I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This: And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny (19 page)

Major Major, the character I play, is a paranoid commander who is in over his head. Though he’s been promoted to major, he wanted to stay lieutenant because being a major carried too much responsibility. He refuses to meet people. His orderly was told to only admit people into his office for a meeting when he wasn’t there. When he was there, no one was to enter until he snuck out the window.

One night after a typically long, hot, and confusing day, Marty Balsam, Norm Fell, and I were throwing back the drinks. I wasn’t on the schedule to work the next day, so I didn’t think much about my intake. Before long, I was overserved.

Somehow the schedule changed and I ended up in the first scene the next morning. In the scene, Dick Benjamin and I were burying somebody. Tony Perkins, who played the minister, was offering a prayer for the dead. Yossarian was up in a tree, naked. With every line, my head pounded harder and my cottonmouth worsened. It was hotter than hell in the baking sun. I prayed that nobody would blow their lines. I just wanted the scene to end so I could go back to my trailer and take a nap.

About two weeks later, Mike Nichols called me into the production office. He showed me the scene from the day I was hungover. Watching it unfold, I felt nauseous all over again. When the reel stopped, he told me: “This is the quality I’m looking for in Major Major.”

I didn’t say a word. I wanted to tell him that I couldn’t do that every night for him. No matter how privileged I was to be in the movie, I couldn’t get blotto every night to produce the hangover that brought Major Major out of me. But I couldn’t summon the courage to tell him.

Every night for years, I played a drunk in my routine “The Retirement Party.” His name was Charlie Bedlow, an accountant who was retiring after fifty years on the job. At Charlie’s retirement party, his pompous bosses reward his years of crunching numbers in a small cubicle with insincere speeches and that standard parting gift—a cheap watch. When it was time for Charlie to speak, he slurred his words and spoke the sober truth.

Golly, I’ve been sitting here listening to Mr. Clayton, Mr. Tibton and, of course, Bruce here, and through their speeches one thought kept recurring in my mind—I think I’m going to throw up. I have never heard such drivel in all my life. I don’t suppose that it ever occurred to any one of you that I had to get half stoned every morning to make it down to this crummy job. You’d be smiling and easygoing if you were gassed all the time, too.

A lot of people have asked me, “Charlie, what are you going to do when you finally retire? Are you going to get a little part-time job in Florida, or just loll around the beach?” In other words, what am I going to do? I have some tapes from some office parties that I am going to let go for fifteen hundred bucks a copy. Let me take that back a minute. The June picnic may run seventeen-five. And with the money I make off the tapes and Miss Wilson’s hundred thou, I should do pretty good
.

I can imagine how he felt because I had seen people just like him at the various accounting jobs I held. I received a letter from someone who was upset at the drunken accountant routine because he felt I was mocking the nameless, faceless corporate workers of the world. I wrote back and explained that I was not making fun of Charlie Bedlow; I was making fun of the system that made him an alcoholic. I was mocking his dehumanizing job. The only way the poor guy could make it through the day was to be soused.

The producers of
The Bob Newhart Show
had seen me onstage as Charlie Bedlow, so they knew I could play a drunk. Occasionally they asked me to go to that well. Once I got drunk with the Peeper, bought a horse, and brought it into my apartment as a baby gift. But it was another very funny episode that I believe helped create the drinking game that ties me to Trivial Pursuit: “Hi, Bob!”

In the episode, Jerry, Howard, Mr. Carlin, and I are sitting around watching a football game. Every time Jerry’s team scores, we pass around a jug of booze. It was a high-scoring game and by the fourth quarter, we’re all blotto.

When I go to the phone to order Chinese food from the House of Hu, all I can muster is “moo goo gai pan,” which I proceed to repeat over and over again. After the guys all sing a rendition of “Over the River and Through the Woods,” Emily arrives home from a trip a day early. I greet her with a drunkenly goofy, “Hi, Emily. What’s happening?” From the couch, Mr. Carlin chimes in, “Where’s the Chinese food?”

The game “Hi, Bob!” is similar, only without the Chinese food. Several friends gather around the TV and watch
The Bob Newhart Show
reruns. Every time someone says, “Hi, Bob,” you take a drink of your favorite alcoholic beverage. My only advice: If you play the game, stay in the dorm, the den, or the rec room at the retirement home, and don’t drive home afterward.

According to a 1982 story in the
New York Times
— I guess it was a slow news day—the game started when the show went into reruns. I later heard that it originated at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. SMU is, I’m told, a party school, so this is possible.

Comedians dish it out, so they have to be able to take it. While I prefer charades or Monopoly, I’ve come to realize that the game people are most likely to associate with me is the drinking game “Hi, Bob!”

The second time I hosted
Saturday Night Live,
Chris Farley and David Spade played “Hi, Bob!” I was in a sketch, and when people walked into the sketch and greeted me with a “Hi, Bob,” they would throw one down.

I only hope that I won’t go down in history for creating the most hangovers on college campuses. Being the Jack Daniel’s of show business is not exactly what I want to be remembered for.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Science of Humor

I’m not a fan of books that examine humor in a scientific fashion. If I ever see another book called
The Serious Side of Comedy
, I’m going to throw up. I feel like comedy is that tribe in Africa who doesn’t want their pictures taken because they believe a photograph steals part of their soul. The closer you get to understanding humor, the more you begin to lose your sense of humor.

Comedy is a way to bring logic to an illogical situation, of which there are many in everyday life. I’ve always likened what I do to the man who is convinced that he is the last sane man on Earth. This guy is something like the Paul Revere of psychotics running through the town and yelling, “This is crazy!” But no one pays attention to him.

