Shit Happens To Comedian Robert Schimmel
MARCH 27, 2008
LOS ANGELES (TNA) – Everyone’s heard of the Midas Touch, the myth surrounding eighth-century Phrygian King Midas who could, reportedly, turn everything he touched to gold.
Some of us, though, have the Midas Touch in reverse, where everything we touch turns to shit. That’s acclaimed stand-up comic Robert Schimmel in a nutshell and by his own admission.
“I’m completely fucked, so far as I can tell,” says the 58-year old comic, whose sexually-charged stand-up routines recently earned him a place in Comedy Central’s pantheon of 100 Greatest Comics. “If shit can happen to someone, it’s going to happen to me. I call it the ‘Schimmel fucking Touch.’ It all goes to shit.”
Robert Schimmel says, 'If shit's can happen to someone, it's going to happen to me.'
Here’s the quick rundown of empirical evidence: It ranges from minor chaos, like showing up to a gig with no pants in his garment bag and dropping his Blackberry in a public toilet while trying to send an important message to his wife, to more Job-like travails.
For example, in the mid-‘90s, Schimmel’s son, Derek, not quite a teenager, was felled by cancer. On the other hand, his HBO special, “Unprotected,” in which he contemplated sodomizing his teenaged daughter’s boyfriend to answer the boy’s curiosity about premarital sex and gulping over the American Heart Association’s warnings about post-heart attack intercourse, was a critical and commercial success.
Fox TV gave a 13-episode commitment to a sit-com called “Schimmel” and life was looking good. And then, alas, the Schimmel Touch kicked in once more. Schimmel was himself diagnosed with cancer -- Stage Three non-Hodgkins lymphoma -- and given six months to live.
“When you ask the doctor what happens if the chemo treatment doesn’t work and he goes, ‘Well, then, you’re fucked.’ And you go, ‘No, really…’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, really. There’s no cure. You’re fucked,’ you really see things differently,” says Schimmel.
“The only thing left for me to do at that point was laugh,” he says. “That’s all I could do.”
In “Cancer On $5 A Day: Chemo Not Included” (Da Capo Press), Schimmel recounts the harrowing, frequently gruesome journey from diagnosis to (uh, spoiler alert?) clean bill of health, while refusing to mince words or spare details of his medical crisis.
In the book, Schimmel refuses to skimp on anecdotes about chemo-induced puking, pubic balding, tools for achieving an erection during chemotherapy (that would be: pump, injection, or attachable rod), the rigors of walking to the mailbox each day, and lusting forlornly over all attending nurses. The results are devastatingly funny, ultimately healing.
“Cancer might have taken my hair and my TV show and my ability to have sex for eight months, but it couldn’t touch who I really am. It couldn’t touch my spirit,” says Schimmel. “And it couldn’t come near my sense of humor.” "When I was lying there in the hospital, feeling like I was going to die from the chemotherapy, I was looking at the women walking by, going, ‘I’d really like to fuck her.’"
Despite the so-called “Schimmel Touch,” the comedian believes he lives a blessed life, and that his surviving cancer is a rare opportunity to connect more deeply with audiences, whereas most comics are very content to “kill” with a joke. Against the wishes of his management, Schimmel’s act today deals, full frontal, with his health issues, concluding with a gut-wrenchingly candid slide show depicting the comedian in the lowest moments of his ordeal.
“If I can make a difference in somebody’s life, then what I went through isn’t for nothing. It’s almost like I’m getting even with what took my son and what screwed with me,” he says. “I feel empathetic with people going through it. They need to talk to somebody who’s been in those shoes.”
Far from having gone limp, though, Schimmel still has a hard-on for sexually energized guffaws, quick to recount the time he sought a zero-gravity orgasm, masturbating as a teenager on his parents’ diving board.
“At the right moment, I’m going to dive off and cum mid-air and see if it feels any different than when you’re sitting on the couch, or whatever. Now if you’re pissing, you can stop, but once you start cumming, you can’t stop that,” Schimmel says. “So I’m in the air, there’s jizz flying out of me, and my parents come out of the sliding glass door, their eyes pop out of their heads, and that’s the end of my life. I think that’s the MO of my whole act: I get busted for fucking everything.”
Schimmel’s no-holds-barred comedic styling is not everyone’s cup of tea, but he insists his act holds a point of connection even for audiences put off by his sexually explicit routine.
“I don’t talk about anything people haven’t tried, heard about, or fantasized about. The only difference is I’m talking about it publicly,” he says. “I can tell by the laughter that people aren’t laughing because I’m telling these far-fetched stories. They’re laughing because they’ve been there too.”
As an example, Schimmel cites a based-on-real-life joke that always gets a big laugh on the road.
“When I was lying there in the hospital, feeling like I was going to die from the chemotherapy, I was looking at the women walking by, going, ‘I’d really like to fuck her,’” he says. “’And I’d like to fuck her too.’ And I can’t do a fucking thing about it.
“Audiences eat that up because that’s not just me,” he says. “That’s every guy.”
One recent evening, a female audience member took issue with Schimmel’s onstage insistence that men and women are different. Schimmel took the challenge.
“She started yelling at me, ‘What makes you think we’re not like men?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m willing to end the show right now to go in the green room and fuck. Wanna meet me back there?’ And she said, ‘Shut up,’” Schimmel says. “And I said, ‘There we go.’ A guy would do it in two seconds without thinking about it.”
Schimmel, who is currently entertaining the possibility of a return to television, says the impulse to write a bucket list – a “things to do before I die” manifesto, a la the current Jack Nicholson-Morgan Freeman box office hit – never crossed his mind.
“I couldn’t even get to the fucking mailbox most days,” he admits. “Do I want to go on safari? Not really. Do I want to jump out of a plane? Probably not. It’d be nice to get my fucking cable bill.”
Besides, always lurking in the back of his mind is the damned Schimmel Touch.
“My wife and I just went to Hawaii for a few days and she said, ‘We could take a helicopter into an inactive volcano. It’d be so cool.’ And I said, ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ She said, ‘Well, it’s dormant,’” he recalls.
“‘Yeah. The way my shit works, it’s going to become active when we’re about 300 feet into the crater. Everybody’ll be going, ‘Oh, fuck,’ and I’ll be going, ‘Here we go again.’ It’s the Schimmel Touch.”
Hitting the road to promote “Cancer On $5 A Day” and playing more than three dozen live dates this year, Schimmel believes he understands the secret to success, at least as far as his own career is concerned.
“Human beings always want the taboo. It’s been like that since the Bible. Don’t eat that fucking piece of fruit. So of course you do. You ban books, people are going to read them. You tell people they can’t see ‘Last Temptation of Christ,’ there’s suddenly an urgency to go see it,” he says.
“The lesson I’ve learned: Forbidden fruit is always in season. People always want it. And I give it to them.”
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