Robert Schimmel: Confessional Stand-Up, Cancer, Howard Stern and a Comic’s Comic Legacy

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Featured: Robert Schimmel, Rodney Dangerfield, Howard Stern, Ralphie May, Brie Larson, Vicki Davis

What’s in This Episode

• Robert Schimmel’s confessional stand-up comedy style and personal life
• Schimmel’s son’s death from leukemia and cancer diagnosis
• Fox sitcom ‘Shimmel’ cancellation due to Schimmel’s stage three non-Hodgkins lymphoma diagnosis
• Schimmel’s 1986 HBO Young Comedian special appearance with Rodney Dangerfield endorsement
• Schimmel’s regular appearances on Howard Stern Show building loyal fanbase
• Schimmel’s death in 2010 car accident in Scottsdale, Arizona while awaiting liver transplant
• Deep dive series on early 2000s comedians who died young before YouTube and podcasting era

Questions Answered in This Episode

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Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain spelling and/or transcription errors.

Caloroga Shark Media. Hey there, I’m Johnny Mac, and we picked up a lot of new listeners this week. So what I’ve been doing on Saturday’s or deep dives on specific tomics, specific comedians. Last week I did Ralphie May. And my point here is I’m trying to highlight comedians from earlier this century who came along a little too early for modern YouTube or social media and podcasts, and these guys died young and would have been awesome.

One of them I would consider a friend Robert Shimmel, who I got to spend a decent amount of time with at serious exam early in my run there. So that’s what we’re doing today. A normal episode in the feed tomorrow. But today let’s talk about Robert Shimmel, who was fantastic and his life, his life story. If you made it up, you wouldn’t believe it.

There’s a thing that happens sometimes in stand up comedy where comedians life is so strange and so specifically pain that the material rights itself and the only question is where the comedian has the nerve and the craft to stand in front of a room and say it out loud. Most comedians who have access to that kind of material, find ways to soften it, keep something of a private, let the audience know it’s there without fully handing it over. Robert Schimmel was not most comedians. His son died of leukemia at eleven years old. Robert talked about it on stage.

Robert himself was diagnosed with stage three non Hodgkins lymphoma, and on the day the oncologist told him, in a room with his parents and his wife, he found the joke and the doctor’s explanation before it even left the office. I’m in my doctor’s office with my mom and dad. Mycologist comes in tells me that I have non Hodgkins lymphomi. He said, there’s Hopkins disease and non Hoskins and then he says, if you’re open minded, you might consider marijuana because it helps with the nausea and the appetite. And my parents are sitting there devastated with my diagnosis, and I’m thinking this is a dream come true.

I got a guy at Mayo clinic telling my parents I got smoke pot. Where were you? Twenty five years ago? Shimill married and divorce the same woman three times. During chemotherapy, he fell in love with his daughter’s best friend.

She came to visit him in the hospital and became his second wife. Robert was sixty years old and waiting for a liver transplant when his daughter was driving him through Scottsdale, Arizona. She swerved to avoid another car and the vehicle flipped. His son and daughter survived. Robert Schimmel died from the injuries ten days later, on September third, twenty ten.

It’s kind of like Sam Kinnison. If you had guessed how these people would go, you wouldn’t have guessed car accident. Chimmell had all kinds of cancer, and that it was a car is just crazy to me. I didn’t realize he was sixty. I thought he was younger.

Robert Schimmell turned every single piece of his life into colmy that made people laugh and feel and occasionally have to put their hand over their mouth because the laugh on the horror were arriving simultaneously. The actual skill was taking the most brutal and specific facts of one particular life and making them not just funny but generous, making an audience feel, by laughing at his pain, that their pain was survivable and laughable. Too. Robert shim Well, born in the Bronx, New York City in nineteen fifty, grew up there. His sister pushed him to do an open mic night.

How many times have we heard a version of that story Shimill did. It worked well enough that a club owner in LA offered him a regular spot. So he moved to LA and found that the club had burned down before he got there. That kind of bad luck where the universe appears to be personally invested in thwarting. You followed Robert Shimmell around for his entire life.

