We'll Be Here For the Rest of Our Lives (38 page)

With this new band, I’ve had any number of occasions to back hip-hoppers. The show insists on a more musical presentation than just a turntable and a rapper. The show insists on all-the-way live. It got all-the-way live when we jammed with Jam-Master Jay and Run-D.M.C., Snoop Dogg, The Game, and 50 Cent. Live Hip-Hop—What A Concept!

In moving from a quartet to an octet, our new band mirrored Dave’s move from NBC to CBS. Things got bigger and better. Whereas before I let the guests come out to bare applause, now I was asked to create what we in our industry—and by our industry I mean, of course, our business—call “play-ons.”

My band and I would get together before the show and, for ten minutes or so, it’d be free-association time. Everyone would throw out ideas for songs that seemed to match the guests. I’d pick the one that made me laugh hardest and use it for the play-on.

Examples:

Ellen DeGeneres: “I’m a Girl Watcher.”

Marv Albert, who famously insisted that his hairpiece was a weave, not a wig: “Dream Weaver.”

Tom Snyder and Craig Ferguson, who at different times
had been tapped for a talk show after Letterman: “I Will Follow Him.”

Nicole Kidman: “Skin Tight.”

John McCain: “Beautiful Loser.”

Kyra Sedgwick, star of
The Closer:
“The Closer I Get to You.”

Politicians could be especially sensitive. When we chose “Soul Man” to play Bob Dole on—only because it rhymed with “Dole Man”—Senator Dole was surprisingly pleased, so much so that he used the song for the remainder of his presidential campaign, much to the dismay of its composers.

When Al Gore came on, I ran into one of his Secret Service guys backstage. “Hey, Paul,” the armed gentleman said, “whatever you do, please don’t play ‘You Can Call Me Al.’ It’s way too obvious.”

“Oh,” I said. “What would you suggest?”

“‘Tennessee’ by Arrested Development.”

Wow. A hipster in the Secret Service.

Taste in comedy is a tricky issue. I leave it to the metaphysicians to clarify that thin line between wildly funny and wildly inappropriate. The problem is that wildly inappropriate often equals wildly funny. Sometimes the most hysterical joke is the most tasteless. The very absence of taste is what makes a lot of stuff funny.

Case in point: A Chevy Chase roast I was asked to emcee.

This happened years
after
Chevy was the biggest comedy star in the country.

I was fond of kidding Chevy, just as Chevy was fond of kidding everyone else. It’s what we did.

When the Friars Club wanted to roast Chevy, it would be for the second time. Chevy was reluctant, and for good reason. There are three prerequisites for making a good roast:

First,
roast the star when the star’s on top
. When a star’s up, it’s okay to knock him down. But when he’s down, knocking him further down isn’t necessarily funny.

Second,
recruit friends of the star
. Make sure that the roasting
is done by people who love the star so genuinely that their vitriol is born of affection, not real rancor.

Third,
don’t televise
. TV kills the intimacy and murderous fellowship that are the hallmarks of a memorable roast.

Unfortunately, Chevy’s second roast failed on all three counts. Chevy only accepted because the sponsor offered to donate $100,000 to his wife’s charity. He may have also accepted because he had fond memories of his first roast. That’s when Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and a slew of studio heads flew in to sit on the dais. This was different, however. De Niro and Pacino were nowhere in sight, and, in fact, the only people on the dais who actually knew Chevy were myself, Laraine Newman, Beverly D’Angelo, and Al Franken. Al, by the way, may not have loved Chevy like the rest of us did.

The dais was so bereft of A-list celebs that I began the roast with a song called “We Couldn’t Get Anybody Good.” The lyrics went like this:

Toward the end of the song, I was handed a fedora and a raincoat that I threw over my shoulder. In Sinatra style, I sang, “How sad the dais! You call this a show? How can you roast a man when no one will go and sit on the dais? Jack shit for a dais. How sad the dais! It blows!”

My monologue was pretty rough and, naturally, in bad taste. At the same time, I realized that some taste was required. That’s why I decided not to use this line: “I don’t really recognize anyone on the dais. Well, that looks like John McEnroe over there. But if you’re here, John, who’s beating up Tatum O’Neal?” Horrible taste.

Instead I said, “Many people asked what went wrong with Chevy’s career. True, he’s burned lots of bridges. He was abusive to people. I think it was the acting. If you really want to know, though, what happened to Chevy’s career, I can explain it in three grams.”

Al Franken took over where I left off. Al was much rougher. He really ripped into Chevy. He talked about how he respected Chevy’s public revelation that he was hooked on pain pills for his back. That took character. That took courage. Al remembered how Chevy ground up those pills and applied them directly to his back. He talked about the time Chevy and Laraine went in on a kilo of back pills. The harder Al hit, the funnier he was.

Even I got hit. Lisa Lampanelli, an insult comic who makes Don Rickles look like Mary Poppins, got up and said, “Paul, I love you. Every time I look at you it reminds me I gotta clean my dildo.”

Another comic, Todd Barry, said, “I see Paul’s band is here but they’re not gonna play. They’re absolutely wiped. They had to learn four bars of a Blink-182 song.” The band fell out.

After the dinner, I found Todd.

“You nailed us with that Blink-182 line,” I said.

He replied, “I wanted to say Matchbox 20, but I thought Blink-182 was just a little more insulting.”

Back to boiling Chevy in hot water, Richard Belzer said,

“The only funny bone Chevy has in his body is when I’m fucking him in the ass.”

