had to whip me on stage with an actual bullwhip, and every night he would just miss me by inches. There were a bunch of beautiful, scantily clad dancers playing the whores of Jerusalem. My wardrobe was a tiny loincloth and nothing else, and there was a lot of Philip Glass music. I was a young actor and just happy to be on stage in New York. I remember reading and thinking a lot about Jesus at the time. I remember jamming nails into my hands until they bled. I remember dying on the cross every night of asphyxiation as realistically as I could. And I remember a phone call that came from my father just before the show closed.

One of my best friends back home, Brian Freeman, had been working a summer job picking up garbage for the city and he had collapsed and fallen into a coma. My dad hadn’t told me because he knew I was in this show and didn’t want it on my mind but as the show was coming to a close, he knew I’d want to come back home as soon as I possibly could. At this point in my life, I hadn’t lost a close friend my age and couldn’t even fathom what that really meant. So, as some form of denial, I had developed a ridiculous confidence in the belief that I, being Jesus on stage, was, by some divine plan, going to be able to walk off the plane in Toronto and go straight to the hospital and wake my sleeping brother with a touch or a whisper.

Needless to say, that didn’t happen. Brian died about a week later, I think. I was twenty-two years old. After the shock and devastation wore off, I found myself alternating between a relentless obsession with death itself and a violent anger towards God. Somewhere between the two lay an extreme disappointment in my own inability to save Brian.

Not until years later did I realize that somewhere during the aftermath of this period—which involved a lot of drinking and isolation and further loss—did the ideas of God and death and acting all get intertwined in my mind, for good. I haven’t quite worked out if acting took God’s place in my life or it just gave me a place to hide from death or, at least, a way to avoid my own life, by diving into imaginary lives that had already been worked out in their entirety from their very first entrance to their final exit. And, of course, there is also the idea of immortality that comes with any kind of performance on film. Ironically, of course, I’ve died on film more times than I can actually remember. And immortality through film seems a ridiculous notion to me now. At best, my work will serve as a keepsake for my daughter and nothing more.

Anyway, I wrote a lot of bad poems back then. Here’s how one of them ended.

Will the Saviour arrive as a movie star,

To make Lazarus out of us all?

Maybe that Mountain is too big to move,

Or maybe that actor too small.

11. I really want to believe the Leafs just won back-to-back playoff overtime victories. But if I wake up tomorrow and U2 has made another great album and De Niro has released another great movie, I’ll know I’m just in a particularly cruel episode of Black Mirror.

12. Little-Known Mob Fact #57:

When a mafia soldier is given an order to break someone’s leg, it is customary for all the other mafia soldiers to wish him good luck by saying, “Have a good show.”

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WRITTEN BY

Tony Nappo

Tony is Italian, he’s from Scarborough, he’s an actor, he’s a father, he’s a really good house painter, and he doesn’t believe that most things matter, ultimately, at all.

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