A long time ago, I read a news item that illustrates this point nicely. An engineer at a Palm Springs TV station had a private porno tape that he was playing for his buddies on the late shift. Somehow, he accidentally transmitted the tape over the air. The strange thing was that the station didn’t receive a single telephone call while the tape was playing, but the minute it was over, the phone lines lit up with outraged callers.

I decided to do a routine based on this. Picture a guy sitting at home when all of a sudden a porno movie comes on his TV. His wife, who is in the other room, tells him she’s going up to bed.

“Okay, sweetheart,” he says. “You go ahead. I’ll be there soon. I’m just watching the end of this movie.”

“What movie are you watching?” she yells from the staircase.

“I don’t know what the name of the movie is, but the girl is very good. …”

“Who’s in it?” she says.

“Nobody we know … no stars. … Wow this new girl is something else.”

Then, when the tape ends, he calls the station to ask how they could air such smut.

When I started out in the sixties, there was a sea change in comedy. The traditional stand-up comics like Henny Youngman and Milton Berle were doing mother-in-law jokes and one-liners about their wives being bad cooks. They were standard in-and-out jokes. It was “Take my wife, please.”

I was part of that change that shook up the dull Eisenhower years, along with Shelley Berman, Mike and Elaine, Jonathan Winters, and, of course, Lenny Bruce. I say of course, because Lenny was the only one of us who went to jail for his art.

Generally speaking, ours was a different kind of comedy than telling jokes. We did situational comedy. We told stories and did comedic vignettes.
Time
magazine dubbed us the “sick comics” because our stories poked at supposedly sacred topics. I was dealing with a revered expresident, Abraham Lincoln. Shelley did a bit on the taboo topic of suicide. Mike and Elaine did a funeral routine that was hilarious. A sample: “We have three caskets. Mahogany for $1,500. Oak for $750. And for $15 we put him outside in a box and god knows what happens to him.”

Our audience was equally nontraditional. College kids made up our fan base. Nightclubs were expensive. There was a cover charge, and then they had to pay for drinks. Near as I could determine, “Take my wife, please” had no relevance to them. So the college kids ordered pizza and beer and sat around listening to comedy records. Our comedy albums became their nightclubs.

My influences came from the more absurdist side of life. I’ve never forgotten the time I heard that this lady in Britain published her correspondence with Winston Churchill, so Robert Benchley decided to publish his correspondence with George Bernard Shaw. Benchley’s correspondence consisted of letters accusing Shaw of taking his umbrella at the theater and asking for it to be returned. Shaw kept writing back saying, “I don’t know who you are, and I don’t have your umbrella.”

Some comedians of my era worked successfully in that old style of one-liners. Rodney Dangerfield was one: “My wife is so neat that I got up to go to the bathroom and I came back and the bed was made,” or “My wife’s driving me crazy. She loves it when I talk dirty during sex. Last night, she called from a motel …”

The new comedians put our own personal stamps on our routines. You can steal a one- or two-line joke. A lot of comedians would see a comedian and move on to the next town and do half of his routine. I’ll never forget watching a Scottish comedian come onstage and do Phyllis Diller’s act. But you can’t steal part of “The Driving Instructor.” Our material was unique to each of us.

Comedy has changed again since the sixties, as the once acceptable limits of raunchy humor have been breached, but audiences have changed, too. We have lost our ability to laugh at ourselves.

I don’t have a joke on albino cross-dressers, but if I did, I guarantee you that I would receive a letter from the local chapter of the ACD asking me to cease and desist making fun of albino cross-dressers.

If I start to tell certain jokes, I can hear people in the audience cringing because they are afraid I am going to cross the line.

The problem is that we live an uptight country. Why don’t we just laugh at ourselves? We are funny. Gays are funny. Straights are funny. Women are funny. Men are funny. We are all funny, and we all do funny things. Let’s laugh about it.

I’ve made a few changes to my act. I did quit wearing a tuxedo long ago because a tux meant going to work. When Bill Cosby first appeared onstage in a sweater, the rules on attire began to relax—though Rickles still wears a tux. I’ve shortened a few of my older routines to adapt to the limited attention span of audiences. Also, in the old days, I used to smoke a cigarette while doing “Abe Lincoln.” Now I use a cell phone.

However, in the past ten years, I’ve learned that some things need a little explanation. Each time I start “The Driving Instructor” with the line “Imagine I’m a driving instructor and seated next to me is a woman driver,” there is an audible reaction from the audience.

“Okay,” I tell the women in the audience, “you must feel this is a sexist routine because it’s a woman driver. That was certainly never my intention when I wrote and performed this for the first time some forty-five years ago. Mrs. Webb is one of my dearest friends. But if some of you are offended, I will make it a Chinese driver.”

Then, I begin performing the routine in faux Chinese. After the laughter dies down, I explain that I can do eight more minutes of Chinese, or I can make it a woman driver.

I’ll admit that sometimes comedians can be a little insensitive.

The first time I hosted
Saturday Night Live
was on May 10, 1980. In one of the many sketches we rehearsed during the week, I played a Union officer. One of the men in my company had been killed and I kept forgetting to write a condolence letter to his mother. Everywhere I turned, something would remind me of the letter.

“Do you want some lettuce?” someone would ask.

Lettuce. … letter.

The night the showed aired, I dressed in Union military blues, and we performed the sketch. No one laughed. It just laid there, dead onstage. It’s not surprising. That was the night after Jimmy Carter had launched a military rescue effort to free the American hostages in Iran, and a U.S. military helicopter had crashed in the failed effort.

Somehow, we didn’t make the connection until after the show.

One of the dangers of becoming successful as a comedian— and I mean successful beyond that $1.18 in quarterly royalties coming in from sales of
The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart
—is that you become cut off from your source material. I no longer work part-time jobs, so that’s a loss of source material right there. As soon as you make enough money, you hire a business manager to balance the books and file form 4887 with the IRS.