Furiously Funny

DELRAY BEACH – Counted among the Seven Deadly Sins, vanity actually proved a lifesaver for comic Dexter Angry.

Some six years ago a doctor told Angry that the abnormal growth under his arm was nothing to worry about.

But Angry didn’t like the way it looked, so he elected to have it removed anyway.

“I thought I was getting a cosmetic procedure, and they told me, ‘Oh, by the way, it’s cancer,’” Angry said.

At the time of the diagnosis Angry felt fine. He wasn’t sluggish. His weight hadn’t changed. He didn’t have a fever or itchiness.

If not for the surgery to remove a bump he considered “unsightly,” Angry may not have learned he had lymphoma until the disease had advanced past the point of successful treatment.

“It was vanity,” Angry said, shaking his head. “Vanity saved my life. Ain’t that a bitch?”

Angry immediately commenced with a treatment regimen that included chemotherapy and stem cell transfer.

“It changed me in the sense that I was not sure if I would be able to do stand-up again because it changes your look, it changes your feel,” Angry said. “You don’t know if you are going to be alive, be able to make it through the treatment. You don’t feel like doing anything funny.”

Angry has been cancer free for about half a decade now, but his health remains a concern.

Immunocompromised and carrying a little more weight than he’d like, Angry stopped performing at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Everything COVID likes is in my body and I don’t want to give it a home,” Angry said.

More than most Americans, Angry eagerly anticipated his COVID-19 vaccination.

“As soon as they said I could take the vaccine, you’d have thought I was in the line to get into the strip club,” Angry said.

Angry isn’t one to preach the importance of the vaccination.

But he is mystified by a subset of the population that won’t get the vaccine yet have no issue partaking in dangerous trends like the current social media craze of stacking milk crates and trying to climb across them. Most of those videos end with milk crates flying and the participant tumbling mercilessly to the ground.

“They wont take the vaccine, but they’ll climb up on milk crates they haven’t seen since they were a kid. Is that not the most insane sh*t? That’s so insane to me,” Angry said. “And I’m not better because I think the crate challenge is hilarious. I do. When someone makes it and they complete the challenge, I’m sad a little bit.”

Angry won’t be taking the milk crate challenge anytime soon. Now that he is healthy and vaccinated, the 45-year-old Angry is once again working to make people happy.

He’s starting to perform more regularly, and recently appeared on an episode of Funny Not Famous.

On Monday he headlined the monthly stand-up comedy show at Delray Beach’s Tin Roof, delivering a performance that drew rave reviews.

“I want to do as many shows as I can do,” Angry said. “I would like to one day be the comparison. That’s my goal, is to be the comparison, meaning when a person in their normal life does something funny, or says something funny, I want the response to be, ‘Who do you think you are, Dexter Angry or somebody?’ That is when I’ll feel like I’ve made it.”