His big break came in nineteen eighty six when Rodney Dangerfield invited him to perform on the HBO Young Comedian special. There’s a guy. I don’t know where he’s from, and I don’t care. He really makes me laugh. All right, give it up for Robert Shimman.

Okay, Robert. Floyd, he gave a comedian. I used to work for the Drug Hotline. That’s a lot of fun. People call Real Stone to get to play with their heads.

Drug Hotline. I’m freaking out on LSD. Gee, I’m sorry the guy. Do you want to talk to? What was that?

Listen? You haven’t real scary hallucinations. Yeah, seeing like pigs eating your face. Now that you mention it, yes, you don’t worry. The spiders will kill them.

If you ever want to have fun with somebody that’s really stoned, all you gotta say is it me? Or is it getting hard to breathe? In? Here they go. Rodney Dangerfield’s taste was impeccable and his endorsement met something specific back in those days.

Appearing on that special put you in front of an industry that was paying close attention to who Rodney thought was worth watching. Shimmell made the most of it. He got some specials on Showtime Hardcore, in the Big Apple, Guilty is Charged, and became known what the industry calls a comics comic. That is high praise. That is the designation for someone who’s peers think is funnier than their public profiles.

Yes they should be, Shimill wrote for a Living Color he was on Howard Stern regularly, and then after two thousand and six, I think is the math there when Howard was up as serious that would bring Shimmel into the building, which is where I got to know him. Talking about that in a bit Shimmell was named stand Up of the Year at the American Comedy Awards. I remember those then. Fox Green lad a sitcom based on his life titled Shimmel whoa. Now you may feel a little pressure.

Yeah, on the roof of my mouth. Get it out. Let’s relax. Oh that’s beautiful. So who are you liking the playoffs?

What do you get the game on that thing? Doctor Rothman needs a consultation online. One that’s not what you think. Yeah, that’s what everybody says. Hey Phil, Oh yeah I can talk.

No he can’t. Ye, he’s very busy. Fell addrestment opportunity. I’m listening. Hmm, hold on a sick if you could buy boats online, would you ro just stick the phone up my ass and we can confidence.

His daughters were played by Vicki Davis and a young actress named Brie Larson. The pilot was shot, sets were built, marketing was being planned, and during the insurance physical for the production, doctors found stage three non Hodgkins lymphoma. Fox put the show on hiatus. The chemotherapy made production impossible. Fox eventually canceled the show.

So what did shim Will do? He put the cancer into the act. He talked about losing his hair, about the specific indignities of chemotherapy, about falling in love with his daughter’s best friend in a hospital because she visited and he was lying there with nothing to dow but noticed she was kind and funny and beautiful. When he married her, she was four years older than his daughter Jessica. Talked about all that on stage, including how weird it was and how much explain it all required.

The Howard Stern part is super important. Howard was a dominant force back in the early two thousands. Shimill worked on the show because he wasn’t trying to be transgressive. Stern show rewarded the thing Robert Shimmill was doing, which was telling the complete truth about his own life without editing on Stern. The more specific and the more honest and the more uncomfortable, the better.

And Robert Shimmell had a specific, honest, uncomfortable set of material than almost anyone Howard Stern ever put on the air. Because Robert’s actual life kept generating it faster than he could use it, their audiences overlapped in the years of regular Howard Stern appearances built Robert Shimmel a following that was unusually loyal, unusually mail, and unusually invested in his specific brand of confessional comedy. So I got too serious to run the comedy channels two thousand and four or so. And in those early days, Robert would come up frequently and come over and do the Raw Dog Channel. And I remember one particular story with Robert.

