A Comedian’s Life (Expletives Deleted)

The last time he ate at Hugo’s, Robert Schimmel is telling you, he spotted actor Peter Boyle at another table and paid for his breakfast. This was back in the days when Schimmel was a stand-up comic living in Los Angeles. Seeing a celebrity in a restaurant and keeping a respectful distance does little for Schimmel. He prefers to buy them meals, and to make sure they understand who bought it. This involves visiting their table, usually. Besides Boyle, Schimmel once bought breakfast for Peter Falk, and in a related incident purchased cigarettes for Martin Sheen.

When he’s telling you a story, Schimmel betrays that especially needy, myopic way comedians talk; even if you get up and leave the table, he’ll keep telling the story to the back of your head. In addition to being a tireless talker, Schimmel, who appears tonight at the Roxy in West Hollywood, is a tireless flier. Last year it was 44 weeks on the road, headlining clubs in Dayton, New York, wherever. It’s a throwback life in an age when younger, less funny men and women are being shown into network offices. The sense that Schimmel is too dirty for TV, that benign neglect has left his art to thrive in the clubs, is perhaps why more famous comedians are fans--Steve Martin, who did the liner notes to Schimmel’s new CD; Jim Carrey, for whom Schimmel wrote on Fox’s “In Living Color”; and Howard Stern.

Stern invited Schimmel into his radio lair last year and asked, as only Stern could: “So, you had a kid die of cancer, right?”

Schimmel does have a son who died of cancer, at age 11, and though it seems beyond the reach of any one-liner, Schimmel didn’t shirk his duty. He did a joke, unprintable here, involving the Make a Wish Foundation, Dolly Parton and oral sex. It was the kind of comedic line in the sand that Schimmel draws every time he takes a stage.

*

Schimmel’s Roxy date is a CD release party for his latest Warner Bros. effort, “If You Buy This CD, I Can Get This Car.” Like his first recording, “Robert Schimmel Comes Clean,” the new CD was produced by Bill McEuen, who oversaw Martin’s legendary comedy albums of the 1970s.

On “If You Buy This CD,” Schimmel talks about Sea World, going to the gym, getting rental car insurance. They’re paint-by-numbers comedy topics, until Schimmel gets to an inspired 15-minute routine on his heart attack and subsequent angiogram (“They shave your crotch or maybe I just fell for it”).

Then he talks about his post-heart attack sex life. The nervous resumption, for instance, of masturbation, despite the warnings in the brochure from the American Heart Assn. about sexual exertion. This, more than any other, is a Schimmel moment; in his comedy, he’s constantly describing such hapless escapades, as if his sex life had festival seating.

“That’s what makes it funny, because you’re on the border of it being uncomfortable,” he says, between bites of his oatmeal with soy milk. “There’s nothing else you can talk about where you’re going to be on that tightrope.”

Death, Schimmel says, could be another one of those tightrope topics, but he’s found that death tends to alienate an audience quickly. He wouldn’t do jokes about his son, for instance, on stage in a club. But he’s willing to try this one: “Guys who work at a mortuary have the easiest sales job in the world. Because who has time to price shop when you have a dead relative on your hands? It’s not like you ask, ‘How much is this coffin? 3,000? How late are you open till?’ ”

Though his manager doesn’t want it known, Schimmel is 48. He commutes to the comedy club world from his home in Scottsdale, Ariz., where he lives with his wife and two children, his transplanted New Yorker parents nearby. He began doing comedy at a relatively late age, 31, quitting his job as a stereo salesman in Scottsdale and moving to L.A. with his wife. They arrived in a U-haul to discover that the Improv had caught fire and comedians were picketing the Comedy Store, on strike for more pay.

This was not the start Schimmel had hoped for, so he took a job selling stereos (during which he installed a system in Steve Martin’s Beverly Hills house). He also started to do spots around town, and eventually became less of a stereo guy and more of a comedian, selling jokes to people like Yahkov Smirnoff and Jimmy Walker for $1,000 a month, he says.

Then, as now, he was dirty on stage, using language that made it difficult for Schimmel to make the transition to television. Twenty years later Schimmel has seen many contemporaries move on. There are lots of reasons comics can’t get sitcoms, or keep them on the air, but with Schimmel you’re glad he didn’t; he seems best-suited for a nightclub, dumping on his sex life to the tender amusement of 300 or so patrons.

Still, a sitcom--a something--would be nice.

“It really bugs me,” he says. [Executives] are going, ‘Well, you’re talking about [masturbation] on stage, how can you be in a sitcom?’ Well, Tim Allen did time for [selling]coke. Come on.”

About two years ago, friends thought Schimmel had finally gotten the break he deserved. “DreamWorks to Film Schimmel Story” read the headline in Variety that day. But the Schimmel of the headline was actually Betty Schimmel, Robert’s mother, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who’d sold the film rights to her remarkable story--two long-lost sweethearts, presumed forever separated by the war, reunite decades later on a Budapest bridge.

Given that his mother sold her story to Steven Spielberg at DreamWorks, it’s a little difficult to ask Schimmel if he has any kind of a deal going around town.

In the event, there’s a new distraction in the restaurant suddenly: Dustin Hoffman has just been spotted at a table by the window. Schimmel is whipping out his wallet, his credit card. Soon, another Hollywood actor will eat for free, courtesy of the R-rated comic with the nebbishy face from Scottsdale, Ariz.

* Robert Schimmel appears at the Roxy, 9009 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, tonight at 8. Tickets are $15. (310) 276-2222.