Atlantic City Weekly

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When answering the question, "What are you thankful for this Thanksgiving?" most of us could fill a few minutes talking about our families, our homes and being able to put food on the table. But when I posed that same question to comedian Robert Schimmel during a recent telephone conversation, I was in for an emotional, thoughtful, and very funny hour and a half, where he spoke about his career, his family, and the life-changing experience of surviving what was supposed to be terminal cancer.

Schimmel, who returns to the Trump Marina for two shows this Saturday, was always drawn to comedy. "I've always known there's really something special about making people laugh," he says. "I've known it since a kid ... when I was mimicking Jackie Gleason and all these other people. I watched comics every night that I could on television. I never thought I would be one, but I was a class clown and I got fired from every job for telling jokes all the time. I sold stereo equipment and my boss said, 'Ya know, everybody's leaving laughing, but they're not leaving with any products.'"

According to Schimmel, his first experience on the stage was unplanned and came in 1980, on a trip to visit his sister in Los Angeles. "My sister said, 'Hey, ya wanna go to the Improv?' Well, I'd never been to a comedy club before. I see Jay Leno and George Wallace and Bill Maher, and all these guys up there, and my sister's going, 'You're just as funny as these guys.' We come back the next night and she signs me up for Amateur Night without telling me. They pulled your name out of a bucket and you literally had two minutes. They had a bar stool with an egg timer on it. At the end of the two minutes, when that bell rang, you had to say good night, even if you were in the middle of a joke. If you didn't, you couldn't come back."

As luck would have it, they called Schimmel's name. After his two minutes, he was told he could work at the Improv whenever he wanted. When he returned home to Scottsdale, Ariz., he quit his job, sold his house, gathered his wife and eight month-old daughter and returned to L.A. But, he was soon to discover that the Improv had burned down.

"I said, you know what? Where there's a will there's a way," Schimmel recalls. He wound up getting a job paying $1,000 a month writing for comedian Jimmy Walker. "My rent was $220 a month, so when I got that job, I literally was making my living in comedy."

Throughout the 1980s, Schimmel began making a name for himself in the business. His self-deprecating, raw, and often dirty humor landed him various TV appearances, HBO specials and a frequent guest seat on Howard Stern's show. Schimmel had become a part of the provocative new wave of comedy, which included Eddie Murphy, Andrew Dice Clay and Sam Kinison.

In 2000, at 50, for reason's unbeknownst to him, Schimmel's career took off. "I had just done the comedy festival in Aspen in the end of 1999," he says. "For some reason I did really good up there. I don't think I was any funnier then, than any other time. And all of a sudden I'm getting asked to be on every show, and people are telling me how great I am. I turned 50 years-old! People would go, 'Wow, we found out you're funny' -- after I've been on the road for 25 years."

But, just as all the pieces were falling into place, Schimmel was met head-on with the biggest challenge of his life. "I got offered an HBO Special, a three-record deal with Warner Brothers, [and] every network wanted a meeting with me," says Schimmel, who would accept a deal with FOX, for a TV show called Schimmel. "I was gonna be the new sitcom premiering in September, and my time slot was right after The Simpsons. You couldn't ask for anything more. And then I get diagnosed with cancer eight days later."

After that, the show was cancelled and Schimmel's cancer was determined to be Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, Stage Three. "I was too late for radiation, so I could only get chemotherapy and if it didn't work I had about six months to live," says Schimmel. "If it did [work] I had a 51-percent chance ... what I had was very aggressive and it was already all over the place."

Schimmel beat the cancer and surviving the disease has exposed the comedian to a new audience, and has given him a new appreciation of what he does for a living.

"I'm really thankful for every day," says Schimmel. "I've got the biggest gift you could get ... and I get to talk about what I went through and make people laugh about it."

Last year, the comedian known for telling raw, dirty jokes, got a call about appearing on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition on ABC. He was to entertain a crowd of 300, including many children who were sick with cancer. Although it required him to do the set from the back of a pick-up truck, and to tone down his act considerably, Schimmel was happy to oblige.

"I love making other people laugh," he says. "I go on stage and I talk about what I went through, it winds up reaching other people, and if that gives somebody else a little bit of positivity, then what I went through wasn't for nothing. And I feel like I'm a lucky guy. Because I got to make a big difference -- even if it's in another person's life."

Robert Schimmel
Where: Trump Marina
When: Saturday, Nov. 24, 8 & 11pm
How Much: $40