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

NEW YORK

Copyright © 2006 Bob Newhart

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher. For information address Hyperion, 77 West 66th Street, New York, New York 10023-6298.

ISBN: 978-1-4013-0246-7

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION: Don’t Judge My Book By Its Title

CHAPTER ONE: Comedians See Life Through a Different Lens

CHAPTER TWO: Growing Up in the Windy City

CHAPTER THREE: I Almost Had a Real Career

CHAPTER FOUR: Part-time Jobs That Sustained Me

CHAPTER FIVE: The Funniest Guy on the Corner

CHAPTER SIX: Dying Onstage Isn’t That Painful

CHAPTER SEVEN: You Can Get Out of This

CHAPTER EIGHT: They Should’ve Pulled My Psychologist’s License

CHAPTER NINE: The Lubitsch Touch: My Days on the Big Screen

CHAPTER TEN: Smoking and Drinking

CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Science of Humor

CHAPTER TWELVE: You Can Have My Frequent-Flier Miles

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Let’s Take a Break for Some Golf

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Famous People I’ve Met (Including Don Rickles)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: People I Wish I’d Known

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: I Don’t Know How to End This

Acknowledgments

To Ginnie, my wife of forty-three years, and to my children, Rob, Tim, Jennifer, and Courtney, along with Ginnie for putting up with the vagaries of the life of a stand-up comedian, and to my grandchildren, Taylor, Maddie, Bella, Will, Caroline, Timothy, and Griffin, for all the joy and laughter they give.

To Josh Young, who gave structure to my “Stew,” and Will Schwalbe, my editor at Hyperion, for his dogged determination to get a book out of me.

INTRODUCTION

Don’t Judge My Book By Its Title

I realize that most people skip the introduction and the acknowledgments. If you are one of these people, then you’re not even reading this. But if you are, I want to share with you the alternative titles I had for this book.

I was told by my editor that titles sell books, so the first title I proposed was
A Slimmer You in Three Weeks.
That would’ve been an instant best seller because diet books sell like crazy. But my publisher’s weak-kneed lawyers refused to approve the title because there were no diet tips in my book.

My next title was
Finding Mr. Right
, because dating books are also very popular. Again, the attorneys nixed this idea, this time on the grounds that the book contained no dating tips. The attorneys suggested that I find something related to comedy in some way since I am a comedian.

I came up with
The Fat Lady in the Pink Dress Wants a White Wine.
This comes from the parties we’ve had at our house when my kids helped serve the grownups. I’d ask my son to go and see what Mrs. Petersen would like to drink. He’d come back and say, “The fat lady in the pink dress wants a white wine.”

Besides being a catchy phrase, I thought this would make a nice title for a book written by a comedian. When you mature, you realize you can’t say something like that in polite company. But comedians don’t mature. For some reason, comedians are still children. The social skills somehow never reach us, so we say exactly what we think without weighing the results. But as a title, it sounded too much like a book written by a bartender.

You Didn’t Let Me Finish
was a candidate because it neatly sums up Hollywood. I first heard the phrase in a story about Harry Crane, a comedy writer who worked for Dean Martin. Harry was sent by Greg Garrison, who produced
The Dean Martin Show
, to check out a lounge singer that they were thinking of booking on the show. The singer, it turned out, was Mama Cass, back when she was known as Cass Elliot.

Harry completed the trip and reported back to Garrison: “This immense woman walks out on the stage in a muumuu and it’s stained,” he said. “It’s not even clean. She had perspiration dripping down both armpits, and she cannot sing. She can’t carry a note.”

Garrison interrupted, “Dean loves her.” To which Crane said, “You didn’t let me finish.”

Deciding that was too Hollywood, I toyed with
Which One Would You Like to Hear Again?
This phrase was my sole line of defense as a naïve and neophyte stand-up.

It was my very first stand-up gig, and I was the opening act at the Tidelands Motor Inn in Houston. I performed the only three routines I had, “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue,” “The Driving Instructor,” and “The Cruise of the U.S.S.
Codfish
.” The audience was particularly responsive one night, and they gave me a lengthy applause. As I left the stage, I walked by the maître d’.

