Different Slants

Seeing the World from a New Angle

Dobie Maxwell–A Noble Unsung Comic…by Robert M. Katzman

Filed under: Dobie maxwell-Unsung Comic,Friendship & Compassion,My Own Personal Hell — Bob at 11:36 am on Thursday, March 15, 2012

Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story: http://www.differentslants.com/?p=355

© 3/17/2012  St. Patrick’s Day

Some people are born with a sense of reciprocity, innate and clear, like salmon swimming upstream to spawn.

Other people, well, you could stick a giant glowing neon arrow up their ass in an effort to point them in the right direction, and it would serve no purpose.

Dobie Maxwell is someone who’s been kicked around in anonymity for a good chunk of his life, and yet still maintained his sense of right and wrong and when to speak up when he recognizes an injustice.  As a person so much like him, I know how rare it is to find a guy to buck the snarling crowd and say: Stop!

I will tell you who he is to me, and what happened to compel me to write this profile about him. I am not certain, but something tells me that not enough has been written about Dobie, and if so, not like what I’m going to say.

Except I know so little.

Funny, under the present circumstances.

I don’t know Dobie’s actual name.

I don’t know if he’s married or has children.

I don’t know where he lives or even his phone number.

We never went to dinner or a movie.

I don’t know what his car looks like.

But, I surely know Dobie.

He’s a standup comic waiting for a break. Years ago, a total stranger, he called me to sell his Mad Magazine collection at a time when I didn’t want or need them in my back-issue magazine store collection, and I had little cash to give to him, in any event.  No one had asked me for any issue of Mad for a couple of years. But we talked for a bit, anyway. Dobie has that something that makes talking to him as easy as breathing.

(Read on …)