Originally published in the Bay Area Reporter
Kent Fuher says his favorite place to work is at home in bed, with his lapdogs and laptop.
“If I had to define myself as more of a performer or a writer, I’d choose writer,” says the thoughtful 52-year-old who will appear at Oasis next Sunday (December 17) as his outrageous alter-ego, drag star Jackie Beat.
“Besides doing Jackie, I write material for Ross Matthews and for the Drag Race queens when they tour with their roast shows—If you ever go, you’ll hear that all of them sound like me. I wrote for Margaret Cho and Joan Rivers, when they were doing Fashion Police. And I’ve written for Roseanne.”
But without fail, for the past twenty-odd years, come late November Fuher has hit the road for a feverish few weeks to perform, as he puts in, “in full clown” for Jackie Beat’s annual Christmas shows.
“I like to write new material for every year,” says Fuher, of the shows’ salacious parody lyrics to pop hits and traditional Christmas songs.“But I’ve been doing this so long that I’ve used every holiday song out there. I’ve done ‘The 12 Days of Christmas’ three different ways and three versions of ‘Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.”
One of the latter, of which Fuher feels particularly proud, involves the cannibalistic aftermath of Santa’s transit crashing into the Andes mountains.
“I just love juxtaposing that sweet children’s song with a real horror story.”
Fuher likes to craft lyrics with unexpected twists, like his riff on the Eartha Kitt chestnut ‘Santa Baby’: “I rewrote it as ‘Santa’s Baby’. It starts out being about getting pregnant from a one night stand on Christmas Eve (He came down the chimney/Then came in me), and wanting to have an abortion. But because of the Christian right she has to say that Santa raped her in order to get it.”
Fuher understands that some of his audience may never pick up on some of the more nuanced wit in his songs. “Look, if you’re not that bright, and you’re in a gay bar and have had five cocktails, you’ll hear the word ‘poop’ and that’ll be enough to make you laugh.”
But, he insightfully recognizes the limits of musical parody as a joke-delivery system for any listener: “You’re moving through the lyrics very quickly when you’re singing, so if a joke is subtle, or requires people to do the math, it won’t work, because there are three more gags in the time it would take them to get it. So I always have to be a little broad and kind of swing for the fences.”
Still, Fuher says that a sense of comedy craftsmanship leads him to pack in the jokes as densely as possible, avoiding the bludgeoning approach of a Weird Al Yankovic: “I don’t repeat lyrics in the chorus.”
Given the high gags-per-minute ratio of the act, Jackie Beat always performs with a music stand and lyric sheets. The stand also helps Fuher be as topical as possible.
“The person who first made me want to become a performer is Sandra Bernhard, and every time I’ve gone to see her, she’s had a music stand she can refer to. It gives me a sense of freedom so I can write five or six new songs in a week if I get inspired and start performing them right away without totally memorizing.”
“One time I was doing two nights in San Francisco. Back in my hotel room after the first night, the whole Tiger Woods golf club thing was on the news. I jumped on my laptop and downloaded the karaoke version of Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’ and the next night I sang ‘I Slept With Tiger’”
The songwriting muse has been particularly fertile these past few months. “I’ll be doing a new four song sexual predator medley,” says Fuher, reveling in the phonetic similarity of Louis C.K. and YMCA.