“Go back out there. They want to hear more,” he said.

“That’s all I have,” I explained.

I reluctantly walked back onstage. The applause died down, and I asked them, “Which one would you like to hear again?”

In considering phrases that have stuck with me over the years, I recalled a story that Art Linkletter used to tell in his routine on how kids say the darnedest things. In one bit, there was a boy who was off by himself brooding in a corner while all the other kids were laughing and enjoying themselves. Art went over to the boy and attempted to comfort him.

“Is something wrong?” Art asked.

“Yeah, my dog died this week,” the boy said.

“Well,” Art said, “your dog went to heaven and when you go to heaven you will see your dog again so don’t be too unhappy.”

The boy looked at Art quizzically. “What does God want with a dead dog?” Another example of the logic of children.

And then there’s the title I settled on:
I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This!

That’s from a gag about a guy who is having an affair with his boss’s wife. They are making mad, passionate love, and she says, “Kiss me! Kiss me!”

He looks at her very seriously and replies, “I shouldn’t even be doing
this
!”

That disproportionate side of life ties nicely to my career. I became a comedian by way of accounting. I recorded several comedy albums, three with
The Button-Down Mind
in the title. I starred in several television series, all of which have my name in the title:
The Bob Newhart Show
,
The Bob Newhart Show
(again),
Newhart
,
Bob
, and
George and Leo
(a bit of a stretch but it uses my given name, George Robert Newhart). I acted in several movies that didn’t have my name in the title, including
Hell Is for Heroes
,
Catch-22
, and
Elf
, and I guest starred on
ER
and
Desperate Housewives
. All the while, I’ve been married to the same woman for forty-three years, had four children, played countless rounds of golf, and met some very interesting people.

However, it didn’t take me long to realize that I couldn’t write a traditional memoir. A memoir is a weighty tome. Former presidents and the Marquis de Sade write memoirs; Bob Newhart doesn’t write a memoir. So I proposed that we call it a roman à clef and leave it at that. Again, my weak-kneed lawyers objected.

But the biggest problem of all came when I was halfway finished with the book. I began to get nervous because deep in the process of writing a book about myself, I didn’t have one of the primary ingredients. I wasn’t feeling cathartic. I’ve read enough of these kinds of books and seen enough authors promote them on talk shows to know that they are always cathartic. So I sent the book to a specialist in recognizing catharsis and asked him if what he read could be considered cathartic.

“No, it’s self-pity,” he said. “But I like the title.”

CHAPTER ONE

Comedians See Life
Through a Different Lens

Most comedians are committable. People say I’m the most normal of all comedians—and I’m still certifiable.

Larry Gelbart once said that comedians look at life through a different lens. Comedians by nature are observers of people. Even if a comedian is on vacation and he sees something funny on the beach, he’ll say to himself, “I have to remember that because I may need it someday.”

When I was a child, I remember watching a garbage truck with the name “Neal Norlag” on the side. Subconsciously, I filed the name away for later use.
Remember Neal Norlag.

Comedians are innately programmed to pick up oddities like mispronounced words, upside-down books on a shelf, and generally undetectable mistakes in everyday life.

Recently, for instance, I’ve noticed on the cable news channels that the guy who writes the news crawl along the bottom of the screen can’t type. Clearly, there is no one watching him and saying, “Gary, what’s wrong with you?”

These aren’t glaring errors, but they certainly stand out to me. One day last summer, a typically misspelled news bulletin announced: “In the Mideast, peace talks are underway between the Palestinians and the Israelis and there is the possibility that Egypt may play a roll”—as opposed to a “role.”

Stranger still, I came across a solemn news item in the newspaper about an assassination in Afghanistan. A minister was killed. I read further. It turned out that he was the minister of tourism. Now, how busy can Afghanistan’s minister of tourism possibly be? You don’t picture a young honeymooning couple saying, “Enough of the bickering. Let’s flip a coin: It’s Paris or Kabul.”