So at serious, a lot of stars would come through and, like any place, sometimes a lobby, because you know, I’m not gonna stand in the lobby waiting for Robert Shimmel to show up, So you know, you take the elevator up and you tell the receptionists you’re here to see John mcdermotter, whoever you’re here to see. So one day in the lobby, Robert Schimmel meets David Brenner. Younger listeners may not know. David Brenner, a great comedian who had his peak fame in the seventies and eighties and also a regular Howard Stern guest. Was also one of the primary guest hosts for The Tonight Show in the Johnny Carson era before Joan Rivers kind of took that gig anyway, So I’m there and my coworker Phil is there and Shimmel and David Brenner start swapping stories and we go, hold on, can we do this on the air?

And they both agree to come back the next day and swap stories. So we put them in the fish Bowl Studio, which is the big studio in the lobby which has all glass and that’s where you would do show off shows. And we set up two like old timey stand mics like what Bob Hope would use in the forties, and two stools, and Shimmel and David Brenner did an hour of radio just swapping stories. Now, when I left over a decade ago, the tape still existed. I hope whoever took over my office didn’t lose that tape because it was fantastic.

Let me see if that’s online. I don’t think it is, because that was pre like YouTube, Ron Dog Shimmel Brinner. No, there’s no video. I don’t even see the press release, but you can see this happened. I’m on Howard Stern dot com and on June seventeenth, two thousand and five, they posted Robert Shimmel stop by tosing in for the news, et cetera, et cetera.

Shimill said he was there to do a show with David Brinner. So it did happen in two thousand and five. You know what, I came up here? I forgot I did this apparently on February twenty sixth, twenty twenty two, I did an episode called Robert Shimmel’s Story. So when you’re done here, go back and listen to that one.

See what version of the story I told Maybe I’ll just tag that onto the Why don’t you just do that, John, I will tag that onto the end of this episode and save everybody some work since I obviously have the audio. Oh that’s funny. Did we learn doing this show? Where were we? Oh?

Yeah? So yeah. So Shimmel and Berner came up and swapped stories for an hour and it was fan fantastic. Shimmell’s a really good guy, always like super nice to work with, Like I like working with a pro who has like no attitude and it’s just there to do the work and like just no airs about him. And Robert Shimmel was a great guy.

His specials Unprotected in nineteen ninety nine. Life since then in two thousand and eight, Shimmel since he’d been gone in two thousand and nine. Are all documentaries of his actual life. He wrote a memoir called Cancer on five Dollars a Day and in parentheses chemo not included. That got him onto NPR’s Fresh Air.

Comedy Central named him one of the one hundred greatest stand up comedians of all time. We’ll have to revisit that list every now and then, but sure, why not? That puts Robert in a group of names that most people can recite from memory, and in a group of names that should come up more often than they do. The reason he comes up less often is the same reason and they were off he May conversation goes the same way. There is a specific kind of legacy that the comedy industry is better preserving than others.

The comedian who had the hit sitcom gets remembered through the sitcom. The comedian who with the viral special gets remembered through the algorithm. The comedian whose career was built on live rooms Robert Shimmel, Ralphie May and radio appearances and a confessional act. That comedian’s legacy depends on people actively arguing for it. There’s a clip of Shimmel and Conan from the nineties that gets passed around occasionally, and then people who find it for the first time say some version the same thing, which is why didn’t I know about this guy?

My next yes HBO special Unprotected, premieres this Saturday at ten o’clock PM. Please welcome a very funny guy, one of our favorites, Robert Shimmel. Thank you, thank you very much. My wife and I just had a brand new baby, and oh thanks, thank you. I’m very excited because for the whole pregnancy she didn’t want to have sex.

I mean every time I wanted to try it, and we’re in bed, you know, She’s like, well, I don’t feel attractive. I said, believe it or not, my penis has real poor vision. Actually he’s legally blind. Only women think. Like that, not guys.

I mean really, I mean I got with her and I go, come on, honey, you think tonight, And she goes, I’m too fat. What guy would be like that if your wife said, hey, tonight, you think you want to do it? Nah, I’m too fat to do it, honey. So I’m laying in bed with her, you know, I’m on the road a lot performing and she said she said, you know, can I ask you something? She said, you know, you’ve been on the road for like three weeks.

