Mickey Cucchiella loves to tell stories — funny stories, personal stories, brutally honest tales from his rollercoast life. He describes his style of spoken word comedy as “a wicked cross between an old-school Irish, long-form storyteller and a cutting political satirist.” It comes with a coat of Bawlmer brass, too.
The other day I asked him to tell me the Mickey Origin Story: How a skateboarding kid from Harford Road broke into comedy.
We went back 40 years for this one, to the same space where Mickey will open a new comedy club this weekend — the lower level of the Bowman Restaurant at 9306 Harford Road in Parkville. There have been at least two other comedy clubs at The Bowman over the years. In the mid-1980s, it was known as Tracy’s. It later became the original location of Magooby’s Joke House.
On Friday it becomes HammerJokes.
I met Mickey there Tuesday afternoon as he and friends were painting the walls and preparing for Friday’s opening.
Mickey first stepped into this place when he was a teenager.
“I was like 17 years old at the time, and I knew I wanted to do comedy,” he says.
Some Baltimore boys wanted to be Cal Ripken or Eddie Murray. Mickey dreamed of being on The Tonight Show. He’d been staying up to watch Johnny Carson and his guests — comedians David Brenner, George Carlin, Steven Wright, Richard Pryor, Ellen DeGeneres, Richard Lewis — and the comedy bug got into his head.
So he skateboarded from his house in Lauraville, near Koco’s Pub, to The Bowman, a distance of five miles, to see standup in Tracy’s.
“I snuck down the steps and stood in that back corner,” Mickey says, pointing to the very spot where his underaged self tried to hide during a performance by the headliner, Nick Carmen Cosentino. “The manager came up to me and said, ‘What are you doing here?’ And I looked him dead in the eyes and I said, ‘I want to see standup. I want to be a comedian.’ And he kinda chuckled and goes, ‘You can’t be here,’ and I was like, ‘Please, can I just watch the show? I’m not gonna move. I won’t drink anything.’ So he said, ‘All right, don’t move, and don’t drink anything.’
“About 10 minutes later, the headliner [Cosentino] came over and he said, ‘You want to be a comedian?’ I’m a kid. I was shaking. I said yes and he asked why, and I said, ‘I just love it, it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.’”
And then, a magic moment: Cosentino and the club’s emcee gave Mickey four minutes on stage, and Mickey went for it.
He started off with a cute joke about sex and a Snickers bar; the adult audience chuckled.
“But then I started doing crowd work, and I ripped into this big muscle guy in the audience,” Mickey says. “I just shredded him, two minutes of annihilation, and when I walked off stage, it was like raucous applause. And the headliner was standing right there, his mouth wide open, and he said, ‘You’ve never been on stage?’ And I said never.”
Everyone made a fuss about the kid from Lauraville. The club management eventually made Mickey the house emcee. At 18, he was doing comedy every weekend, and that’s the Mickey Origin Story.
Now 56, he returns to the scene this Friday and Saturday for the first performances at HammerJokes, a play off the name of the Baltimore club where he also emceed shows back in the day — Hammerjack’s. There’s a large photo in the new place of young Mickey on stage there, a microphone in one hand, his other hand in bird-flipping mode.
While he’s been a professional comic since high school, most people around Baltimore remember Mickey as the high-energy, quick-witted guy who made appearances and eventually hosted shows on 98 Rock for several years. He had a good run there — with Russ Mottla, then with Kirk, Mark and Lopez, and eventually on the morning show with Amelia.
Fans also remember his sad departure.
Mickey walked away from radio in 2013. In a farewell video, he said he was grateful for his time on 98 Rock but that he had become too depressed to continue. His mother had died; he and his wife had divorced. “I never got back to where I was,” Mickey said. “It’s more of a struggle than it is fun to do what I do.”
In the years since, he struggled more with depression and tried different jobs to earn an income — painting houses, selling cars, opening a vape shop. “I lost my way,” Mickey says. “And at one point last year I got to a bad place mentally.”
So he wisely sought help at a psychiatric treatment program in Harford County. Along that part of the journey, he says, he rediscovered himself and what he’s good at — talking, telling stories, and making people laugh in the process.
And so “Mickey Talks” was born. That’s the amusing podcast he and another 98 Rock veteran, Matt Davis, produce in a studio at Flagship Cinemas in Eastpoint. The owner of the theaters, Paul Wegner, has been a Mickey supporter and given him room and resources to get back on track.
The track looks good right now, and it leads to HammerJokes, downstairs at The Bowman, where his career started. He’s been through a lot. He’s grown. He’s grateful. He’s healthy. He still has a following. And now he gets to the club with big-boy wheels (a Jeep Cherokee), not by skateboard.
Dan Rodricks’ column appears weekly in the Fishbowl. He can be reached at djrodricks@gmail.com or via danrodricks.com
