Robert Smigel

(Excerpt from Robert Smigel interview)

Is it true that you almost became Dr. Robert Smigel?

[Laughs] Well, I had no idea what else I was going to do with my life. My father is a dentist; he still practices.

More than thirty years ago, he developed the cosmetic tooth-bonding technique. He’s much more important to dentistry than I could ever be to my own profession. You really should be interviewing him. And your book should be about dentistry. It’s only right.

My father’s actually very funny. He has his own odd bedside manner. I’ve seen him ask patients who have cotton in their mouths non-sequitur types of questions, like, “If you were forced to save only one of your grandchildren, which one would you pick?”

Do the patients appreciate his Sophie’s Choice–type questioning?

That’s where the cotton in the mouth comes in. The patient can’t answer, so they kind of become a prop in his act. Jon Lovitz goes to him, and he’s always telling me how my dad’s funnier than me.

I actually worked in his office for a couple of summers when I was considering dentistry. He has a very thriving practice, and it seemed ridiculous for me not to consider becoming a part of that business. I was funny to my classmates as a kid, but I never assumed I could make strangers laugh. It wasn’t really until I was at the end of my rope with pre-dental in college that I just—as a lark more than anything else—entered a stand-up contest that was being held at NYU, where I was attending, in 1981. I wrote a routine for the contest just to see what would happen, and I ended up being one of the winners.

Do you remember any of the jokes?

I was a big fan of Andy Kaufman’s. So, I was into testing the audience with anti-performance stuff. I would come onstage in full Orthodox Jewish garb. I would wear an overcoat, a tie and a hat, and I fashioned a big beard out of cotton candy. I would also bring out a large religious book called the Pentateuch, which contains the five books of the Torah, and I would then do what the old men in our synagogue used to do when they were trying to find a prayer. They would very slowly and deliberately turn each page one at a time and lick their fingers. I would do the same thing onstage until I got a laugh, and then, when the laughs died down, I’d start to eat my cotton-candy beard. It would become a rhythm. I’d lick my finger, pull a piece of the beard, eat the beard, lick the finger, back to the page, pull the beard, and so on.

How did your parents react when you made it clear that there wasn’t going to be another dentist in the family?

My father was understanding. He had sort of been led into dentistry—his father was a dentist—and he never enjoyed it until he made it interesting for himself with dental aesthetics. My mother was somewhat horrified, but still supportive. I sort of crawled to the finish line at N.Y.U. I even tried to finish pre-dental, but then I flunked organic chemistry.

A few weeks later, during the summer of 1982, I left for Chicago and joined a Second City offshoot I’d heard about called the Players Workshop of Second City. I also joined an improv group called All You Can Eat. I didn’t name it, by the way. We put on a show that we produced ourselves called “All You Can Eat and the Temple of Dooom [sic],” which grew to be very successful. We would split the profits each week, which came to around $300 for each of us. I lived with two friends in this group, in a filthy apartment, and our rent was $450. It was probably the happiest time of my life. Chicago is still a great place to start out in comedy; it’s cheaper than most cities, and there’s a huge community of people doing improv and sketch comedy. It’s not hard to find like-minded people.

What sort of sketches did you perform in the stage show?

There was a range of silly ones. I don’t think it was the most inventive comedy group that was out there at the time, but we tried to do clever material, and we became very popular. It was actually good preparation for Saturday Night Live. We didn’t do improv onstage, just sketches. At the time, I thought improv was great as a writing tool, and I loved watching people at Second City develop scenes in improv sets. But I was not a fan of watching improv games.

In fact, one of our more interesting sketches was a parody of an improv game. So for our sketch, we’d ask the audience for the typical improv suggestion, like, “We need an occupation, and we need a period of time, and we need a location.” Then we’d have a plant in the audience who’d start making weird suggestions. Every time we’d freeze the scene, the plant would highjack it, coming up with stranger and more convoluted suggestions: “Okay, so now you just grew a tree on your arm, because you find out that she had an affair with Hall and Oates’s mother, and you’re all going to a sing a song about orange puppies.” Most of the audience loved seeing the improv game ruined, although some of them probably felt a little ripped off.

At what point did this stage show lead to Saturday Night Live?

Al Franken and Tom Davis, two of the great original writers for SNL, were shooting a movie in the Chicago area called One More Saturday Night [1986], and one of the members in our improv group, Dave Reynolds, just happened to be cast in a major role. Franken and Davis became friendly with Dave, and they came to see our show, and they really liked it. We hung out with them afterward at a goofy German bar. And I thought, Well, that was fun, and that’s the end of that.

About a month or so later, I read in TV Guide that Lorne Michaels had gone back to Saturday Night Live, after a five-year-hiatus, and that he was hiring Al and Tom as producers. It was about the closest that I’d ever come to literally hitting the ceiling. All of a sudden, there was a possibility that I could actually be doing what I most wanted to do, and it felt completely alien. I was never the kind of person inclined to go after things aggressively. I once contacted Late Night with David Letterman before it premiered, to see if they were hiring writers, but I never sent them anything. I was so naïve that I simply called the show and asked if I could submit material. They said no and I said, “Okay,” and I never thought about it again. To give up, that was all the rejection I needed…