Juvenile Humor

By Steve Lopez/Martinez

You can go a long way toward understanding what's in the head and heart of Michael Pritchard with one detail from his resume. In 1980, when he won the San Francisco International Comedy Competition, he was also named California Probation Officer of the Year for his work with kids locked up in juvenile hall. It was the kids, in fact, who persuaded him to try stand-up comedy. If he could get laughs out of hard-core punks like them, they reasoned, he ought to go cash in.

For a while, it looked as if he would. After Pritchard won the comedy competition, he scored every funny man's fantasy: an appearance on the Tonight Show. That led to more TV. A 6-ft. 6-in., 300-lb. grizzly of a man, Pritchard danced with Judd Hirsch in an episode of Taxi, and two networks had a bidding war over him. But nothing in Hollywood interested Pritchard as much as the homeboys back at the hall. "If Mother Teresa had a kid with Jesse Ventura," says Robin Williams, who worked the same clubs as Pritchard back then, "you'd get Mike. He's this huge Vietnam vet with a big heart."

Today Pritchard, 49, stands in front of 500 students in the Martinez Junior High School gymnasium, just east of San Francisco and not far from his home in San Rafael. For nearly 20 years, he has melded his comic gift with his passion for social work and has somehow made a career of it, taking his act to schools from Washington to Ketchikan, Alaska. And never has he been in greater demand than since the school shootings at Columbine. Nowadays, he books appearances and sells videos on the Web at SavingOurSchools.org

No sane person would attempt to hold the attention of five adolescents, let alone 500, for nearly an hour. Pritchard, however, has the advantage of being able to rattle off a thousand sound effects and voices, including the Ewoks he has done for George Lucas' Star Wars films. And once he hooks the kids, he sneaks doses of medicine in along with the candy.

Everyone in the gym at Martinez snickers at the names that Pritchard and his lunkhead pals used to call a heavy girl named Gina when he was a third-grader in St. Louis. But they mummy up when he says, "Nobody wanted to be there...when she was home, with all her pain locked up." Pritchard tells how, years later, he ended up in an emergency room after a gang member conked him on the head. And guess who was his nurse? Gina, who took note of the fact that while she had slimmed down nicely, Pritchard was the size of a weather balloon. "I tried Ultra SlimFast," he says. "I found out it tastes great on Ben & Jerry's."

Pritchard leads them down this path, touching on the ways kids divide themselves: by the clothes they wear, the color of their skin, the cars their parents drive. "Lack of respect is the root of all evil" and "Pain shared is pain divided," he preaches, building to where he demands honest answers to a few questions. "How many of you have seen fights start here at school for something silly?" The hands shoot up. "How many of you have heard the words homo, faggot and dyke used in school?" A sea of hands again, just as when he asks if they have seen students isolated and ridiculed. "This is not how we want to live," he says.

After the assembly, 25 students meet with Pritchard in a classroom and open up. John, 13, says he suspects the kids who pick on him do it because they fear someone will do it to them. Corey, 14, says he wishes people could see past his reputation as a bully and know he doesn't have a cold heart. "My name is Steve, and basically I've been teased all my life," says a 13-year-old with red hair and a T shirt he gets razzed for. It refers to the reputed last words of a Columbine victim: SHE SAID, "YES, I BELIEVE IN GOD."

Pritchard doesn't tell them about the other life he might have had or about the horror stories from juvenile hall. He doesn't tell them he spent most of his school years in the dean's office or about all the kids he couldn't save as a Vietnam medic or that he's been sober for 20 years. The idea is for them to do the talking. And then he Bigfoots through a gauntlet of high fives as he leaves, happier than anyone in Hollywood.