After 40 years in the stand-up comic racket, including an impressive list of charity performances, Chilmark resident Lenny Clarke knows how to put people in the seats.
“If you’re easily offended, don’t come,” Mr. Clarke said. “Don’t even buy a ticket.”
Mr. Clarke will headline a performance to benefit the Martha’s Vineyard Sharks at the Portuguese-American Club in Oak Bluffs, on Sunday evening, August 7.
Also appearing are Boston area comics Bobby Slayton and Christine Hurley.
“Between us, we’ve got almost a hundred years of comedy,” he said. “We don’t need any help. We know what we’re doing.”
Mr. Clarke is famously an enthusiastic Boston sports fan, and said he is happy to support the local entry in the Futures Collegiate Baseball League of New England.
“I love the Sharks,” Mr. Clarke said.
Team general manager Shana Metzger said the timing is finally right for the fund raising event.
“Lenny has been a big supporter of the Sharks for a number of years,” Ms. Metzger said. “We’ve been trying to put something together, but it just didn’t work out with his schedule. This year, he approached us, and asked if we could do something in early August.”
The club intends to use the proceeds for field improvements including grass seeding, and construction of new bathrooms.
Mr. Clarke has lived on the Island full time now for more than a decade, with his wife Jennifer, who operates a charter fishing boat out of Menemsha.
For a funny guy, he is pretty serious about his Island home.
“There’s no place I’d rather be,” he said. “But in order for me to stay here, I’ve got to leave the Vineyard. I still do stand-up all over the country. I work when I can. I just keep banging away.”
In the past two years, his extensive travel schedule has included work on three feature films and two television series.
His latest film work was in a movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal, a summer neighbor up-Island. Called Stronger, the film is about a romance that developed among two victims of the Boston Marathon Bombings.
He also worked on the USA Network television series Sirens, with pal Denis Leary, and on the Starz Entertainment series Survivor’s Remorse, a production headed by LeBron James, who won the NBA championship earlier this year with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
For Mr. Clarke, there is comedy in that.
“I came home and there was a big gift box from Lebron,” he said. “Now I gotta cheer for Cleveland.”
Mr. Clarke makes comedy out of the foibles of others. The current political climate has been a windfall for many comedians, but Mr. Clarke won’t test his political jokes on his Chilmark neighbors, including, for three weeks of the summer, President Barack Obama.
“It’s a great time to be a comic, if you don’t care what can happen to your career. I have opinions about politics, which I keep to myself. I just lay off it. I don’t want any trouble,” he said.
While politics may be off base for him, popular culture is not. Mr. Clarke said comedy fans can expect some timely jokes about the Kardashians. It appears the reality TV family has gotten under his skin.
“These people are worth a half a billion dollars. Half a billion dollars. People think these are the role models? Come on.”
Trouble is of course exactly what motivates Lenny Clarke, and it is a fair bet that there will be plenty of trouble stirred up at Sunday night’s fundraiser.
“It’s a nasty, nasty show, for anti-politically correct people. We’re out to make you laugh,” he said.
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