She said, have you been taking care of yourself? I said, yeah, I’m masturbated a couple of times. She said masturbate. I’m talking about eating right and exercising. Why is any more famous?

What happened? What happened is Robert Shimill never got the sitcom. Robert Shimmell. I would call him a friend. Again.

We weren’t best friends, but like good guy to work with. And here let me dust off that other episode from how many years ago? Now, I can’t do math four years ago? And let’s see what Johnny Mac said back in twenty twenty two. Here’s past me and I’ll see you tomorrow.

With a normal episode, Today’s episode is going to be a lot naughtier than usual. I won’t use any particularly sweary words, but the topics are going to be quite adult. So if you listen to the podcast on a daily business would say children or a nun or your mom, Why don’t you bail? On today’s episode, I’m going to talk about Robert George Shimmel, one of my favorite comedians and someone I knew personally. There’s a fantastic interview and a website called mister Media that I’m going to pick at.

I’ll do a lot from that on the back end, but a quick story up top here. Robert told mister Media. I went to go see Rodney Dangerfield in Vegas and my mom and dad were there, and I want him to my parents to meet Rodney because I thought, you know what, They’re gonna meet Rodney and they think he’s really funny. They’ve seen him on Ed Sullivan, on Tonight’s Show and on Mike Douglas, and they’re gonna really believe that I’m in show business for real. So we go to see a show.

My dad’s a real early bird. He goes to bed at like nine at night. So I go up to the dressing room with just my mom and I knock on the door and Rodney and where I’m not making this up. Rodney opens the door. He’s wearing a silk robe that has playing cards on it, with his stuff hanging out, no underwear just out of the crack of his robe.

He had a joint in one hand and a Miller light in the other, and he said, hey, you got to be Bob’s mom. I’m like, you gotta be kidding me. That’s not what I wanted my mom to see. And he started hitting on my mom. He said, where’s your husband?

She said, oh, he went to bed. Rodney goes, what are you doing later? Baby? From The Observer in nineteen ninety nine, Robert Schimmel was remembering the day that Barry Diller had resigned from twentieth Century Fox back in nineteen ninety two. A lot of set up there, But this will make sense to you, Robert said.

On that night, I did a big industry showcase in La, where you go in front of everybody, ABC, CBS, NBC, Disney, Sony, Warner, Fox, and my opening line was, I have such bad timing in this business. I blew Barry Diller last night. My agent came over to me and said, are you out of your effing mind? Shimo says, why. The agent says, because the guy can make a phone call and I won’t even be in show business anymore.

Blow someone else. If Dielor finds out, he’s gonna go nuts. Shimmel said, why would he go nuts? I’m blowing him at that sign. Back in ninety ninety then a forty nine year old Robert Shimmel was described as the guy where people go, hey, come here, you gotta hear this, and with the book said yeah, but where’s he going with that kind of material.

Shimmel, a man with a shaved head, cool suit and eyes that look like they’re channeling the collective disbelief of his native Bronx, told jokes that often work like defibllerator battles. When his wife wonders if Robert Shimmel is suffering from premature ejaculation, he replies, does it look like I’m suffering? Those aren’t tears on your belly? After getting nitrous oxide from his deaentist, mister Shimmel hears him say Robert, you’re gonna feel a little prick in your mouth, and Shimal says, I’m not that messed up yet. From that observer piece, Shimmel has a lot of heavyweight fans in the comedy business.

He’s been on Conan six times in two years. Steve Martin wrote the liner notes to Shimmel CD. If you buy the CD, I can get this car. Howard Stern, the comedian, on a number of times when Shimmell was on Stern around this time, he talked about the allergic reaction he had to a spermicide that his wife was using. He described it as like having intercourse with a calzone.

