Guilty as Charged

Robert Schimmel delivered stand-up with the cadence of a tired suburban dad and the vocabulary of a degenerate. He takes deeply mundane situations like paying a hotel bill or listening to airline safety instructions and smoothly escalates them into graphic, uncomfortable territory. The standout bit involves the sheer panic of an in-room movie checkout, where a front desk clerk loudly announces the title of the adult film he rented. Schimmel does not tell standard dirty jokes. He constructs elaborate, humiliating scenarios where he is always the biggest loser in the room.

Filmed at the Catch a Rising Star club inside Bally’s in Las Vegas, the 1994 Showtime hour captures a working professional who was already a fixture on the Strip. Schimmel had spent the previous years building a reputation through early appearances on Rodney Dangerfield television specials and a writing stint on Fox’s sketch show In Living Color. The tourist crowd at Bally’s is frequently caught off guard by his delivery, oscillating between groans and laughs as he details exactly how to handle a hungry shark or the depressing logistics of purchasing an inflatable love doll.