Raging Bully

Bobby Slayton operates with a gravelly rasp and an unyielding lack of patience. On the 1998 audio album Raging Bully, the self-proclaimed “Pitbull of Comedy” leans into a confrontational, rapid-fire rhythm. He is an insult comic in the classic sense, viewing his audience and his own family as targets of opportunity. The appeal here is the sheer velocity of his agitation. He does not want you on his side; he just wants to talk over you.

Released as an hour-long set on Miramar Records, the album features Slayton digging into heavy-handed domestic complaints. He offers deeply unromantic accounts of his marriage, including a dispute sparked when his wife discovers his copy of a pornographic film titled The French Maid. When she asks if he wants her to dress up like the character, Slayton tells her it would ruin the movie, suggesting instead she dress like a Mexican maid to clean the house while he sleeps with the woman on the tape. It is an abrasive posture, capturing the comic during a stretch of his career where he was parlaying this exact aggression into acting gigs like his turn as Joey Bishop in HBO’s The Rat Pack.