ABlog the Author

Because you kind of asked for it....

….the podcast for “The Ethicist” that Adrianne and I did last week. Nice mention of EVERYTHING HURTS at the end.

Reblogged from my friend and fellow Tumblr, cyber-bard Will Leitch

Another award-winning Late Show action photo by John Filo....

Robin Williams and Dave had just spent two segments talking about great heckle lines from the audience. Robin took the place down recounting his lookalike, Bono, telling a crowd in Scotland to clap their hands, then saying, “Every time you clap your hands, an elephant in Africa dies….” and a guy in the back yelling, “So, stop clapping your fucking hands!”

Well, during the break, I had to tell him my favorite comedy club heckle of all time. A comic was bombing in one of the showcase clubs and a guy yelled out, “Hey, move out of the way. I can’t see the bricks….” As this shot will attest, it dropped him. (And if you know anything about Robin, it’ll be in the act tonight….)

Here's an email I needed to share, then yak about....

….from a guy named Mark Mobley, who may or may not be out of my past:

Mr. Scheft:

I’ve just read your blog for the first time — it’s great, as is The Ringer. Your reminiscences of mid-’80s comedy made me curious about whether you were the person I misintroduced late one night in Baltimore.

I was MCing at the Charm City Comedy Club (you will no doubt remember my killer material about Mayor William Donald Schaefer). Anyway, I got up after the middle act and did the “You’ve seen him on … ” thing, only to forget the (your?) name. So instead of admitting that I was an idiot, I did the worst thing I could do in that situation — I made up a name, along the lines of “Ladies and Gentlemen, Mike Stevens.” The comic (you?) walked right past me, and deathstaring at me in the back of the room, said, “Hi. I’m MIke Stevens,” and went on with his act.

Thanks for posting all those stories. I met a lot of great people in that club. All best, —M.

I wrote him back immediately and said it definitely was not me, because I would have thought it was funny. Every comic has stories about botched introductions. I was introduced at the Bitter End from the booth: “Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Heck….” My wife, Adrianne Tolsch, was introduced in Claremont, California as “Give it up for Diane Porch!” Glenn Hirsch had a entire bit in his act about being brought up as “Gleeb Hush.” Gleeb Friggin’ Hush!

Usually, it’s some neophyte emcee or a clueless guy in the sound booth. But even we seasoned pros falter. Adrianne once brought Pat Cooper up at Catch a Rising Star by calling him Pat Henry, Frank Sinatra’s long-dead opening act. Cooper was furious, and said, “How about a hand for Gilda Diller?” And I was emceeing in Vegas at the Riviera Improv in 1986 and the headliner was this ventriloquist act, JTO and Bobby Duck. I got all the credits right, but blanked out after I announced the vent. So, it came out like this: “Your headliner just finished six weeks in Jeff Kutash’s ‘Splash.’ We love them here at the Riviera. Please welcome JTO and…and…. Hey, what’s the fucking puppet’s name?”

(voice from the back of the house): “Bobby”

Me: “Bobby!!!!!!’

(voice from the back of the house): “Duck….”

Me: “Next time…”

Are you ready for this? The voice from the back of the house? Then Riviera Improv maitre ‘d and later better known as Bobby Bacalieri on “The Sopranos,” STEVE SCHIRRIPA! 

Slow news day....

This afternoon, Adrianne and I taped Randy Cohen’s “The Ethicist” podcast for the New York Times website. He takes a picture of everyone who does the podcast wearing the same headset, frames it, and lines the walls of his bathroom with the photos. The podcast won’t be up until next Friday, but until then, enjoy me doing a guy waiting for his dentures to be repaired….

Randy Cohen is a former Letterman writer, and may be the wittiest Communist I know. He has been doing The Ethicist column in the Sunday Times magazine for ten years now, which is beyond impressive, especially when you consider there have been no newspapers for the last five years.

One more thing from New Year's Eve, 1986 or 1987....

…I just remembered. The key with Larry David (who did not smoke pot), even back then, was to ask him questions about himself as if it was an interview. So, I say, “Larry, what would you say your best quality is?”

“My best quality? I would have to say it’s the ability to continue eating no matter how disgusting the conversation around me is.”

(It helps if you imagine Larry David’s voice for that line. If you need help, here’s me imitating him on Letterman last April….Cue it up to 3:50-5:03)

Oh yeah, and speaking of Trivial Pursuit, I neglected to mention Jon Hayman’s most enduring credit — the voice of the “Bubble Boy” on season two of “Seinfeld.”

