I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This: And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny (3 page)

For stand-ups, it’s perfectly acceptable to call one another even though you haven’t met. The feeling is, I don’t know you, but you are another stand-up. You’ve been through the wars, fought back the hecklers, and lived to tell another joke.

Stand-up comedy is not for the faint of heart or small of ego. Basically, a comedian is introduced to a paying audience. He (or she) walks out on the stage. The subtext is that he (or she) is going to make the audience laugh for an hour and a half. That’s a pretty conceited thing to say.

In nightclubs, you are performing, as the catchphrase goes, without a net. Singers can hide behind a song, with excuses like “I never cared for that arrangement” or “those are the dumbest lyrics.” Sinatra once said about
Strangers in the Night
that if you liked that song, you’d like orange yogurt. He thought it was stupid, yet he sang it because people wanted to hear it.

As a stand-up, if the audience doesn’t laugh, they’re saying, “You’re not funny.” And that’s personal.

I’ve never thought of myself as a gambler, but I guess I am. Every night I perform, there is that risk: Will it or will it not work? When it works, I get an adrenaline rush. When it doesn’t, there’s such a terrible low that I’ve even blamed my partner. Never mind that it’s a telephone.

Just in case you ever run into one in the real world, here are a few dirty little secrets about comedians:

Comedians are sadistic.

There’s an old joke that perfectly illustrates how comedians see themselves. One comedian—an opening act, not a headliner—is talking to another comedian. “Over the last couple of weeks, it has been weird,” he says. “I’m opening for Steve and Eydie. I finish and walk offstage, and they walk on. But the people were still applauding for me, so Steve and Eydie call me back. A week later, I’m opening for Tony Bennett and the same thing happens. I finish, people are applauding, and Tony calls me back onstage for an encore. But then last Thursday, I’m at this club and I died.”

“Yeah,” says the other comedian. “I heard about that.”

Comedians are self-absorbed.

Again, an illustrative story. A fair-to-mid-level comedian is onstage at a nothing kind of place. He does his show to polite applause and walks offstage. A woman comes backstage to tell him how much the show meant to her.

“I lost my husband six months ago,” she begins. “I loved him very much. We had spent our whole lives together. I was walking by and I saw your name and I thought to myself, ‘Gee, I’d like to laugh. That’s what I need, a good laugh because I’ve been in mourning for six months.’ And I came in, and it’s the first time I’ve laughed in six months. If there is anything I can do, I don’t know how to repay you. If there is anything I can do, any sexual favor you would like …”

The comedian interrupts her. “Did you see the first show or the second show?”

Comedians have multiple personalities.

Buddy Hackett was working on his famous Chinese-waiter routine—the one where he puts a rubber band around his eyes to force them into slits and then lectures the diner, “You get one from column A and one from column B. … No, those two are from column A … you only get one from column A.” He came home one night during the time that the routine was still in the developmental stage and said to his wife, Sherry, “Do you know what he said tonight … ?”

Comedians have a perverse sense of humor.

I once opened a show in Vegas at the Frontier Hotel by telling the backstage announcer to give me a long, drawn out buildup, and then stop the hydraulic stage short. “Ladies and gentlemen … drumroll … The Frontier Hotel … drumroll … takes great pride in presenting … drumroll …
Bobbbbb Newhart!
” With that, the back half of the stage slowly rose, revealing my head and chest, and there it stopped. I climbed up onto the stage—and nothing. No reaction at all from the audience.

I still think it was a hilarious gag.

Comedians can bury a joke just like your uncle.

Ed Sullivan once had Jack Jones on his show as an entertainer. After Jack had finished singing, Ed called him back on stage, as he did from time to time. Jack returned and Ed asked, “Jack, didn’t your father used to be Alan Jones?” Jack replied: “He still is.”

That was on the afternoon show. The audience roared. Ed told Jack they would repeat the exchange that night because the audience thought it was so funny. After Jack sang his two songs for the second show, Ed called him over and asked, “Jack, is your father still alive?” Jack gave Ed a blank stare … and there was total silence from the audience.

Comedians can teach you something.

Many jokes are like adult Aesop’s fables. Take Danny Thomas’s classic “jack story.”

Danny used to do a routine in which a guy’s car gets a flat tire. The guy has a spare but no jack, so he has to walk to the nearest garage to rent a jack. The guy thinks out loud, “I have to rent a jack. What do they want for a jack? Twenty bucks? I’ve got to have the jack to fix the flat, and the garage attendant knows I’ve got to have the jack.”

The guy keeps walking. “He could ask for fifty bucks, and I’m going to have to pay it. … Actually, he could ask for a hundred bucks if he really wanted to. … My god, he could ask for five hundred for the jack.”

Finally, when the guy reaches the garage, he says to the attendant, “You can take that five-hundred-dollar jack and shove it up your ass.”

For those of you who missed the point: Slow down, take a breath, and have a conversation.

Some comedians cannot tell a joke.

Everyone is probably familiar with the story about the new guy in prison on death row. The first day he’s locked up, another inmate yells out, “Twenty-four!” Everyone on death row breaks up laughing. A little time goes by and another prisoner shouts, “Seventeen!” Again, everyone cracks up. The new guy asks another inmate, “What is that?” The inmate says, “They are telling jokes. We all know the joke, so they just give the punch line.” The new guy says, “Let me try. Twenty-nine!” Nothing happens. The inmate says, “See, some people can tell jokes and some people can’t.”

Many good comedians can’t remember the jokes, so they just do punch lines. If someone gives me the punch line, I can generally build backward to the joke. Dick Martin and Don Rickles can’t remember jokes, so all we do is punch lines.

“Why, is one missing?”

The story: “Did you take a shower?”

Or: “I’ll get the half that eats.”

