Risque Business

The last time he ate at Hugo’s, back in his days as a stand-up comic living in Los Angeles, Robert Schimmel is saying, he spotted actor Peter Boyle at a table. Schimmel paid for his breakfast.

Seeing a celebrity in a restaurant and keeping a respectful distance does little for Schimmel. He prefers to buy them a meal and to make sure they understand who bought it. This usually involves visiting the star’s table. Schimmel once bought breakfast for Peter Falk and cigarettes for Martin Sheen.

When he’s telling you a story, Schimmel betrays that especially needy, myopic way comedians talk; if you leave the table, he’ll keep telling the story to the back of your head.

Besides being a tireless talker, Schimmel, who appears Wednesday through Sunday at the Brea Improv, 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 in to network TV offices. The sense that Schimmel is too dirty for television, that benign neglect has left his art to thrive in the clubs, is perhaps why more famous comedians love him--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 among them.

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 did have a son die of cancer at age 11--about six years ago--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 and Dolly Parton. It was the kind of comedic line in the sand that Schimmel draws every time he takes a stage.

In addition to the Brea dates, he has an Oct. 28 date at the Roxy in West Hollywood. The Roxy date is a release party for his latest Warner Bros. CD, “If You Buy This CD, I Can Get This Car.” It, like Schimmel’s “Robert Schimmel Comes Clean,” was produced by Bill McEuen, who produced 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--paint-by-number comedy topics--until he gets to an inspired 15-minute routine on his heart attack and subsequent angiogram. Then he talks about his post-attack sex life.

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

Schimmel, 48, lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., with his wife and two daughters, 20 and 7, in the same city as his transplanted New Yorker parents. He began doing comedy at age 31, quitting his job as a stereo salesman in Scottsdale and moving in 1981 to L.A. with his wife.

They arrived in a U-Haul to discover that there had been a fire at the Improv the week he arrived and that 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 did spots around town and eventually became less of a stereo guy and more of a comedian, he says, selling jokes to people such as Yakov Smirnoff and Jimmie Walker for $1,000 a month. After six years in Los Angeles, he packed it in and moved back to Scottsdale.

Then, as now, he was dirty onstage, using language that makes it difficult for Schimmel to make the transition to television while many contemporaries have moved on. There are a million 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.

About two years ago, friends thought Schimmel had finally gotten the break he deserved. “DreamWorks to Film Schimmel Story,” read the headline in Variety.

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But the Schimmel of the headline was Robert’s mother, Betty, 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.

When a guy’s mother sells her story to Steven Spielberg at DreamWorks, it’s hard to ask if he has any deal of his own going around town.

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

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* Robert Schimmel opens Wednesday at the Brea Improv, 945 E. Birch St. 8:30 p.m. Also 8:30 p.m. Thursday, 8:30 and 10:30 p.m. Friday, 8 and 10:30 p.m. Saturday, 8:30 p.m. Sunday. $10-$12. (714) 529-7878.