The observer continues. If actor Jason Alexander was not a fan before the October first Friars Club roost of Jerry Stiller, he must be one now. Alexander dies spit take. During Shimmel’s set, Shimmell had started off by saying mister Stiller had played Angela Lansbury’s sea word in murder, she wrote. Shimal then stopped and quickly corrected himself by saying he meant to say cousin.

Shimill said, Jason Alexander’s lawyer called me and told me that Jason had called him after the roast and said I had made him use his asthma spray. Yet, even though Shimmel killed, some even felt he should have closed the roast. His entire performance was cut out of the hour long version of the roast that aired on Comedy Central a few weeks later. Shimmell said he didn’t find this out until he had both of his parents over to watch the show. It’s a bizarre thing to be treated like that, he was cut because of the time restraints that.

Shimmel said, that’s the worst thing that happens to me. Then I’m in pretty good shape. Shimmell then went somewhere else in the interview. He says, the next time you go to a drug store, you gotta look at this on the box of the fleet enema. This shows you how stupid they think we really are.

It says caution in big broad letters, remove the orange tip off the bottle before inserting into the rectum, which means that somebody actually stuck that up their button, squeezed the bottle and shot the cap up into their spleen and had to go to the emergency room. Then Shimmell fired off a series of discussions he swore he’d had with celebrities. Shimmel said, I went up to Jane Fonda. I met her at some party with Ted Turner. I walked over her and said, Ms Fonda, I don’t want to bother you, but I just want to say that my wife’s favorite movie is Fried Green Tomatoes.

She said, I wasn’t in that. I said, I know, but that’s our favorite movie. She looked at me like, what is your problem. I love doing stuff like that because celebrities, when you mess with them like that, you’re always expecting to suck up, and when you don’t do it, they don’t know how to react. He talked about a time he was sitting at a table with Milton Burrell, Caesar Romero, and another actor who had play I Had a Doctor on a nineteen sixty sitcom.

The actor who played the doctor was with a young man who he introduced as his ward. Shimmel said, Ward, what are you, Bruce Wayne? Your ward? You mean the kid you’re having sex with? Anyone else here?

Have award? Tonight? At the awards dinner, they were sitting with Joseph Cotton, who won an award for Citizen Kane, pretty famous movie. Cotton comes by and Shimal says, mister Cotton, I know tonight’s your night, but I just want to tell you I’ve seen Citizen Kane like thirty five times and I don’t get it. The whole thing was about a sled man.

You’re lucky you made that movie then, because I’ll tell you today that crap wouldn’t fly. There’s no special effects, and it turns out to be a sled At the end, nobody’s getting laid I got to know Robert a little bit. He would come up too serious a lot in the early days of my run and there running Serious XM comedy. Really really nice guy. When he wasn’t performing, he was pretty low key, but you’d have a conversation with him, and in his natural delivery, he would just say things that were jokes and would take a second to react to, like, wait, did you just say the most absurd thing.

In two thousand and eight, he spoke to Terry Gross on NBR. He describes how he viewed the cancer. He said, it’s like Robert Schimmel, the person whoever’s in my head that part doesn’t have cancer, and it’s like I’m trapped in a body that’s betraying me. And I don’t feel sick in my head. You know, you don’t feel like you’re dying.

You don’t even look bad when you have cancer. It’s the treatment that makes you look bad. And I feel like my body’s the Titanic and it’s going down and I’m the captain of the ship and it’s gonna take me down with it. You can’t switch to another body. So back to that fantastic interview, Robert Shimmel did with mister Media.

Still on the topic of cancer, Robert said, there’s no way it could not be funny when you go to the doctor and he says you have open source in your mouth and down your throat, because that’s what happens with chemotherapy. That’s to avoid any kind of oral anal contact. And I’m thinking, first you tell me I have cancer, and now I can’t kiss anybody’s ass. When’s the punishment gonna stop? What did he think I was gonna be doing.

