While watching Bill Scheft, the comedian, novelist, and head writer for The Late Show with David Letterman, I had only one regret: I should’ve brought a tape recorder instead of a camera.
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Physically, he’s unremarkable. Looking compact in a tweed jacket and a loosened tie, he has the kind of appearance that would pass as anonymous in his native New York City.
But, in hearing Scheft promote his latest book Everything Hurts, a romping tale of an author afflicted by psychosomatic limp whose parody of a self-help book becomes an international best-seller, it’s obvious that his appearance belies something greater.
Scheft’s thirteen year long comic pedigree was immediately obvious from the moment that he took the mic.
Quipping that he liked the “Mordecai Richler Spring Rolls” and the “Benjamin Netanyahu Mushrooms,” he remarked that it’s nice to “be in a private club…that allows Jews.” Then, after giving the audience a short autobiography (“My mom, she was a stay at home narcissist…”) proceeded to do what he loves best, tell stories.
He told one story of working at George, the now defunct glam-politics publication helmed by John F. Kennedy Jr., “where every girl there either just finished having sex with JFK Jr. or was on her way to having sex with JFK Jr.”
In another, he was doing a book talk for an audience of three in a Pennsylvanian town too small to name (“Go up I-95, get off at the exit for Neptune, go past Neptune…”).
My favourite one was about the Writer’s Guild of America strike of 2008. Responding to a woman’s question about how The Late Show has had to adapt to technologies like YouTube, he said that he had proudly taken part in the strike, and was a happy to announce that for “every video David Hasselhoff puts up on the Internet, we’ll receive 10 per cent of all the hamburger that falls on the floor.”
For the entirety the night, Scheft drew gems from what a seemingly inexhaustible resevoir of stories, conjuring Letterman’s sagacious predecessor Johnny Carson, the Detroit Red Wings and the Octomom, sprinkling in a bit of literary glister with words like “elegaunt” to describe an geriatric upper-east sider, and “coke-fee” as a morning brew.
Though not immediately apparent, Scheft’s a natural raconteur of immense talent. His stories – well, suffice it to say he is one.
Everything Hurts is available from Simon and Schuster, $24.00