The story: “I’m dating this girl and she works for a magician. Every night, he saws her in half. With my luck, I’ll get the half that eats.”

All comedians are thin-skinned.

So please do not write to me or the publisher if you don’t like this book.

On the other hand, ventriloquists are downright crazy.

Dick Martin knew a ventriloquist named Pat Patrick who committed suicide by throwing himself from a plane. Pat Patrick left a note that read, “The dummy pushed me.”

CHAPTER TWO

Growing Up in the Windy City

Chicago is a satirical city. I know this for a fact because I grew up there.

Take its nickname: the windy city. Most people believe its derivation comes from the wind whipping off Lake Michigan and between the skyscrapers. While there is what’s locally known as the “lake effect,” Chicago is not considered by meteorologists to be a particularly windy city. Once we were in Chicago filming some stock footage for
The Bob Newhart Show
, and we had to rent a wind machine to blow my hat off.

There’s much more evidence to suggest that the nickname metaphorically refers to the long history of blustery politicians and the excessive boasting of early Chicagoans about their rapidly growing metropolis. Though it became a term of pride, the nickname was probably given to the city by its urban rivals.

Whether blustery in words or weather, there’s no putting on airs in Chicago. It’s too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer to walk around with any pretenses. You’ve got to be as real and solid as one of those bone-in rib eyes served at Gibsons Steakhouse. It’s a city where you say what you mean, mean what you say, and, most importantly, where you must be able to back up what you say. All in all, this makes it a great place for comedians to sharpen their acts.

There is a long list of comedians and actors who came out of the Second City theater. The tradition began with Alan Arkin and Barbara Harris, and grew exponentially with John Belushi, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Chris Farley, Gilda Radner, and Martin Short, to name a few. This improvisational comedy theater is also responsible for reminding the world about the Second City moniker, a phrase coined in a series of derisive
New Yorker
magazine articles by A. J. Liebling

In Chicago, there truly is a Second City mentality, a cautionary “don’t think you’re New York just because you have big stuff in your city.” Consider that the Sears Tower was erected in 1974 as the tallest building in the world at 110 stories and 1,450 feet. Why? Because Sears needed eight more floors of office space than the Empire State Building? No, it was simply to have the tallest building in the world and be ahead of New York.

To this day, I maintain that you can’t fool Chicago audiences. People in other cities laugh at what they think they should laugh at, but people in Chicago only laugh when something is funny. That’s why there’s such a long list of comedians who were toughened up and found success there, including Mike and Elaine, Shecky Greene, Mort Sahl, Jonathan Winters, Shelley Berman, and, of course, Bob Newhart.

Tim Conway, a dear friend of mine, tells a story about growing up in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. His father, who wasn’t handy at all around the house, decided that he could install a doorbell. He completed the task, but there was a slight problem. The doorbell rang all the time except when someone actually pushed it, at which point Tim’s father would say, “I’ll get it.”

Given this childhood, Tim could only have become a comedian.

I’ll try to describe my childhood and let you decide if this is the stuff of which comedians are made.

Overall, I would say that my childhood was neither more nor less funny than the childhoods of most people I know. I was born in Oak Park Hospital, but I grew up across the town line in Austin on the West Side of Chicago. I used to say that I lived in Oak Park because it was more posh than Austin. Ernest Hemingway grew up there, and Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote twenty-two Tarzan novels while living in Oak Park. Even the founder of Austin, Henry Austin, lived in Oak Park.

I always thought we were from an upper-middle-class family until I met an upper-middle-class family and realized that we weren’t. The rich people were easy to spot because they all had suntans in the wintertime. Bronzed skin in February was a status symbol in Chicago. It meant that you had vacationed in Florida over Christmas. My family didn’t have much money so we didn’t go to Florida. If we went on vacation, it was to Wisconsin.

My father, George, worked for a plumbing and heating contractor, and my mother, Pauline, was a homemaker. I was the second of four children, and the only boy. My sisters, Mary Joan, Pauline, and Ginny, were all very smart. Suffice it to say, I tried to get my report card home before my sisters because I knew that once theirs arrived, mine wouldn’t look so good.

My sisters and I were raised Catholic and educated in Catholic schools. A religious education was important to my parents. I lived about eight blocks from Fenwick High School, but I rode the streetcar forty-five minutes to St. Ignatius. What I remember most about St. Ignatius is that it was all boys. This made for some ambiguous theater when we put on plays because the girls’ parts were all played by boys. The love interests in the plays left a lot to be desired.

However, like most kids, I didn’t pay much attention in church, and I only took communion because I was always hungry. Until I was an adult, I thought that St. Christopher was the patron saint of magnetic feet because you stuck him on the dashboard and he wouldn’t move.

All religions basically are saying one thing, and that is: “Be nice to each other.” My friends who are Jewish comedians always seemed to have a leg up because they could use Yiddish words like schmuck or putz in their acts, and talk about growing up Jewish. Our family never used Irish or German words; we just spoke plain English, which is not exactly fodder for a comedian’s act.

Now, I can’t be judgmental because I didn’t go through the Depression and my father did. I don’t know what that does to someone, but it affected him. I know that about two years after my father and mother were married, he took a job with American Standard, which manufactures plumbing supplies. In accounting, there are two kinds of book entries: LiFo (Last in, First out) and FiFo (First in, First out). Unfortunately, he was with a FiFo company, and when the Depression hit, he lost his job.

When I was growing up, most of the time my father would come home from work around five o’clock and take a nap. In high school and college, I always worked, so I would get home around 6:30
P.M
. My sisters had their own schedules. Sometimes the family would have dinner together, sometimes not. Around eight, my father would go to “Toppers,” his favorite hangout. He would come home around 12:30
A.M
. More often than not, this was a typical day in my father’s life.