Name: Jean Shepherd on Letterman, March 10, 1982
Uploaded: 2020-04-02T18:13:43.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jean Shepherd on Letterman, March 10, 1982' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-04-02. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jean Shepherd on Letterman, March 10, 1982' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-04-02. Transcript available.

Hi there, and welcome back to the extravaganza, ladies and gentlemen.
My first guest, Gene Shepard.
Besides his humorous radio monologues, he's written for Playboy and The Village
Voice.
For public broadcasting, he has scripted Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories
and Other Disasters.
His latest book, entitled A Fistful of Fig Newtons, is right here.
Please welcome Mr. Gene Shepard.
How do you do, sir?
Pleasure to meet you.
Any bit of information I've ever heard about you was always prefaced by a
description of a radio show you used to do in New York City,
and people said you would talk and talk and talk about anything that came to
mind, and it was fascinating. Is this true?
Well, my show is a little like Clifford.
Yeah, I loved Agnes saying, I dust them bottles.
Yeah, that's a full life for Agnes, apparently.
I could just see, my mother, by the way, collected wash rags.
My old man used to dust his Pontiac with her wash rag, and I know that kind of
conflict that goes on out there, Dave.
Would you tell me a little bit about the radio show? You would get on and just
go, right?
Well, not really. I used to prepare that show every night.
Actually, it was a kind of a radio nightclub act, and one night I realized that
here I was six nights a week, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, two hours a night,
and I'd see my friends like Bob Newhart do a quick 18 minutes, you know, three
times a night.
I said to myself, I've got to get out of that business.
But people all loved what you were doing on the radio.
I loved it. How many of you ever heard my show in New York?
Excelsior.
It's the same group that was not sure whether the world had ended earlier.
We're sure, aren't we, Dad?
From the book A Fistful of Fig Newtons, tell me about, for example, the chapter
Lost at Sea.
Well, Lost at Sea, David, is about a thing that all of us have gone through.
You went to school once, didn't you?
I had some education, yes.
Well, I, here I was at the age of nine, already in a bad position in life,
because I was going to a school named after the worst president in history.
And I didn't know it. It was the Warren G. Harding School.
And I imagine there's some kid right now going to the Richard Nixon School.
There's no Richard Nixon.
And I was going to the Warren G. Harding School.
I'm sitting back there in the alphabetical ghetto, the last third of the
alphabet, me and Schwartz,
and Chester Wisniewski, and behind us was Zinsmeister.
And we'd sit there. We couldn't see. We couldn't hear.
And that classroom would extend up in front of us, and you could see the sun
coming in.
And Miss Shields would be up there in the front. She was wearing a blue Brillo
pad on her head.
We couldn't see what was going on. And I'd hear her talking. She'd say things
like,
And to me, that's education.
Pretty much it, huh?
And once in a while, a word would come out. I remember one day we were sitting
back there, and I hear this phrase,
Bolivia exports tin.
That's the only thing I ever learned all of my days at school.
And I use it to this day. I said it to Norman Mailer the other day. I said,
Mailer, Bolivia exports tin. He says,
My God, that's true.
Then you walk away quick and get a drink, you know, before you're discovered.
But algebra was the thing that finally proved my undoing, Dave.
And I remember I went to high school. I had been able to go all the way through
my grade school without once being called on.
And I had learned a technique in grade school, see, how not to get called on.
Now, every kid has his own technique, and my technique was to keep a line of
kids between me and the teacher.
Just keep moving, see, like a snake.
She could never see me, so I keep moving back and forth.
Schwartz would just slowly sink down into a seat, so he had his own technique.
Zinsmeister, who was Catholic, you could hear his beads going.
You know the fear of failure, see.
Well, I get into high school, see, and I had been able to fake my way all the
way through grade school, never got called on.
And all of a sudden, I'm in this class, and it's Mr. Settelmeyer, and it's
algebra.
Algebra.
Now, five minutes into the class, the first day, Dave, I knew I was six weeks
behind.
Kids were raising their hands up there, and they were answering questions.
I couldn't see, I couldn't hear.
And six weeks go by, I have done no algebra whatsoever.
And that fantastic day came when I'm sitting back there in the back of the room,
and I've given up.
I can hear the sound of the glee club singing in the distance.
Somebody is kicking a football.
And I'd never been called on in 13 years of school.
When I did the worst thing that a guerrilla fighter can do, I lost my
concentration.
Sitting there listening to the glee club singing, and I'm watching a moat of
dust drifting down.
When all of a sudden, out of the darkness, I hear Mr. Settelmeyer say,
Shepard, I hear a thin squeal from Schwartz.
He just grazed him.
Yeah, he says, my God, they got Shepard.
If they could get Shepard, they could get any of us.
There's no hope, you know.
And I got up, and I walked up, and of course, I had all these things I had
prepared, you know,
before I was called on.
