I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This: And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny (8 page)

I sat down and wrote a routine, despite the fact that I had no place to sell it or perform it. I now give you “The Driving Instructor” in its entirety for what I think is a pretty good payoff:

How do you do, Mrs. Webb. I see you have had one lesson already. Who was the instructor on that, Mrs. Webb? … Mr. Adams. … I’m sorry. Here it is. … Just let me read ahead here and kind of familiarize myself with the case…. How fast were you going when Mr. Adams jumped from the car? … Seventy-five. And where was that? … In your driveway. How far had Mr. Adams gotten in the lesson? …Backing out. I see. You were backing out at seventy-five and that’s when he jumped.

Did he cover starting the car?. … And the other way of stopping? What’s the other way of stopping? … Throwing it in reverse. That would do it, you’re right. All right, you want to start the car. Mrs. Webb, you just turned on the lights. You want to start the car. … They all look alike, don’t they? I don’t know why they designed them that way.

Let’s pull out into traffic. What’s the first thing we are going to do? What did Mr. Adams tell you to do before he let you pull out in traffic?. … Besides praying. No, what I had in mind was checking the rearview mirror. You see, we always want to check the rearview. … DON’T PULL OUT! Please don’t cry. I’m sorry, but there was this bus, Mrs. Webb. All right, the lane is clear now, you want to pull out. That wasn’t bad at all. You might try it a little slower next time. All right, let’s get up a bit more speed and gradually ease it into second. … Well, I didn’t want to cover reverse this early, but as long as you shifted into it. … Of course, you’re nervous. I’m nervous. I’m not just saying that, I’m really very nervous. Just don’t pay any attention to their honking. You’re doing fine. … You’re not blocking anyone’s lane. … No, as long as you are here on the safety island, you are not blocking anyone’s lane.

All right, you want to start the car. While you’re turning the lights off, why don’t you turn off the heater? There we are. Let’s get up a bit of speed. Now let’s practice some turns. The important thing on turns is not to make them too sharp, just kind of make a gradual … Now that was fine. That was a wonderful turn. It’s hard for me to believe you’ve only had one lesson after you make a turn like that. Are you sure you haven’t had more than that? One little thing—this is a one-way street. … No, actually, it’s partly my fault. You were in the left-hand lane and you were signaling left, and I just more or less assumed you were going to turn left. … Same to you, fella! … I don’t know what he said, Mrs. Webb. Let’s pull into the alley up there and practice a little alley driving. This is something a lot of the schools leave out and we think is— You’re going too fast, Mrs. Webb! You were up around sixty and it’s kind of a sharp turn.

Just drive down the alley there, Mrs. Webb. Maybe we’d better stop here. I don’t think you are going to make it between the truck and the building. … Mrs. Webb … Mrs. Webb! … Mrs. Webb! … I really didn’t think you were going to make it. That just shows you we can be wrong, too. … No, I’ll get out on your side, that’s all right. Mrs. Webb, it might be a good idea if we went over to the driving area. They have a student driver area a few blocks away. Maybe traffic throws you, maybe that’s the problem. We’ll turn here and it’s only about a block up. Turn right, here. … That was my fault again. You see, I meant the next street, not this man’s lawn. … Sir, sir, would you mind turning off the sprinkler for a moment. … Newly seeded, is that right? That’s always the way, isn’t it. … I don’t suppose it is so damn funny, is it? …

Mrs. Webb, do you want to back out and get off? … Creeping bend, that’s right. … Just back out, Mrs. Webb. … Thank you very much, sir. … Ah, now we hit someone. Remember, you were going to watch the rearview mirror, remember we covered that? … The red light blinded you. … The flashing red light blinded you … the flashing red light on the car you hit blinded you? … Yes, Officer, she was just telling me about it. All right, all right. Mrs. Webb, I am going to have to go with the officer to the police station. … They don’t believe it and they’d like me to describe it. Now, the other officer is going to drive you back to the driving school, and then you are to meet us at the police station. …

My name is Frank Dexter, Mrs. Webb. Why do you ask? … You want to be sure and get
me
next time!

