Name: Rob Reiner On Improvising All Of "Spinal Tap" | David Letterman
Uploaded: 2025-12-15T04:03:19.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Rob Reiner On Improvising All Of "Spinal Tap" | David Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-12-15. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Rob Reiner On Improvising All Of "Spinal Tap" | David Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-12-15. Transcript available.

Thank you very much for being here.
This man over here, this Paul Schaefer man,
is a very well-known, beautiful human being,
as we all know, and he's wonderful in the film.
You ruined me. You ruined my career.
You killed me in the film.
Babe, babe.
You killed me. I was brilliant in your film.
I had to edit.
You cut my whole part out of the film.
You left me. I was brilliant.
No, it's not true.
Laughs. Left on the cutting room floor.
It's not true.
The rats are laughing now as they come in.
The rats.
I cut this man together.
I cut this man together.
Made him look beautiful on film.
Killed me.
No, he's not grateful.
Kids, kids.
No, no, it's all.
No, he's great.
You're a prince.
I love working with you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
Get out of here.
Get out of here.
Beautiful human being, Paul Schaefer.
This movie.
And you.
No, no, no, don't start.
You're quite attractive.
He's a handsome guy.
Not quite as handsome as Alan Thicke, but, you know, he's got everything else.
Whoa.
But he has everything else going for him.
The space in the teeth.
See?
We both have that.
Do we both have that?
It's a sign of intelligence, I think.
Oh.
Jeez, I don't know.
It never showed up in any of my records.
Anyway, this motion picture, I saw this a couple of weeks ago.
This, and this is going to sound like a phony compliment, but I haven't laughed
as hard in
a movie in two years as I did.
Oh, good.
Thank you.
You guys did a really, really nice job of it.
Thank you.
And Michael McKean.
Michael McKean.
It does a wonderful job.
And Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer, who's a good friend of Paul's as well.
Yeah, they're wonderful in it.
They're, the band is composed of, there are five members of the band.
Two of them are actual Englishmen who have played in rock and roll bands over
the years.
And Chris and Harry and Michael are Americans and they're all accomplished
musicians and they
have also played with bands, but they're Americans.
And the characters, the accents are flawless.
I mean, Chris's performance is seamless.
I mean, you can't, I mean, he is a British rock and roller.
I mean, you cannot see the seams in it.
He's playing a really nice British dumb guy.
Just sort of dumb.
No, not sort of dumb.
Quite dumb.
Quite dumb.
They're all quite dumb.
Talk a little bit more about the film.
It's actually what you call a rockumentary.
You're Marty DeBerge.
I play Marty DeBerge, who is a filmmaker documenting the tour of this British
heavy metal band that's
been together 15 years.
They're legendary.
They've been, they come to be known as Britain's loudest band.
They are on tour in America.
They haven't toured in six years.
They're touring in America to promote an album called Smell the Glove, which
they run into
some problems because Smell the Glove, the cover art is, the record company has
some problems
with the cover art.
They call it sexist.
It shows a naked woman, a heavily oiled naked woman on all fours with a dog
collar around
her neck with a glove shoved in her face to sniff.
And for some reason, they think that's sexist.
I don't know why.
So they wind up making a compromise with the artwork.
And it winds up being this album, which, as you can tell, is, it's a lot like
the White
album, except it's, this is Smell the Glove.
And this, this record, by the way, will be available in, in the stores.
So look for it.
It's on Polygram.
This is an actual record coming off of the movie.
Yes, a record coming off of the album.
And it looks like this.
So you can't miss it.
It looks, it looks like the divider in the, in the store, but don't buy that.
Buy the actual album.
I think a good way to describe where this band is in the great scheme of rock
and roll
bands is, is the, uh, the marquee at the Holiday Inn in, in one stop where they're
performing.
Yes, yes.
They're, they're, they're in Chicago and the marquee at the Holiday Inn
welcomes them.
And it says, uh, welcome, uh, the national company of the whiz and spinal tap.
And they get, they get billing below that.