I met Ken Ober around 1984....

…at a club in the Village called The Other End, which was The Bitter End and then was renamed The Bitter End. No, that’s wrong. I met him a couple of blocks over at a club called The Paper Moon, which became The Boston Comedy Club and was run by, of all people, Eddie Brill, a comic who has been doing the warm-up at the Late Show for the last dozen years. Ober was a nice guy, originally from Boston (The Paper Moon was started to give comics from Boston a place to work in New York.) and we bonded immediately over the Red Sox and Celtics and the fact that we were the same age. He was, like a lot of guys back then, an okay comic, but very winning onstage. A guy who clearly wanted to be something else, but for the time being, loved being a comic. This is not a judgment. And if it was, I would be making the same judgment about myself at the time. The other similarity between us is that we were involved with women who were better comics than us. I married mine. Kenny did not.

I might have done four shows with Kenny. Rarely saw him. He was mostly a Village guy. The Comedy Cellar, the Moon, the Other End, the Duplex. I worked primarily uptown, at Catch a Rising Star, where I was one of the house emcees (I replaced Bill Maher in 1982 when he killed on the Tonight Show, then moved to LA seemingly the next day), the Comic Strip and the Improv. I do remember one New Year’s Eve, maybe 1986, when there were at least eight of us crammed into Judy Orbach’s tiny apartment in the Village, playing Trivial Pursuit, smoking pot, drinking, and scream-laughing until 6 am. It was Judy (a wonderful singer), her boyfriend Chuck Montgomery (a guitar player at the Improv who later played the guy drinking at the bar when Madonna gets up and walks away in “Desperately Seeking Susan”), me, my eventual wife Adrianne Tolsch (the lead house emcee at Catch), Ober, Sue Kolinsky (the aforementioned better comic/girlfriend), Jon Hayman (one of the funniest offstage guys ever) and the then-broke Larry David.

Shortly after that, Larry and I go into a meeting at MTV to meet with some young haircut named Mike Dugan. He’s looking for writers for this game show he’s creating.  And he talks about how they’re going to throw shit at contestants when they answer incorrectly and have comics heckle them and pull their chairs through a wall when they’re eliminated and there’s going to be a younger sluttier version of Vanna White. And Ken Ober is going to be the host.

Well, we walk out of this meeting and I turn to Larry and say, “Are you kidding me? What a piece of shit. I know I got nothing going on, and I know they’re not interested in me, but I don’t think I’d go near that. And Ober? Ober? Good luck, man. I hope they’re paying him a lot of money.”

And Larry David, broke Larry David, Larry David take-a-girl-out-to-dinner-and-try- to-pay-with-a-coupon, said, “I think it’s a great idea. And Ober is perfect. This is going to be a big hit.”

Sometimes I am wrong, and sometimes I am galactically wrong. “Remote Control” became what it was, and Ken Ober became the guy he wanted to become. But remained the guy he was. I remember one episode when they had some giant white frat boy on and he answered some question right that he didn’t expect to and he awkwardly high-fived Colin Quinn. And Ober said, “Jim, you looked like Brad Lohaus with that high-five.” Brad Lohaus was the big doofy back-up center for the Celtics back then. I’m going to guess that was the last time Brad Lohaus was mentioned on MTV….

This will have to pass for my eulogy.

What do you say we plug somebody else?

If you love topical jokes about sports and you have The Twitter installed, please sup on my friend and colleague, Late Show co-head writer Eric Stangel. He can be reached at www.twitter.com/ericstangel . 

Okay, now back to shameless self-promotion....

The boys at Simon and Schuster are getting the paperback ready for this April. You need to turn in the inside blurb page six months ahead. Son of a gun, they found a nice review in Charleston, SC Post and Courier from last June I had not seen. Enjoy…. 

(By the way, the typos you found were fixed, Cathy….)

Right there, that is a gigantic difference between S&S and my old publisher, HarperCollins. There were three factual errors in the cloth edition of TIME WON’T LET ME. They went unchecked. Not thrilled, but it happens. The artist who did my cover found them. I made sure to make the changes and turn them in along with my blurb page way ahead of time. Well, the paperback comes out, no changes, no blurb page. Inexcusable. I got a lot of apologies, fine, and was assured everything would be fixed in the next printing. I wished they had stopped with the apologies. To infer my paperback would go back for a second printing was beyond disengenuous.

That happened in December, 2006. Glad I’ve let it go….