R.I.P. Robert Schimmel

January 16, 1950 – September 3, 2010

I was saddened this morning after finding out that unheralded – and highly underrated – comedian Robert Schimmel passed away in a Phoenix hospital on Friday after being involved in a car accident.  As far as tough times go, Robert faced tremendous trials and tribulations throughout most of his life.  After graduating high school, he decided to join the Air Force and ended up serving one year during the Vietnam War.  While he was there, Schimmel received a blood transfusion and subsequently contracted hepatitis C as a result.  In 1980, he left Scottsdale, Arizona to visit his sister in Los Angeles, and she urged him to get on stage while they were at the Improv comedy club’s amateur night.  After his performance, Schimmel was immediately offered a regular time slot by the club’s owner if he would relocate to California.  So, the aspiring comedian quit his job and moved with his wife and two young kids to pursue a comedy career.  When they arrived, he drove by the club to show his family where he would be working, and soon discovered that the club had burned to the ground the night before.

After hearing of this ordeal, and listening to his material, Rodney Dangerfield invited Robert to perform on his HBO Young Comedians Special.  His stand-up career began to flourish, but his material was still largely considered to be too explicit and raunchy for the mainstream.  He made unsuccessful appearances on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and The Hollywood Squares, but his controversial brand of humor did make him a fan favorite on The Howard Stern Show. In 1998, the comedian suffered a heart attack – an event which he would later joke about by saying, “You know you’re out of shape when you have a heart attack while watching television.’’  In 1999, he was offered a development deal for a sitcom by FOX, but soon after it was picked up in 2000, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.  He underwent lengthy treatments, but then would later reveal on Stern’s show that he had also contracted cirrhosis, and it had progressed to the point where he was put on a waiting list for a donated liver.  Yet despite this myriad of health problems and career struggles, Schimmel never lost his sense of humor or the ability to spin his own tragedies into comedy.  His manager Lee Kernis had this to say after the comedian’s passing, “Robert was always the butt of his own joke.  When he would talk about the failings of his marriages, his relationships, or having kids, he always made the joke about his inability to ever win at the end.”  The comedy world lost a unique and brilliant representative on Friday, but I have no doubt that Schimmel’s past performances will continue to provide laughs, and hopefully influence future generations of comedians as well.

Schimmel’s breakthrough performance on Rodney’s Dangerfield’s HBO special (NSFW language in the following clips):

A clip from a 1994 performance in Las Vegas titled “Guilty as Charged”:

More Robert Schimmel on YouTube