When it was time for Chevy to speak, we were rooting for a great rebuttal, but Chevy was genuinely hurt and could only say, “Wow, that was rough.” He turned to Franken and said, “Jesus, Al…my daughters will never see this.” Then he sat down.

I felt terrible. After the dinner, Tom Leopold, who had written many of my scathers, said, “Let’s make sure Chevy’s okay.” So Tom and I, along with Lew Soloff, went up to Chevy’s hotel room. Lew has a big heart and, like me, was hurting for Chevy. Lew is all about sincerity. He sincerely loves everybody. I’ll drop by Lew’s place, for instance, while he’s finishing up a phone call with “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

“Who was that, Lew?” I’ll ask.

“Wrong number,” he’ll say.

Up in Chevy’s room, we were sympathetic. “Sorry it was so hurtful, Chevy,” I said.

“You’re kind to come up here, Paul.”

“I feel terrible about that three-gram joke I told,” I said. “I’m going to tell the show to edit it out before it airs.”

“Don’t.”

“Why?”

“It was funny.”

Another roast in which I participated was one I’d been waiting for my whole life. I’d get to roast Jerry Lewis.

In my personal equation, Jerry is to show-biz comedy what Phil Spector is to pop music production. As Cole Porter would put it, Jerry is the top. And in order to roast him, I was determined to top everyone who came before and after me.

I had a head start because Belzer was roastmaster. Richard was the one who had gotten Jerry to agree to fly to New York from Vegas for the affair. Jerry would do anything for Belzer, especially after Belzer had gotten Jerry on an episode of
Law and Order: SVU
, playing his uncle.

The roast was private—which made it that much more special for me—and Belzer gave me an extra-good spot. I had a monologue that led to a song with special lyrics. I hired the best comedy writers I knew, Tom Leopold and Bill Scheft, to help me develop material. I wasn’t going to be just good; I was going to be phenomenal. I had to do it for Jerry, just as Jerry did it for his kids.

I worked my
tuchus
off. I rewrote and rehearsed, I practiced until my timing was perfect. Not since my bar mitzvah had I approached a public performance with such a passion to please. And in this case, the one person I wanted to please more than anyone was Mr. Jerry Lewis.

The big day arrived. Jerry arrived. He was seated down the dais not far from me. When called to stand before the podium and do my thing, I took a deep breath, relished the moment, and went into it. The preamble to the song was long, too long. The account of my personal fondness for Jerry’s telethons was too detailed. The explanations of my love of Jerry’s talent were too complicated. The jokes were too hip for the room. In short, I died. Even worse, in the midst of my horrible death, even before I got to the song, Jerry got up from the dais and left!

I had to chase after the poor man and bring him back.

“Jerry,” I said, “you can’t leave now.”

“I thought you were finished,” he said.

“Please, Jerry, just listen to the song.”

He heard the song and tried to smile. But the smile didn’t
work and neither did the song. The song died. And that very evening, on the plane back to Vegas, Jerry Lewis suffered a heart attack.

Thank God, Jerry survived the song and the attack. Our relationship survived as well. On Jerry’s next trip to New York, he brought his young daughter. Belzer suggested that Tom Leopold and I join them for lunch and bring our kids as well. We all met at Café Fiorello across from Lincoln Center—Jerry, Belzer, Tom, and me at one table, the kids at another.

This was when my daughter, Victoria, was twelve and my son, Will, was six. The occasion was merry and went without incident. Jerry was delighted to be surrounded by a group of devotees. We were delighted to hear his stories about the glory days of
The Nutty Professor
and
The Bellboy
. Toward the end of the lunch, Will came over to my table and said, “Daddy, can we get the check?”

“Sure, son,” I said.

Jerry looked over at Will, who has extremely attractive Asian facial features.

“Does he know any Chinese words?” asked Jerry, after Will had gone back to the children’s table. Before I could explain, Jerry went on: “Sometimes it’s valuable to teach a child a few words in his mother tongue to give him a connection with his past.”

“Actually, Jerry, my kids aren’t adopted. My wife, Cathy, is
Italian-Korean
. That’s why my children have that exotic look.”

Jerry tuned me out. Instead he leaned over to whisper in Belzer’s ear, “Well, I guess the kid does good laundry.”

In a perverse way, I loved the story and couldn’t wait to tell
my friends that my child was the object of Jerry’s dated ethnic humor. That Jerry—what a nut!

Later that same year I took my family to see Harry Shearer’s annual Christmas show that he puts on with his lovely wife, Judith Owen. Cathy wanted Harry to meet our kids; he hadn’t seen Victoria since she was an infant and hadn’t met Will at all. This evening, though, Harry’s Christmas spirit was interminable. He never left the stage. The show went on for so long the kids couldn’t take any more holiday cheer.

“Let’s just bring them to the side of the stage,” said Cathy, “so Harry can at least get a glimpse of them.”

While playing bass, Harry sidled over to stage right.

“Harry,” I said, “we gotta split. You remember Victoria, of course.”

“Darling,” said Harry, “you’ve grown up.”

“And this is my son, Will.”

“Does he know any Chinese words?” Harry asked out of the side of his mouth. That Harry—what a nut!

I can’t conclude my examination of bad taste in humor without revisiting the memorial service for comic Sam Kinison. Poor Sam was killed in a car accident in 1992 at the tragically young age of thirty-eight. I liked his wild humor and admired his extreme antics. And though I had met Sam, I really didn’t know him and wouldn’t have attended the service were it not for Richard Belzer. Sam and the Belz were so close that Belzer had been asked to emcee Kinison’s memorial. Richard insisted I attend. “It’ll be hysterical,” he said.