Bill Scheft
When Bill Scheft visited The Drive recently, Steve Jaxon gave him a glowing introduction: “I’m very excited about talking to our next guest. We’ve been hoping to get him on for quite a while. I’m a big fan. He’s a comedy writer, novelist, for years he was David Letterman’s right hand man, and writer for Letterman. Last time we were in New York we were at the Ed Sullivan Theater and I noticed he was the guy standing just offstage and then every commercial break he would go up to the desk and talk to Dave. He’s been on the show because he’s a novelist. His latest novel is called Shrink Thyself. Great comedy writer, I’m really honored to have Mr. Bill Scheft with us.”
Steve then mentioned his last visit to the Ed Sullivan Theater for a taping of Letterman’s show. “We were there a few years ago, we were in the front part of the balcony we actually had VIP seats. I was wondering, we were both talking, Mike and I (my producer, who was with me) and afterwards we were wondering what you guys were talking about, if it had to do with the show, because you were there every commercial break, talking to Dave.”
Bill explained, “Well, you know, it’s funny, because I described my job back then as that I was more of Dave’s cut man, that I would sort of jump in between rounds, basically I would try to keep him loose during his own show, try to entertain him during his own show. So we very rarely would talk about the show. Mostly I would remind him of old bits of his or other comics. If I told you what we talked about you just wouldn’t believe it. I mean it would be, ‘What was the restaurant in LA that Marlon Brando and Orson Wells used to eat at?’ you know, and then we would spend the whole show, the all of a sudden just as I was walking away I would remember that it was Ma Maison and I would run back and tell him just as the band was playing.
Shrink Thyself, Bill Scheft’s new novel.
“But it would always be a conversation that only the two of us could have because we had so many of the same reference points. I was a comic for 13 years and we knew a lot of the same people and, just like that, it was not this kind of urgent thing that it looked like. I had a lot of friends who came to the show and they could just see me, they couldn’t hear me from where they sat, like where you sat. I would look like I was yelling at him. Somebody said it would look like he worked for me. And it was just to me, being sort of demonstrative, trying to entertain him, that’s all. That’s all we would do. I just tried to keep him loose. We rarely, rarely, rarely talked about the show. (…) Basically, I enabled the people who were actually working on the show to go about their jobs unfettered. I was sort of keeping him busy and loose.
“And I remember one time, I think this only happened once, where I reminded him of something right before he went back on air and he really couldn’t stop laughing. And I never thought he would tell the audience what he was laughing at. I thought that he would tell the band to stop and then just sort of restart it again, which we would do from time to time. And he actually told the audience what I had reminded him of. And the story was, it was the only time he ever called a phone sex line. He told me this story.
“He calls the phone sex line and he immediately sort of realizes how ridiculous it is, what he’s doing. So the woman says to him, ‘OK, so the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to rub oil all over your body.’ So he says, ‘what kind of oil? And the girl says, ‘I don’t know, like olive oil?’ And he says, ‘Well, I’m allergic to olive oil. So it was ten minutes of the girl saying, ‘well, what about peanut oil?” and that was the whole call. Isn’t that great? I never thought he’d tell the audience that, but that’s what made him him.”
For more information about Bill Scheft, visit his website, www.billscheft.com.