And also when they play an outdoor kind of amusement park, they get second
billing to
a puppet show.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So they're, they're fighting for survival.
And Paul, Paul plays the, uh, the, the, the record label PR guy in Chicago.
Yes.
Artie Fufkin.
Paul plays Artie Fufkin, who is a, uh, a promo guy.
Yeah.
Who was, uh, not doing a good job, uh, promoting the band.
He books them into a, uh, uh, a record store where they're signing autographs,
uh, signing
albums and nobody shows up.
And, uh, Paul is, uh, very chagrined at this and, uh, asks them to, uh, well, I'm
not going
to give it away.
Yeah.
And, and Paul, if you get to be a big star off of this, remember we gave you a
day off
to be in this movie.
That's right.
Yeah.
That's right.
I'm very grateful for you.
Uh, we, let's take a look at some, uh, some footage here from the motion
picture.
This is spinal tap.
You know what we're going to look at?
Uh, yes.
I think this is an interview sequence where I'm interviewing the band members
at, uh,
one of, uh, uh, I think that's at the beginning of the picture.
Okay.
It talks about the history of the band.
This is, uh, documentarian, uh, Marty DeBergey talking to the members of spinal
tap.
So talk a lot.
Yeah.
This is spinal tap.
Did they, I'm sorry, go ahead.
That, that clip, uh, the, the, uh, flashback to the, uh, an appearance on an
early British
television show.
If you notice that the blonde guy playing the drums is Ed Begley Jr.
Who's on St. Elsewhere.
Uh, but the character, yeah, he's good.
But, um, in the film, uh, spinal tap has a, uh, a history of bad luck with drummers.
Uh, they seem to drop off at an alarming rate.
Um, that, that fellow is a character's name, uh, John Stumpy Peeps.
Uh, and they all meet with very, uh, strange deaths.
How many have they had?
How many drummers in the group?
Oh, it's, we can't number them.
We can't count it up.
Uh, this, uh, John Stumpy Peeps died in a, in a bizarre gardening accident.
That's never quite, uh, explained.
He's, he's replaced by a fellow named, uh, uh, Eric Stumpy Joe Childs.
Who, uh, who is very, very mysterious death.
He, he, he choked on vomit.
Uh, and it wasn't his own vomit.
Somebody else.
Which is, which is, it's very bizarre.
They, uh.
That's the world of rock and roll.
Yeah, yeah.
It's, uh, they've never been able to figure out whose vomit it was because
Scotland Yard
doesn't have facilities for dusting for vomit.
So, there's no way to print.
And then, uh, he's replaced by, uh, he's replaced by a third drummer, Peter
James Bond,
who, uh, during a, during a, uh, an outdoor summer festival at the Isle of Lucy,
uh, explode.
He exploded on stage.
Spontaneous combustion?
Spontaneously combusted, yeah, yeah.
Everybody thought it was part of the show.
There was a flash of green light and there was a little stain left on his drum
seat and nobody
could figure out what, what happened to him either.
This is, uh, you get the feeling that this movie, it was really done.
It's a put-on.
Yeah, but it's done with, with an awful lot of care.
It's a tongue-in-cheek.
Very funny.
Was much of it improvised or was there?
The whole, the whole film is improvised.
The whole film is improvised.
We, we...
Now, didn't that scare the movie company when you went to them and said,
we sort of have an idea here?
Yes, it did scare it.
It did scare the movie company, but we felt that, uh, in order to, uh, give it
the right
field, to give it the field of documentary flavor, that we wanted to shoot it
as a documentary
and to improvise the whole film.
We followed the band around as if they were on tour in, you know, backstage and
on stage
and limos and hotel rooms, and we shot it all 16 millimeter handheld, and I
shot like
50 hours of film and took seven, eight months to edit it, just as you would a
regular documentary.
It looks terrific, and, and again, I do want to stress, it really, really makes
you laugh.
Oh.
A real nice job.
Rob, thank you very much for being here tonight.
Rob Reiner, folks.
Uh, we'll be back to meet the folks from the Virgin Islands Olympic team right
after you guys.