With me nothing comes easy. This morning I did my push-ups in the nude…I didn’t see the mousetrap.
People ask me, “How do you write jokes?” There is no set procedure, but writing is basically thinking. Before you write anything, you have to sit there and think about it. Sit down and try to think funny in whatever area you want: wife trouble, car trouble, kid trouble.
With my image, everything is trouble.
Many of my jokes are written on the spot when I hear something I can make funny. One day I was sitting in Mulberry Street Pizza in Beverly Hills. It’s a nice place to hang out with the guys—and one of the guys I was hanging out with at the time said that he had a “tale of woe.” So I turned that into: “Every man has his tale of woe. Unfortunately, in life there’s more woe than tail.”
One time I was kidding around with a waitress at Mulberry Street. I said, “Make it with me, and I’ll give you a thousand dollars for an hour.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “that’s not enough.”
I said, “Okay, I’ll stay two hours.”
I was in Fort Lauderdale, driving along by myself. I came to a red light, and at the intersection was a convertible with two young couples. To my left, about three feet away from me, was a very attractive girl. She looked at me in a sexy way and said, “I wanna suck your cock.”
I could see what her game was—she wanted to see if she could shock the “old man.”
So I said, “You’re gonna have to pay me.” As I drove away, I could hear them laughing and yelling, “Rodney!”
Putting a good joke together is a delicate thing. The emphasis on the right word is very important. So is the rhythm, the timing.
And of course, the joke has to be funny.
People don’t know the preparation you do in show business. I still do The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and I try to do all new jokes each time.
Counting my stand-up routine and my “conversation” on the couch with Jay, I need about 30 new jokes. That means I have to write a hundred new jokes. Then, to know which jokes get the best laughs, I go to a local comedy club the Laugh Factory and try them out.
After I have about 30 new jokes I like, I have to put them in some kind of order—create some flow, some continuity. I call that stringing them together into my joke necklace—they have to be in the right order to work. I have to string together about 10 jokes for my stand-up bit and another 20 for my “chat” with Jay afterward. It takes hours and hours of work at home and many nights onstage to get a Tonight Show routine the way I want it.
This girl was ugly. They used her in prisons to cure sex offenders.
Living as long as I have, you can’t help but look back on life and wonder what does it all mean. Sometimes, I don’t ever think I’ve made it. Even today, if I check into a hotel and a bellman picks up my suitcase, I feel awkward. I feel like I should be taking the bags. I guess I feel like I’m one of the masses. Maybe people know that.
I’ve been broke most of my life. For years I was picking up the phone and acting surprised. “The check came back? Oh!”
Every day now when I get up in the morning, I read the obituaries.
The obituaries have been very entertaining. Often you will read about the lives of some fascinating people.
I read about Suzanne Bloch, a musician and teacher. She was a class act, respected by all. Suzanne often played chamber music with noted scientists, including Albert Einstein.
Einstein turned out to be very difficult to work with. Suzanne would give the downbeat, but Einstein always came in late. Each time they had to go back to the beginning. Finally in exasperation, she turned on him and said, “Mr. Einstein, can’t you count?”
But I can count and I know my days are numbered. I can picture my own funeral, the things that would be said:
We are here today to bid farewell to Rodney Dangerfield.
A good husband, a good father, and a very good tipper.
A man who cared about the homeless. He was always looking for a girl who needs a room.
A man who always loved his neighbor—if she was easy.
Farewell, Rodney. We know you’ll be in good hands—your own.
I tell ya one thing, though, I’m not about to die anytime soon. There are too many people out there who owe me money.
I can accept getting older. I can even accept getting old, but dying? Man, that’s a tough one to accept. As my friend Joe Ancis used to say, “Who made this contract?”
Life’s a short trip. You’ll find out.
You were seventeen yesterday. You’ll be fifty tomorrow. Life is tough, are you kiddin’? What do you think life is? Moonlight and canoes? That’s not life. That’s in the movies.
Life is fear and tension and worry and disappointments.
Life. I’ll tell ya what life is. Life is having a mother-in-law who sucks and a wife who don’t. That’s what life is.