I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This: And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny (7 page)

After he had been working for me for about a month, I hired a young woman. I was training her, explaining that we filed the claims by the last four digits of the claimant’s Social Security number. I handed her some files and told her to get started.

The hungover musician walked over to me and asked what I had just said to the new employee.

“I told her how to file, by the last four numbers of the people’s Social Security numbers,” I said.

He furrowed his brow. “I thought you said to file these by the
first
four numbers.”

I shook my head at the realization that every one of his claims needed to be refiled.

Man, I’d love to know what he’s doing now.

But the real reason the Illinois State Compensation Board wanted to keep me on was because most people who had held my job quickly figured out the game. I worked five days a week and earned sixty dollars, while the unemployed were collecting fifty-five—and they only had to come in one day a week. I admit it took six weeks, but it finally dawned on me that I was coming in four extra days a week for a measly five extra bucks.

A potential career break came when Dan Sorkin called me one day and asked me what I was doing on Saturday. Dan was a popular Chicago disk jockey who liked my routines, and I had appeared on his radio show several times. Like Jean Shepherd in New York and Don Sherwood in San Francisco, Dan was the voice of Chicago, so when he called you listened.

Dan told me to meet him at Meigs Field, a small downtown airport on Lake Michigan that is no longer there. A radio station in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was looking for a new disk jockey. We were going to fly there in his single-engine Bonanza plane and get me that job.

To bolster my credentials, Dan had told the Grand Rapids station that I was living in Texas but wanted to move back to Chicago. If the station wanted to hire me, it was going to cost them a lot of money because I really wanted to be in Chicago.

We boarded Dan’s single-engine Bonanza, and he asked if I wanted to fly across the lake or along the shoreline, down around Gary, Indiana. No-brainer: the shoreline.

When we arrived in Grand Rapids, the station managers began chatting up Dan, the legendary voice of Chicago. They gave Bob Newhart, who incidentally had no experience in radio broadcasting, a commercial to read and sent me to a sound booth.

Thankfully, they were all so interested in what Dan had to say that they didn’t pay any attention to me. I started to read the commercial copy, but I was so nervous that I kept mispronouncing the words. I waved from inside the booth to get their attention so I could do a retake—all to no avail. Dan was regaling them with stories.

After a bout of nervous laughter, I finally finished the copy. Emerging from the booth, I told Dan that we had better be getting back to Chicago. I didn’t want them to hear my laughingly laughable demo tape.

On the return trip, 2,200 feet over the steel plant smokestacks of Gary, Indiana, Dan turned around and informed me, “The engine is going to cut out, but don’t let that bother you.”

I quickly forgot about the botched audition. “What?”

“The engine is going to stop because I have to switch fuel tanks,” he said, adding reassuringly, “but it will start up again.”

Sure enough, the propeller stopped spinning. We glided for a few minutes and, thank god, it soon whirred back to life. I closed my eyes for the rest of the flight.

As we prepared to land at Meigs Field, Dan yelled out, “Look at that view of the skyline! Isn’t it incredible?” I kept my eyes sealed shut. I didn’t care if I ever saw another airplane in my life.

Needless to say, we never heard from Grand Rapids.

I wrote most of my material in a vacuum, having no idea when, where, or if the routines would ever be performed. My best routines had a catalyst that I often discovered by chance. The idea for my routine “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue” originated from a book titled
The Hidden Persuaders
, which talked about the danger of PR men creating images in presidential campaigns to the degree that you were voting for a personality rather than a leader’s ideology.

In the piece, I imagined a telephone conversation between the press agent and Abraham Lincoln just before Gettysburg, that I think, in part, would have gone something like this:

Hi Abe, sweetheart. How are you, kid? How’s Gettysburg? … Sort of a drag, heh? Well, Abe you know them small Pennsylvania towns, you seen one you seen ’em all. … Listen Abe, I got the note. What’s the problem?. … You’re thinking of shaving it off? Abe, don’t you see that’s part of the image with the shawl and the stovepipe hat and the string tie? … You don’t have the shawl. Where’s the shawl?. … You left it in Washington. What are you wearing, Abe? … A sort of cardigan? Abe, don’t you see that doesn’t fit with the string tie and the beard? Abe, would you leave the beard on and get the shawl?

Now, what’s this about Grant? … You’re getting a lot of complaints about Grant’s drinking. Abe, to be perfectly honest with you, I don’t see the problem. You knew he was a lush when you appointed him. … Your gag writers … You want to come back with something funny? Maybe an anecdote about a town drunk. I can’t promise anything. I’ll get them working on it.

Abe, you got the speech. … Abe, you haven’t changed the speech, have you? … Oh, Abe. What do ya change the speeches for? … A couple of minor changes? … I’ll bet. All right, what are they? … You what? You typed it! Abe, how many times have we told you—on the backs of envelopes. … I understand it’s harder to read that way, but it looks like you wrote it on the train coming down. Abe, could you do this: Could you memorize it and then put it on the back of an envelope? We are getting a lot of play in the press on that. How are the envelopes holding out? … You could stand another box.

What else, Abe? … You changed “four score and seven” to “eighty-seven”? … I understand it means the same thing, Abe. That’s meant to be a grabber. … Abe, we test-marketed that in Erie and they went out of their minds. … Well, Abe, it’s sort of like Marc Antony saying, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, I’ve got something I want to tell you.” You see what I mean, Abe? … What else? … “People will little note nor long remember” … Abe, what could possibly be wrong with that? … They’ll remember it. It’s the old humble bit. You can’t say, “It’s a great speech, I think everybody is going to remember it.” You’ll come off as a braggart, don’t you see that? … Abe, do the speech the way Charlie wrote it, would ya? The inaugural swung, didn’t it?