I could barely eat jello. You’re not supposed to have sex when you’re in chemotherapy because the chemotherapy in you comes out in all your bodily fluids. So actually it’s all that if I had a bathroom that I could use that my wife and daughters didn’t use, that would be the way to do it, because sometimes guys be on the seat and the girl sits on it, and if any of that gets in them, it could be dangerous.

And then he said you could take care of yourself.

Robert ads, well, it’s really hard to lay in bed and pray to God and say please let me get through this, and then be taking care of yourself in the same bed. Looking up the same ceiling. It’s impossible, just really is. And I prayed and I had a really hard time doing it. I’ll tell you why.

I think I’m more spiritual than religious. I’m laying in bed asking God to get me through this, and it felt like I had a friend. I hadn’t talked to him ten years. Now the blue, I’m calling him and ask him to lend me a thousand dollars. I don’t pray all the time, and here I am asking for the biggest thing you could ask for, which is not to die.

But I prayed to everybody. I pray to Buddha, pray to Jesus. If there’d been a Gi Joe in the room, I would have prayed to him anything and everything to get me through it. There’s a chaplain in the hospital. They do their rounds every day.

When the guy came in for the first time, he said, Hi, I’m the chaplain to you Christian. I said, no, I’m Jewish. He said, well, I’m sorry that I bothered you. And I said, where are you going? I don’t want you to leave.

He said, do you want to pray with me? I said yeah, let’s go. He said okay, but I’m going to be praying to Jesus, and I said, I’m going to be right there with you. I don’t want to die and get up there and have Jesus at the gate going you where do you think you’re going? I watched George Carlin talk completely in the opposite direction about religion, and it floors me.

He makes me laugh so much when he came out with the book When will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops or whatever it’s called. I bought it. I was laughing out loud reading it on an airplane, and the next radio show I did, I talked about how funny the book was. I get home, Carlin calls me and he goes, are you plugging my book on the radio? Yeah?

He said why? I said, it’s ef hysterical. He said, Shimmel, why would you buy my book? All you have to do is ask me and I’d give it to you. I said, I’m not going to ask you to give me your book.

I was on the road and I wanted to get it. Then like two hours later, a messenger knocked on my door and handed me a package. I opened it up. It was the same book from Carlin he had sent it over inside it says, Hey, Shimmel, go f yourself George Carlin, and I’ll finish up with a great story, as told by Robert Shimmel. I’m walking down Broadway.

Jackie Mason comes out of the State Deli. He’s with two friends. They’re walking up Broadway and the two friends stop and they’re talking to somebody else, and Jackie sees me, I’m completely bald. I have a little bit of hair under my lip, no eyebrows, no eyelashes, I’m wearing a baseball hat. Jackie Mason comes over and goes, oh my god, what happened to you?

He said, I just finished chemo therapy. And he said, cheme with therapy? He had cancer? What kind of you have? His two friends walk over and Jackie Mason says, I want you to meet a real funny guy, Howie Mandel.

He thought I was Howie Mandel. And his friend says, he doesn’t look like Howie Mandel. Jackie Mason says, of course, he doesn’t look like Howie Mandel. He just finished chemo therapy. He lost a lot of weight.

And Jackie says to me, what are you doing in town? Well, I’m doing Conan O’Brien tomorrow. Are you busy tonight? No, how’d you like to have dinner with me? At two intelligent comics have a nice dinner and a conversation together.

Shimill said, all right, where are you staying at the Parker Meridian. Mason asked under what name? I said, Robert Shimmel. He said, Robert Shimmel. How do you come up with that?

I said, that’s my real name. Jackie Mason said, Howie Mandel’s your stage name, and he felt so bad for Howie. I did done have the balls to tell him that I wasn’t him. He did go through with the dinner, and Jackie Mason starts telling people that Howie Mandel went through chemotherapy. Like a month later, I’m up in Montreal for the comedy Festival.

I’m checking into the Delta Hotel. That’s where everybody stays. I’ve stayed there, that is true. And the first person I run into the lobby is Howie Mandel and he comes over to me and says, so, how am I doing? Robert Shimmel one of the greats.

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