Now, I hope you agree that’s pretty detailed with regard to driving. They are drilling the basics: checking the rearview mirror, avoiding one-way streets, and maneuvering through a narrow alley. All this is pretty run-of-the-mill for most of you, because you have probably been driving for a number of years.

Strange but true: At the time I wrote “The Driving Instructor,” I didn’t have a driver’s license. The reason I didn’t have a driver’s license was simple: I didn’t know how to drive.

Most of the guys I grew up with were taught how to drive by their fathers. My dad just never got around to teaching me. He had a car, albeit one with sand in the gas tank, but he never showed me how to drive it.

Even as a young adult, I didn’t bother to learn. I took the L or the bus to and from everywhere I needed to go in Chicago. In any event, I couldn’t afford to buy a car, so what was the point of learning to drive? Where would I go?

CHAPTER FIVE

The Funniest Guy on the Corner

On February 10, 1960, I was admitted to a very exclusive club—the fraternity of stand-up comics. It isn’t the most exclusive club in the United States. The most exclusive club is former presidents. Currently, there are just four alive: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George H. W. Bush. The next most exclusive club would be owners of NFL teams, of which there are thirty. But then right after that would be working stand-up comedians, and I became one that February evening.

But I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself.

I had never intended to perform my material as a stand-up in front of an audience with a telephone as my partner. A comedian named Don Adams changed my mind about that.

It was very early on in my career, and the line of work I was in—comedy—wasn’t making me any money. No regular employment had resulted from the radio tapes that Ed and I made or the brief guest spot on the man-on-the-street TV show, and I was still working part-time day jobs waiting for something to break. I decided to become a comedy writer and sell my material to established comedians.

I felt “The Submarine Commander” could very easily be adapted to Don Adams because of his deadpan delivery. The routine involves a commander of a nuclear submarine whose troops run roughshod over him on his final voyage. I reached Don when he was in Chicago for a show and he agreed to take a look.

I later learned that Don did the routine for his wife, Dorothy. When she told him she thought it was funny, Don replied in that William Powell–esque clipped voice of his: “It’s not! And I’m not paying for it!”

He didn’t pay for it, but he used it. He told me that it wasn’t the type of material he was looking for. He gave me his address in New York and told me to send along anything else I wrote that might be right for him. Two weeks later, I was watching
The Steve Allen Show
, and Don walked out onstage and performed a chunk of “The Submarine Commander.” Word for word. I couldn’t believe it. I was yelling at the TV, “That’s mine! You’re stealing my routine!”

I was furious. To put it mildly, I felt that Don was not a very stand-up stand-up. However, I reasoned that if other comedians were going to steal my routines, I had better perform them myself or I would never be paid for any of my material.

When I later recorded the routine, I actually left out the part that Don stole because I didn’t want people accusing me of stealing from him! The missing part was the sub marine commander talking to his men, and it went something like this:

I’d like to congratulate you men on the teamwork we displayed. We cut a full two minutes off the previous record of four minutes and twenty-nine seconds in surfacing and firing at the target and resubmerging. I just want to congratulate you men on the teamwork. At the same time, I don’t want to in any way slight the men that we had to leave on-deck. I think they had a lot to do with the two minutes we cut off the record, and I doubt that any of us will soon forget their somewhat stunned expressions as we watched them through the periscope.

As the years passed and I retold this story, I never used Don’s name. But in 2005, Don passed away, and his wife, Dorothy, who always liked the routine, asked me to tell the story at his memorial service, so I did. Everyone there nodded in acknowledgment. They all knew Don. Truthfully, I became philosophical about the whole situation, realizing that I was really indebted to Don for inadvertently causing me to become a performing stand-up.