Abe, hold on. They’ve come up with a thing on Grant. … Good, ah beautiful! They got a beautiful squelch on Grant. You tell them you are going to find out what brand he drinks and then send bottles to all his generals.

Saturday night … I’m going to be in New York Saturday night. … A bridge party at the White House … Listen, Abe, why don’t you take in a play?

When I wrote the routine, I was living at home. I gave the routine to my mother to read.

“Do men really call each other ‘sweetheart’?” she asked me.

“Yes, Mom, in advertising they do.”

I performed the routine on Dan Sorkin’s show, which led to a phone call from the producer of the local Emmy Awards, not the national one. He was looking for performers for the show, which would be held in the lobby of the Tribune Building. It turned out that IATSE, the film technicans’ union, was on strike, so they couldn’t televise the show. He asked me if I would perform, and I gladly accepted.

After I did “Abe Lincoln,” a local anchorman named Alex Dryer took the stage and declared, “What do you mean there’s no talent in Chicago?”

As a result of the high praise for my appearance at the non-televised, local Emmy Awards, I was hired in 1958 to appear on a man-in-the-street program on WBKB, the ABC affiliate in Chicago. The show was hosted by Tom Mercein, a local announcer. Tom’s son Chuck later played for the Giants, which is neither here nor there, but I thought I would mention it.

My role on the show was to supply the comic relief. Tom was the roving reporter who would walk up to me and interview me. I played a different person every day, and many of the characters were drawn from my unsold radio routines.

One day I was Dr. Arnold Currothers, a physician and surgeon. Tom buttonholed Dr. Currothers, who discussed his surgery of the previous evening.

“I got a call about ten-thirty
P.M
. from one of my patients for an emergency appendectomy,” Dr. Currothers told him. “I got down to the hospital around eleven o’clock, and we had the patient on the operating table around eleven-thirty. And then I opened the patient up around twelve o’clock. Then we ran into complications with the operation … and I closed the patient up at, uh, I closed the, uh, I’m sure I closed the patient up …”

With that, the good doctor took off running back to the hospital.

I had to be at the studio at 7:30
A.M
., and the show aired from 8:30 to 9:00, opposite the
Today
show and
Captain Kangaroo
. Given the competition and lack of viewer response, we weren’t sure the signal was even getting out of the building. Still, I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. I was making $300 a week, and I was finished working at 10
A.M
. I’d catch the bus home, grab my golf clubs, and be on the first tee by noon. I couldn’t imagine life would ever get any better than that.

Occasionally I would stay a few extra hours to be an in-studio guest. For these segments, I would write the questions for Tom and he would interview me, in character.

Once I was a baseball player, and not a very good one. I held the record for having lived in the most cities in one year because I was constantly being traded.

“What’s the longest you’ve lived in one city?” Tom asked.

“Two weeks,” I replied. “It was really great. We put the kids in the school and led a normal life.”

The show aired for sixteen weeks, during which time we received a grand total of one piece of mail. Actually, it was a postcard, referring to an old routine that Ed Gallagher and I had done where a talk-show host interviews me as Patrick M. Doyle, noted lecturer and author of nineteen books.

Host: “That’s a tremendous output. It just shows your versatility and your tremendous profundity, wouldn’t you say?”

Doyle: “Well, no, I wouldn’t say it, but I’d like for you to say it.”

Host: “Tell me, Pat. Are all these books in English? What I mean by that is, are there any foreign printings?”

Doyle: “Well, just one book. It’s printed in English and French.”

Host: “Really. What’s the name of that?”

Doyle: “It was an English-French dictionary.”

Later in the interview, the host asks me to pick a favorite book from the nineteen, all of which, he points out, have a humaninterest element, give a tug at the heartstrings, and have happy endings so you are glad that you read them.

I tell the host that one of my favorites was about Court, a cocker spaniel who was owned by the Addams family in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The family was very protective of the dog, and they never let him outside because he was so small. But he happened to find a board loose in the fence one day, and he crawled out into the alley. The mother was panicked when she couldn’t find the dog. Then the kids came home, and they were hysterical that their puppy was missing.

As Patrick M. Doyle tells the story, he becomes so overcome with emotion at the thought of the lost dog that he breaks down crying. He’s wailing so uncontrollably that his speech turns into gibberish. As the show fades out, the host pleads that the time is growing short and begs Doyle to tell him if they ever found the dog.

In the postcard—the sole piece of mail received by
The Tom Mercein Show
—a viewer wondered where he could buy the Patrick M. Doyle book with the story of Court in it so he could find out what happened to the dog.

These were lean years financially, but I avoided starvation by living in my parents’ house until I was twenty-nine. One year, I asked a friend named John Kelly if someone at his accounting firm could figure my income tax. John gave my paperwork to a colleague at the firm. That year I had earned all of $1,100.

His colleague took one look and said to John, “Does this guy have a paper route?”

“No,” John said, “I went to college with him.”

The fact of the matter was that my friends were married, buying houses and cars, preparing to start families, and I wasn’t really doing anything. There was a point at which I thought, “You have really majorly screwed up. Look at what you have done to your life.”

My parents had no idea what I was doing, but I did. I was trying to find a way to break into the comedy business. Until that happened, each morning I would pore over the want ads in the
Chicago Tribune
, looking for yet another part-time job.

One typical morning, I came across a full-page ad for driving instructors. It occurred to me that I had seen this ad the day before and the day before that. The ad was what is called a “standing ad,” meaning that it runs every day. Presumably, that meant there was a continuous need for that position due to constant turnover.

I began to wonder why there was an insatiable need for driving instructors. This led me to imagine what an average day was like for driving instructors. Then I exaggerated it a little bit and what I arrived at was: a group of men who go to work every day and never know for sure if they’ll return home that night because they face death in a hundred different ways.