I was going to say things like, repeat the question, please.
He says, yes, get up here and give me the value of C.
I walked up to the front of the class, and it was the first time I had actually,
clearly, David, seen an equation.
I couldn't believe it.
It was eight, nine yards long.
It was thick.
It had fringe, little things with twos on it.
And you know what?
I couldn't believe, Dave.
All this stuff switched over the whole board, and at the end, it said, equals
zero.
And it hits me.
All this crap equals nothing.
What is this?
We're going to have to take a pause right here in this.
We'll be right back.
More with Gene Shepard.
Thank you.
Gene Shepard is here, a radio great humorist, author, and not too good in
algebra.
But tell me now, there's another reference to the great ice cream war.
Oh, yeah, that was when I was a kid.
There was a place called the igloo.
And me and Schwartz, every day at lunchtime, we'd go to the igloo.
Same guy, Schwartz.
Yeah, me and Schwartz.
And, of course, me and Schwartz, neither one of us knew any algebra or anything.
See, we were working our way through ignorance the way other people work their
way through the Bible.
And, you know, we didn't know that we were ignorant.
Yeah.
See, so that made it easier.
So one night, we're down at the igloo, see, and Mr. Leggett is operating the igloo.
Now, igloo was the big ice cream store in town.
Now, this is a big town.
This is not the happy days or anything, see.
What town would this be?
This is the toughest town this side of the Barbary Coast.
It's a town called Hammond, Indiana.
It took guts, David, to just be a kid there.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's a mean town.
In fact, I remember late at night, you could hear the sound of pool balls
hitting together.
And I, at the age of 12, at maybe 12, 13, I could go out at night, and me and
Schwartz would siphon gas.
And at 12, at 2 o'clock in the morning, I could tell what brand of gas I was
drinking.
I preferred Phillips 66 for after dinner.
It was nice, clean.
It had a nice, dry quality to it, so me and Schwartz used to go to the igloo,
see.
And one night, we're sitting at home.
The old man is sitting there drinking a can of Blatt's beer.
But my mother's wearing her chenille Chinese red bathrobe with the aluminum rheostats
in the hair.
By the way, we had a sink that every night at 6.15 would go,
My mother jumped up with the Brillo pad, see.
She figured she could Brillo way all evil in the world if she got the ultimate
Brillo pad.
And she'd look down in the sink.
There'd be a pause.
The old man would put his, his Blatt's down on the table and look up.
And then the sink would go,
My mother jumped back.
One beat.
It'd just go, one beat, boop.
And then, pow, up would come Mrs. Bruner's coffee grounds from next door.
Hmm.
It could have been worse, I guess.
Well, it was Hammond, you know.
We traded coffee.
Yes, it was worse one night, by the way.
Mr. Bruner came home at 2 o'clock in the morning and the plumbing backed up.
Oh, my.
And that was fantastic.
So, began to learn about reality and, and we used to hang around the igloos.
So, one, this one night the phone rings and Mrs. Anderson is on the phone.
She says to my mother,
Mrs. Anderson, she says they're having a price war down at the igloo.
Now, do you know what a price war is?
That's when prices go down.
It's hard to believe it.
So, we run out and jump in the Oldsmobile.
My old man was an Oldsmobile owner, David, the way other people are Baptists.
You wake him up at 2 in the morning and say,
What are you?
And he says, I'm an Olds man.
Yeah.
And we get to Olds and we drive down.
There's a whole crowd of people.
Thousands of people are going down the street.
It turns out that right across the street from the igloo,
a place called the Happy Cow has opened.
Actually, it was owned by Bordens.
You remember Elsie, the cow?
Had a big plastic cow and he is going to put the igloo out of business.
Big corporation.
And Mr. Leggett has written on the front of his window,
Ice cream cones, triple deck, seven cents.
My God, everybody from the, from, they were coming from Michigan.
Well, the guy comes running out from, from the Happy Cow and he,
We're all standing there waiting in line to get our ice cream cones.
And he writes on his window, ice cream cones, three cents.
It's two o'clock in the morning now and they're starting to arrive from Iowa.
The panic was on him and finally, Leggett had had it.
He had it up to here.
He just went out and wrote all across the front of his store,
Ice cream cones free, all you can take.
And God, the place rocked.
And two days later, the Happy Cow was out of business.
They did it.
Mr. Leggett did it.
And it taught me at that point that if you're willing to give away everything
you got, you can win.
Yeah.
You can win.
Let's hear it for Leggett.
It's a true American story, Dave.
It certainly is.
And you've got a, quickly now you have a film coming up on PBS, sir?
Yeah.
It's going to be on the 16th of March and it's called
The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters or The Ballad of Ludlow Kissel.
I'll be there.
Thank you very much.
Gene Shepard, ladies and gentlemen.
We have to pause here for station.
We'll be right back.
Who's that?
We'll be right back.