How Robert Schimmel Got the Last Word on Showtime’s ‘Inside Comedy’

Brian Higbee David Steinberg and Robert Schimmel during an interview for the Showtime series “Inside Comedy.”

As David Steinberg remembers it, his interview with Robert Schimmel was a hilarious reflection on an often tragic life.

In early 2010, Mr. Steinberg, the veteran comic and host of the Showtime series “Inside Comedy,” sat down with Mr. Schimmel, a stand-up performer who was not quite a household name but who had built a loyal following with appearances on “The Howard Stern Show” and in HBO specials like “Unprotected.”

Over the course of their conversation, Mr. Schimmel spoke candidly about challenges he had faced - driving from Phoenix to begin his stand-up career at the Improv comedy club in Los Angeles, only to find that it had burned down the previous night; the death of a son from cancer; and his own experiences after he was given a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma - while making clear he could find a dark humor in all of these events.

Then, later that summer, Mr. Steinberg and his colleagues at “Inside Comedy” received some shocking news: Mr. Schimmel had died from injuries he suffered in a car accident.

Mr. Steinberg’s interview with Mr. Schimmel will be shown on Monday, concluding the second season of “Inside Comedy” with an episode that is not particularly sentimental, celebratory or maudlin, and that acknowledges Mr. Schimmel’s death with only a simple title card at the end of the show.

It is also an episode that, for the makers of “Inside Comedy,” raised many questions of how best to present a performer who could no longer speak for himself, including the question of whether it should be shown at all.

That, said Mr. Steinberg, was his “very first thought.”

“Even after I saw it,” he added, “I had to be talked into it.”

Mr. Steinberg said he got over this first hurdle after consulting with his fellow producers on “Inside Comedy,” who include Steve Carell and Alan Zweibel, and who concluded among themselves that “no one in this group would be exploiting him in any way.”

“We just thought, this is a good thing to show his family, to show his kids,” Mr. Steinberg said. “It was so important for him to do this. This was a special interview for him.”

While most episodes of “Inside Comedy” typically alternate back and forth between interviews with two different comedians - say, Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin, or Tina Fey and Judd Apatow - Mr. Steinberg and his partners decided to devote an entire show to Mr. Schimmel.

This was a plan that Showtime did not immediately embrace, noting that the only other performers who had been given solo episodes in the series were Chris Rock and Larry David.

“At first blush it was, ‘O.K., so the third one in that constellation is Robert Schimmel’” said Gary Levine, the network’s executive vice president of original programming. “It gave us pause and we had to talk about it.”

Meanwhile, the “Inside Comedy” producers debated how best to inform viewers unfamiliar with Mr. Schimmel that he had died. They approached Mr. Stern, the radio host, about recording an introduction to the episode, but he was unavailable. They also scrapped a prologue in which Mel Brooks would have recited his famous aphorism on the difference between tragedy and comedy: “Tragedy is if I cut my finger. … Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die.”

By now, Showtime had seen the interview with Mr. Schimmel and felt it could sustain its own episode. “The timing of the interview and the irony of his life ending from none of the things that had afflicted him through his whole lifetime was just really impactful,” Mr. Levine said.

But Mr. Levine wanted a title card that would quickly alert viewers that Mr. Schimmel had died â€" “I thought, to have the audience share the power of the episode, they should be armed with the same knowledge that we are,” he said â€" and asked Mr. Steinberg to add this after one of Mr. Schimmel’s first anecdotes, in which he describes his arrival at the Improv in Los Angeles and finds it still smoldering.

“It’s something that I considered,” Mr. Steinberg said. “And then when I put it together that felt wrong. To me, the only way to go was to just let the audience hear what he has to say, and go with that card at the end.” After he and Showtime “jousted back and forth about this quite a bit,” Mr. Steinberg said, his approach ultimately prevailed.

(“My philosophy is, if you tried it, if you listened and if in the end you really don’t believe it works for you, you get to break the tie,” Mr. Levine said.)

For all the back and forth over the episode, Mr. Steinberg said it was important to highlight Mr. Schimmel, who he feels possessed a daring spirit that stand-up comedy requires.

“If you go into these areas that people are afraid to go into,” Mr. Steinberg said, “you’re always helping someone that has the same thing happening to them. There’s always someone else that has a version of whatever your worst thing is, happening to them.”

“The hardest thing to do in stand-up is risk the audience’s appreciation of you by going too far, and he wasn’t worried about that at all,” Mr. Steinberg said of Mr. Schimmel. “He will make you nervous, in any one of his shows, at some point, no matter who you are.”