“That’s why I’m in Fullerton for retards.”
–Andy Dick, before many in the audience groaned at and/or walked out of his performance Wednesday at the annual Fullerton Cares Comedy for Autism benefit at the Fox Theatre.
The comedian, who is known for headline-grabbing arrests and incidents—including one where he exposed himself and pissed on stuff at a 2011 Newport Beach Film Festival party—was seen sobbing in the Fox's green room after his set.
“It is a word I shouldn’t use,” he says in a statement issued through Fullerton Cares. “I shouldn’t use that word. There are a lot of taboo words out there. I was just joking. Kevin [a friend attending his recorded statement] is not mentally handicapped … he’s not. He has autism. I have slight autism. So, I apologize if I offended anyone out there. Autism in my eyes touches everybody. I think we all know somebody or we are ourselves in some ways autistic … and that’s it. I didn’t mean to offend anybody.”
Fullerton Cares and its founder issued separate statements accepting Dick’s apology and apologizing themselves to anyone offended by the routine.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.