I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This: And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny (11 page)

“Look, sir, I don’t come down in the sewer and bother you at work, so why are you bothering me?” and “I’ll tell you what. I’ll check my brains at the door and we’ll start off even.”

At nightclubs, particularly in the sixties and seventies, the booze really flowed, so I encountered many a drunken heckler. Typically it was after midnight and some guy who had had a few too many mai tais would be trying to impress his girlfriend. In these cases, I used the girlfriend and predicted what might happen to him after the show.

“Sir, the way you are acting I don’t think you’re going to get any tonight.”

“I can hear your lady after the show: ‘Well, you certainly made an ass of yourself tonight.’ ”

An airplane flying overhead elicits a standard, “Pull up! Pull up!” With a circling helicopter, I go further: “I didn’t see the news today. Are we under attack?”

But the biggest problem I’ve had was dealing with a heckler in the middle of a routine. “The Submarine Commander” would be well under way and I’d get heckled. I would have to go out of character to put him down, unless I could do some fancy footwork and somehow work the put-down into the routine. Such as: “Sailor, I’ll deal with you in a minute,” or “Johnson, why are you always so much trouble?”

If I’m performing a telephone routine, I can usually weave something in. During “King Kong,” for instance, I’ll say, “I’ll deal with you in a minute, sir. … Sorry, sir, someone had a question about whether the elevators go all the way to the top. I told him these elevators do, but clearly his doesn’t.” Another standard phone routine retort: “He did appear to be a little drunk, yes, sir.”

The only way to save a routine is to stay in the moment so the audience doesn’t lose its train of thought. Otherwise, I have to break character to put the heckler down and then start the routine over. If I have to stop for more than a sentence or two, I’ve lost the momentum. That really used to frustrate me, which is why I favored colleges over nightclubs. At colleges, there aren’t many hecklers. At least there weren’t before “Hi, Bob.”

Perversity is an innate trait in comedians, and dealing with dumb audiences requires perversity. When you face a dumb audience, it’s worse than being heckled because they just sit there and stare at you. One particular evening, I was in a certain city on the East Coast that had the slowest audience, and I decided to fight back.

“I guess people probably wonder what comedians do during the day because we travel a lot and have downtime before the show,” I began. “Well, I happen to belong to the Road Runner Club. It’s quite interesting and very well organized. We have different chapters in each city. One thing we do is that we get together and we talk about our favorite Road Runner cartoon. …”

As I looked out over a sea of confused faces waiting for something funny to emerge, I wondered how far I could take this. What the hell, I thought, I’m feeling a little crazy. For them, I’ll take it a little farther.

“Yesterday, we were talking about my favorite episode, the one where Wile E. Coyote is chasing the Road Runner … or maybe it was Bugs Bunny who was chasing him. I forget now. Anyway, Bugs Bunny gets hold of a can of paint, and he paints a tunnel on the rock. Remember that one?”

Blank stares.

Here’s another. I’ll set it up by saying, “There are certain victimless crimes that police have to spend their time on, like gambling. You aren’t hurting anybody.”

And then I’ll move into the joke. “All of the guys in the audience, we’ve all done this. The wife and kids are out of the house. You are all alone, and you slip on one of the wife’s dresses. You aren’t hurting anybody.”

At this point, there is a long delay with no response from the audience. “You mean … you don’t do that?”

No one ever laughs at these bits. They might be a little bit perverse, but sometimes the audience deserves it. There are plenty of small, twisted things that I’ve left in my act over the years just because I felt like it.

In “Introducing Tobacco to Civilization,” there’s a line where the head of the West Indies Company is talking to Sir Walter Raleigh, who is telling him about discovering tobacco. The company man says, “You see, Walt, we’ve been a little worried about you ever since you put your cape down over that mud.”

That never gets a laugh. People usually stop laughing just to try to figure out the reference. Most people don’t remember that one of the famous stories about Sir Walter Raleigh was that he took off his coat and draped it over a mud puddle so a woman disembarking from a carriage wouldn’t soil her shoes. When I first performed the routine, people laughed. Over time it has become an obscure reference, and today almost no one makes the connection.

The fictitious names Larry Strickland and Neal Norlag are another laugh-stopper. In “The Bus Driver’s School,” I point out that we are going to find out whether the students will be good bus drivers, or possibly some of the alltime great bus drivers—bus drivers like the legendary Larry Strickland, or probably that greatest bus driver of all, Neal Norlag. (Remember him?)

It’s the bus driver’s version of comparing Babe Ruth and Willie Mays. Who was the greatest? They never played at the same time, so we’ll never know.

Why not take it out of the routine?

Perversity.

And, incidentally, the Elmwood Casino is named after the elmwood, a type of Canadian flower.

It wasn’t until years later when I met Harpo Marx that I began to understand how truly great comedians dealt with failure onstage. Ginnie and I were in Palm Springs, and Harpo introduced himself to me and invited us over to his house.

Harpo was an incredibly humble and generous man. He and his wife couldn’t have children so they adopted six kids.

We were sitting in his den, and he opened one of his scrapbooks. He pointed out a column outside a vaudeville house. The column had metal plates on it with the names of several performers, including the Marx brothers.

I was curious. “Of all the vaudeville houses that you played in, why did you keep this particular picture?” I asked.

“Because we were there an entire week and we never got a laugh.”

The funny thing about comedians is that you will never hear them say, “I killed ’em last night” or “I had ’em rolling in the aisles.” What they will say are things like “it was the worst crowd ever,” “the whole act went into the dumper,” or “I played this club the other night and … nothing.”

