Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

I totally fell for it. I said, “I am over here !” What a stupid trick, but people were laughing, and that broke the ice, and then he did a whole routine. “Ruthie, my wife,” he said. “Look at her lips. The last time I saw lips like that, it had a hook through it.”

Ruthie, who was sitting next to Maria, said to her, “Oh God, that joke. I’ve heard it a thousand times.”

Berle sat down with us afterward, and we had a great time. Finally, he said, “Let’s get together.”

“Absolutely!” I said.

We met at Caffé Roma in Beverly Hills, and it became our place. We always had lunch there, and I’d hang out with him and his friends like Sid Caesar and Rodney Dangerfield, and Milt Rosen, who wrote a lot of the jokes. Or I would go to his house, where we’d smoke stogies while I asked him a thousand questions about comedy.

Berle was the president of the Friars Club of Beverly Hills, which he founded in 1947 with other comedians like Jimmy Durante and George Jessel. It was on a side street between Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards, in a white building that resembled a bunker from the outside but inside was a private restaurant and nightclub. I would go every month or two for a lunch or a dinner or some event. The Friars had good boxing matches and was famous for celebrity roasts. But Milton was almost eighty, and it was very clear that the club was outdated.

He and his buddies had such a strong lock on it that new comedians weren’t joining. Guys like Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin, Danny DeVito, and Robin Williams would visit, and you would see them getting frustrated and thinking, “Who are these old farts? I can make jokes that will blow everyone away.”

But I was not a comedian, so I was not putting myself on that level. What’s more, I grew up in a culture where you respect the elders. To me, someone as accomplished as Berle ought to be honored and complimented and pumped up because maybe he didn’t have much going on anymore. It must have been weird to be Milton Berle, and, after becoming a legend as “Mr. Television” and then being a big star in Las Vegas and on Broadway, all of a sudden your only identity is the Friars Club. No matter where he was, Milton tried to steal the show because he still had that craving for attention, which was why he’d become a comedian.

I discovered that all these comedy legends could have a normal conversation, but not often. They would talk about everyday stuff if we were hanging out at Caffé Roma, but then Robin Williams would come by, or Rodney Dangerfield in his Bermuda shorts, and that would stir things up. If you went with that same bunch to an event where there was any kind of audience, the madness never stopped: joke upon joke and attack upon attack, with everyone going after everybody else. But the funniest thing was that a lot of the comedians brought their wives, who were normal-looking hausfraus. They would roll their eyes at the jokes. You could almost hear them say, “Here we go again. Oh God.” In fact, sometimes you did hear one of them say, “Aw, come on, how many more times are you going to use that one?” That was the worst. The old comedians just hated it.

The Friars Club guys didn’t see me as a comedian. They liked me as a person and liked my movies, and they felt that I had some talent for jokes with certain safe material that was not too complicated. They also knew I respected them and admired their talent. That was fine. You have to figure out your potential. So let’s say on a scale of 1 to 10, with Milton Berle a 10, my potential is a 5. In comedy his potential was much greater than mine, obviously, but maybe not in something else. It’s hard to imagine Milton Berle as an action hero.

But the trick is how do you reach 100 percent of your potential? It was the right time in my career to expand into comedy and throw everything off a little bit. But I also knew comedy was a tricky thing to get involved with. Particularly for me as a European, because I didn’t have an American sense of humor, and my timing and delivery of lines tended to be a little cockeyed. So meeting these guys and being included in their world gave me a chance to understand it better. I discovered that I really like being around people who are funny and who write comedy and who are always looking to say things in a unique way—though I had to get used to Milton wisecracking that I had bigger tits than my girlfriend.

He became my comedy mentor. He used to encourage me by saying, “You being funny with your accent is twice as big a deal as me being funny. They expect me to be funny!” He taught me a lot about how to deliver jokes, how to play down the humor and not stress the punch line too much. I would ask how to pick jokes to lighten up a serious situation and tie them in so the humor seems organic. I learned how if you’re doing standup, nothing has to tie together at all. First, you make a few jokes about whatever’s in the news, like Jay Leno does. Then you pick some people in the audience and work them over, and you make sure to throw in some jokes on yourself to take the curse off the fact that you’re making fun of other people.

Often Milton would coach me on timing. “You get a lot of awards when you’re a star, and lots of them are irrelevant,” he said. “But you still have to give an acceptance speech. So here’s what you do. You say, ‘I’ve gotten many awards, but this one … for me …’ —and you have to get emotional here and make like you’re choking up—‘this one … for me … is the most … recent! ’ See? You show the emotion so you get the audience going the other way.”

Berle wrote his own jokes— The Milton Berle Show was the biggest and longest-running program on TV in the early days—but he was also famous for stealing from everybody else. Jack Benny once got accused of stealing a joke from Berle, and he said, “When you take a joke away from Milton Berle, it’s not stealing, it’s repossessing.”

His biggest frustration with me was the way I always went over the top. He was helping me get ready once for a roast that he couldn’t attend. On that occasion, I was the person to be roasted, and Milton was giving me jokes to use when my turn came to respond to the other speakers. “Don’t burn, just singe,” he said, reminding me of this old rule about roasts. I didn’t pay much attention. One of the jokes he gave me was about comedian Henny (“Take my wife—please!”) Youngman: “Henny has a weight problem. But it’s not really a weight problem, it’s just water retention. He is retaining Lake Mead.”

On the night of the roast, during my turn to speak, I gestured toward Henny and said, “Look at this fat pig. But he’s not really fat. He has a water retention problem …”

Milton’s friends from the Friars Club knew he’d been coaching me, and the next day they called him up yelling, “How could you tell Arnold to call Henny a fat pig!” Milton said I should call the club members who were offended and apologize. “I thought by going beyond what was written on the card, it would be funnier,” I told them. “But I know it was against the rules, and I’m sorry.”

When I see a great performer, I always start to dream. Wouldn’t it be cool to be a rock ’n’ roll star like Bruce Springsteen? Wouldn’t it be cool to give a speech to the applause of one hundred thousand people like Ronald Reagan? Wouldn’t it be cool to do a hilarious half-hour standup routine like Eddie Murphy? Maybe it’s the Leo in me, the perpetual performer who always wants to be the center of attention.

So with Milton Berle, I was saying to myself, “Maybe I will never get to his level, but if I can learn just a little bit of what he knows …” How many times in life do you have to give a toast? How many times do you have to give a speech for some worthy cause like physical fitness? Or appear at a press conference at some movie festival?