Schimmel finds humor in battle with cancer

Friday, June 1, 2001 | 8:24 a.m.

Cancer is no laughing matter, unless you are edgy comedian Robert Schimmel.

"When I got diagnosed, my mom, who is 71, goes, 'Did they give you any pot yet?' " Schimmel said during a recent telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles.

"I said, 'Ma, if you want some pot, just tell me, so and I'll get you some. Why wait till I get sick to ask?' "

The 50-year-old heir-apparent to such comedians as Lenny Bruce, Sam Kinison and Redd Foxx is appearing tonight and Saturday at the Monte Carlo. Ironically, he had just finished a gig at the Monte Carlo last year when he learned he had cancer.

"I was there on a Friday and Saturday (June 2-3)," Schimmel recalled. "The next day I was feeling a little run-down, and so I went in for a checkup and they found non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The doctor told me if I hadn't come in when I did, I had less than a year left to live.

"The year is up this weekend."

After seven months of debilitating chemotherapy, which kept him off the stage, his cancer is in remission and has become part of his act.

"In the hospital they ask you to say on a scale of one to 10 how you would rate your pain level," Schimmel said. "Say eight, no matter what. One is like baby aspirin and eight is demerol. Ten is morphine. What they don't tell you when they put you on pain medicine is you get really constipated. That's when you really find out what '(expletive) a brick' means."

Schimmel's humor is adult. Some say it pushes the limits of good taste and often exceeds it.

"I've been told my whole career, 'Don't talk about that,' " he said. "But I find it funny, and you (as a comedian) have to do what makes you laugh. Almost everything I talk about onstage is from real life, and if not exactly verbatim then pretty close, maybe sometimes embellished a little for entertainment value.

"I mean, Richard Pryor talking about his heart attack and setting himself on fire -- that's funny. It's what made Pryor who he was."

Putting a funny spin on reality, some of it tragic, is what makes Schimmel who he is.

"They ask you to sign a living will in the hospital. You check one of several boxes. One is they will keep you alive at any cost, which is until your insurance runs out ... Actually I put in the will that I wanted my body to be spread over Las Vegas, but I didn't want to be cremated."

Schimmel said he did consider being cremated.

"But the guy said, 'You do get parts of other people. You might get somebody else's hip bone in there.' I said, 'You know, I don't want that.' "

During chemotherapy, he said, open sores formed in his mouth and down his throat.

"I had to gargle with Lidocaine (an anesthetic) so I could eat," Schimmel said. "My doctor said, 'When you have open sores in your mouth, try to avoid any oral-anal contact.' I said, 'Can I avoid it if I don't have open sores in my mouth? Am I obligated?' "

Schimmel said that marijuana helped him through the cancer treatment.

"I smoked pot when I was getting chemotherapy," Schimmel said. "I watched this whole Supreme Court thing when they overturned legalizing the use of pot for medical purposes. They said it really doesn't have any benefit. Yeah, not to them because they can't make any money off it."

Schimmel said having had cancer has changed his life.

"I have a chance to make the most out of what I have left. I think it's really sad that you have to have a doctor tell you that you have a 50-percent chance you're going to go five years without a recurrence, and then you say, 'OK, starting today I'm going to live my life to the fullest.' You should live it to the fullest anyway. Why must you wait?

"I have friends who say, 'You know, that's the next great adventure, to be dead.' I say, 'Yeah? Send me a postcard from your adventure. I don't want to go on that trip.' How do you know what's waiting on the other side? They put you in a box and you're 6 feet under, now you're going to be in heaven cracking a joke with angels for eternity? Sounds great.

"I need one person to come back and tell me that it exists. Until then life ends with a lot of people crying and you being lowered into the ground. I'm claustrophobic. I don't even want that."

The hardest part about cancer wasn't learning that he had it. "It was telling my children that I had it. That's tough."

Since the diagnosis, Schimmel said he has a new perspective on life.

"A lot of things mean a lot to me now that I didn't think did before, and some things that meant the world to me don't mean anything now," he said. "Everything got switched around real fast.

"I live in a town where people judge you by what kind of car you drive and where you live. When I was getting chemo in the clinic, there's no special parking space up there for your Porsche Boxter."

Schimmel cloaks in humor many of the tragedies he has experienced. "I try to find humor in it," he said. "That's how I deal with it."

Schimmel said when his son died of cancer 11 years ago he had the misfortune of having to deal with a funeral home, whose director used the emotional blackmail to try to sell him a $12,000 casket.

"I asked him what I should spend," Schimmel said. "He said, 'It all depends on what your dearly departed meant to you.' Then, he asks me if I want to include a pillow. I said, 'It doesn't come with a pillow?' The pillow was extra. What, he's going to get a stiff neck? I mean seriously, a pillow? Do you have a five-CD changer I can put in there?"

Schimmel, a native of New York, got a late start in his comedy career.

Nineteen years ago he was married and raising a family in Scottsdale, Ariz., where he ran a stereo store. One weekend he went to visit a sister in Los Angeles and his life took a different direction.

"She took me to the Improv one night and signed me up without telling me. The emcee pulled my name out of a bucket. When I went onstage, my first line was, 'I'm really not a comedian, I'm a stereo salesman,' and the audience started laughing. That's all I needed to hear."

The owners of the Improv told him he had a standing invitation to appear.

"So I quit my job, put my house up for sale and moved to L.A. with my wife and daughter, and the night before I got here the Improv burned down. It was still smoldering when we arrived."

He got a job selling stereos and appeared wherever he could get a gig at night.

"I sold a stereo to Steve Martin and I was installing it in his house and he was there and I'm talking to him and I said, 'You know, I'm a comedian, too,' and he said, 'Yeah, that's why you're installing my stereo system.' I didn't realize it sounded so stupid at the time."

Seventeen years later, Schimmel said, he recorded his first CD ("Robert Schimmel Comes Clean"), for which Martin wrote a liner note.

"What a life. Where else can that happen?" Schimmel said.

Now Schimmel has his own television sitcom, due to debut on Fox this fall. An HBO comedy performance aired in November, and he was voted "Stand-Up of the Year" at last year's American Comedy Awards.

archive