Maybe it’s comedians’ twisted sense of the world, but we remember our worst routines word for word. This can be a little disconcerting because for every routine that works, there seem to be four that don’t. For all you sadists out there:

A civilian goes to Mars. When he returns to Earth, he’s being interviewed on his impressions of Mars. The interviewer asks if the people on Mars are more advanced than people on Earth. The civilian says they are, and the interviewer asks by how much.

“I would say six, seven weeks,” the civilian replies. “When I was up there, they had the disposable razor blades and it was like six or seven weeks after I returned to Earth before we had them.”

That was one that died, but I still love it.

There was once a comedy team named Brown and Carney. The entertainment business is always looking for the next big thing, and the suits at RKO thought that Wally Brown and Alan Carney could become another Abbott and Costello. This is the kind of delusional thinking that goes on every day in Hollywood. Inevitably, it turned out that Brown and Carney were no Abbott and Costello.

One day they arrived at a vaudeville house just in time for their show. There was no time to rehearse. They handed their sheet music to the band and took the stage. What they didn’t know was that the previous act was a poodle act with jugglers that used the exact same music.

The minute the band struck up the music, the poodles ran out onstage and began doing pirouettes. Brown and Carney spent the entire show fighting off the poodles.

I’ve never been attacked by poodles, but there have been times when things didn’t go well due to circumstances slightly beyond my control. The Australians had been after me for years to play Sydney. I had declined because of the long flights. But after turning down a number of offers, I decided to steel myself for the twenty-two hours of flying. When I arrived at the club for the first night’s show, I asked the maître d’ how many people we were expecting.

“Tonight,” he pondered aloud, as he carefully consulted his master list, “we have … fourteen.”

Wow. Figuring that maybe Monday was an off-night, I asked about the following night.

“Tomorrow, we have nine.”

“Wednesday?”

“We don’t have any for Wednesday.”

Apparently, my
Button-Down Mind
album had cooled off.

That same trip, I was playing a hall in front of 300 people, but it might as well have been empty. Bit after bit, joke after joke, routine after routine, there was nothing but dead air.

“Artie,” I said into the microphone, calling to my manager who was in the lighting booth.

Artie came out of the booth. “Yeah, Bob,” he said over the silent crowd.

“How much time do I have to do?”

“You have to do an hour.”

“An hour? … How much time have I done?”

“Thirty-five minutes, Bob.”

“Artie, let me know when I’ve done another twenty-four minutes.”

The audience sat stone-silent, watching this exchange. It didn’t matter because I wasn’t coming back to Australia. Ever.

Sad to say, the situation could’ve turned out even worse.

Jack Paar used to tell a story about maestro violinist Jascha Heifetz. He gets a call in March from a club owner in North Dakota who wants to book him in November. It sounds like a pretty good gig. The hall holds 3,000. Jascha consults his schedule and agrees.

But come November, there is a terrible blizzard in New York, so Jascha calls the club owner and explains that all the flights have been canceled and he will not be able to make it. The club owner tells Jascha that there are 3,000 people who will be heartbroken if he doesn’t show up. Jascha vows to do whatever he can.

After hours on the phone, Jascha finds a flight from LaGuardia that connects through Denver to North Dakota. He finally arrives at the auditorium at 11
P.M
., and there are only twelve people there.

He’s utterly deflated. “I thought you said there were three thousand,” Jascha says to the club owner.

“There were, but they didn’t think you were going to show up so they all left,” the club owner responds. “But these people have been here since five
P.M
.”

“I’ve never appeared in front of such a small audience,” Jascha says.

“Jascha, it will really make their night if you just sing one or two songs.”

Worse than having no one at all or no one laughing was the time that I had a full house and my hair fell off in the middle of the show.

I was appearing at the Palmer House in Chicago and the room was unusually hot. All of a sudden, I felt my hairpiece starting to slip. The glue that held it to my slightly bald spot was apparently melting. As the hairpiece slid down the side of my face, it picked up speed. At the last second, just before it hit the floor, I grabbed it and stuffed it into the pocket of my tuxedo.

The audience was laughing—laughing uneasily, I might add.

“Well, now you know I wear a hairpiece,” I said.

This was a great-looking hairpiece, and I used to wear it everywhere I performed. It wasn’t one of those bad hairpieces where people say, “Do you really expect me to believe that’s your hair? It looks like a dead animal fell out of a tree and landed on your head.” Thanks to master craftsmanship, this hairpiece blended with my normal hair perfectly.

Since the rug had been literally pulled back, I worked the situation into the show. An embarrassment of that magnitude demanded that I get some comedic mileage out of it. Every time I put my hand in my pocket, I’d jerk it back out and screech,
“Ay, yi, yi!”
as if I were being bitten.

The audience loved it. They knew they were witnessing something that, hopefully for my sake, the next audience wouldn’t see.

In the early seventies, I filled in for Johnny Carson as guest host of
The Tonight Show
from New York. He was having contractual problems with NBC—which meant that he wanted more money. NBC’s stance was that Johnny wasn’t going to hold them up for any more money no matter what. (Guess who won?)

This was before
The Bob Newhart Show
, which is to say that it was a pretty big opportunity for me.
The Tonight Show
had a writing staff that was available to help the guest host write the nightly monologue. Each night, they would give me three lousy jokes. Having fulfilled their obligation, they would return to working on their screenplays. With Johnny gone, there wasn’t much anyone could do about it.

It fell to me to write the monologues. Each night after the show, I would gather all the New York papers and search for material. Then I would fall asleep skimming the dossier on the following day’s guest. After three weeks, I felt like a wet and worn-out dishrag. When Johnny left, he had done it for thirty years.