A few years after Don appropriated my work, I lent a routine to Bill Daily—and I had a devil of a time getting it back. Bill was a friend of mine from Chicago. He I were both trying to break into stand-up at the same time. I had no club dates booked, and he needed material. He was working with a folk singer named Gibson, and he was going to be opening a nightclub in a basement on Chicago Avenue.

Bill was familiar with my routine “The Grace L. Ferguson Airline (And Storm Door Co.).” The routine is about flying on a discount airline that has eliminated a few of the frills and extras, like navigational instruments and maintenance. Bill asked to borrow the routine, and I agreed to lend it to him.

A year later, I was making a follow-up to my album
The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart
called, appropriately,
The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back
, and I was one cut short. I phoned Bill and told him that I would have to take back the Grace L. Ferguson routine.

“But that’s my strongest bit,” he protested feebly.

I resisted saying, “Bill, doesn’t that tell you something?” and instead explained that the routine was merely on loan. He was a gentleman about returning it. Obviously, there were no hard feelings because he ended up playing Howard the airline pilot on
The Bob Newhart Show
for six seasons. At least, there weren’t any hard feelings on my part.

The album
The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart
turned out to be bigger than I ever could have dreamed in my wildest imagination. It came about because Dan Sorkin had given some of the early radio tapes I made with Ed Gallagher to George Avakian, director of artists and repertory for Warner Bros. Records. George loved the routines and thought they might make a funny album. When I met with George, he told me to let him know the next time I played in front of an audience so he could send a team of engineers to record the performance. He felt the interplay with the audience would make a much better record than a studio recording.

That sounded fine, but there was one small problem: I had never played a nightclub.

I didn’t know the first thing about what I was getting into, so I asked around town about managers. I met with a few and eventually signed with Frank “Tweet” Hogan, who had handled Mike and Elaine and Shelley Berman. Tweet canvassed the country for a club that would book an unknown act. Finally, five months after Warner Bros. made its offer, Tweet booked me as the opening act at the Tidelands Motor Inn in Houston.

For two weeks at the Tidelands, I performed “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue,” “The Driving Instructor,” and “The Cruise of the U.S.S.
Codfish
,” a.k.a. “The Submarine Commander.” None of the routines had titles when I wrote them, but for copyright purposes—and to make the album look somewhat professional—the Warner Bros. record executives assigned titles to them.

I also tried out new material because I only had enough to fill half the album. After the show, I would go back to the hotel with Ken and Mitzi Welch, who were the closing act at the club, and perform the new routines for them. They would listen and tell me which ones were funny enough to test out the next night. From those nights came “The Wright Brothers” and “Nobody Will Ever Play Baseball.”

“The Wright Brothers” was a phone conversation between a salesman from a new production corporation and Orville Wright talking about how they would market this new invention called the airplane. “Is there any way of putting a john on it?” the salesman asks. “Jerry came up with an idea I kind of like. Maybe we could set up a little snob appeal–type thing and get two classes, one with a john and one without.” The salesman is also worried about travel time. “That’s going to cut our time to the Coast if we have to land every 105 feet. …”

In “Nobody Will Ever Play Baseball,” Abner Doubleday tries to sell a game manufacturer on baseball. The manufacturer is skeptical because it takes eighteen people to play. “You see,” he tells Abner, “the ideal game is that two or three couples come over to the house and they get a little smashed.”

On February 10, 1960, my performance was recorded for my first album, and I became the newest pledge to the fraternity of working stand-up comedians. There was no secret ceremony. I simply went backstage at the end of the night and poured myself a double scotch.

Around the time that the album was supposed to be released in April 1960, I called Warners and asked when it was coming out. I couldn’t find it any stores in Chicago. They told me that it was already out and that they were shipping every available copy to Minneapolis because it was flying off the shelves there.

I figured that if all else failed at least I could play Freddie’s in Minneapolis for the rest of my life.