Bathtubs Over Broadway

None of this should have happened.

I shouldn't know about it.

This stuff is bizarre and hilarious.

Those are only the beginning layers.

We were not supposed to hear these songs.

We were not supposed to see these productions.

It was supposed to be all thrown away and forgotten.

But we played a trick on history, and we saved it.

We've never heard of those!

Well, hang on 'cause...

Hey, Todd. How's it going?

- Sir. - Is it a bloodbath?

He cut a decent amount, but we put in some saves

- and some new, uh, Patriots jokes. - Okay. All right.

So right now, three elements?

- Uh, yeah, closing on Cher. - Okay.

Okay.

And does Cher require a special cue?

Or is it just from off the previous stage joke?

She's just cued off the Kim Kardashian joke.

"Wound clear around her ass." Okay.

I feel like industrial musicals kind of chose me.

It just kind of crossed my path,

and I seemed to be the right person

at the right time in history to latch onto this.

The joke preceding that is, uh, one you have on your page

about Kim Kardashian, uh...

"Big line for the... For the book.

Uh, the line wound clear around her ass."

I like your tie.

Yep.

So I'm gonna double and triple-check that,

but that seems to be where we landed.

All right, thank you.

From the heart of Broadway,

broadcasting across the nation and around the world,

it's the Late Show with David Letterman.

Steve kind of is the voice of the show.

Uh, I mean, obviously Dave is the voice of the show,

but Steve has been around as a writer longer than anybody else.

I consider Steve to be the last vestige

of the heyday of late-night talk show television writers.

There are precious few of these men and women who can do this.

- All right. - Do we just have him

- groan a little bit, like... - Yeah.

Should we put that line earlier on?

'Cause I think that's funny that he has

- a compound fracture. - Sure.

When you're a comedy writer,

you become so calloused to so much out there,

'cause we're so immersed in pop culture and comedy

that it takes a lot to entertain us.

We become hard laughs.

But with Steve, he's already, you know, way left of center.

Steve always takes it in a way that we...

You know, you just could never do.

After decades of writing comedy and working in comedy,

I do think that many of the receptors in my brain

that would allow me to enjoy comedy like civilians, I would call them,

have been burned out.

People around me will be roaring with laughter at something,

and I'll just be nodding politely.

For me, now, to find anything that makes me

burst out laughing is somewhat rare.

That's just Bob's head on a stock-photo guy's body.

It makes perfect sense

that Steve would be enamored with something

- called The Bathrooms Are Coming! - Yeah.

- Isn't that the name of it? Okay. - Yeah.

I had been hearing The Bathrooms Are Coming!

As long as I can remember,

but I didn't actually know what it was.

I thought he had just kind of made it up.

- I thought he made it up, too. - And, like,

it was this thing in our family.

Now, here's something that nobody cares about.

Sorry. Back up.

Here's something that most people don't know about.

Um, and... And he's just turning it into this huge thing.

I found out that it was part of a bigger thing later.

Yeah, that was a shock.

So, how does a cynical comedy writer with comedy damage

get emotionally involved

with people who wrote musicals about ball bearings

and light bulbs and bathtubs?

It began really very accidentally and randomly.

Here we go!

Perfect. Oh, good.

Uh, here we have an album, it's called Number One Hard.

Now, this is a musical.

Please don't make up your own jokes.

Number One Hard. It's a musical about the Canadian grain industry,

and we'll be hearing a song

from this album entitled "Wheat."

I didn't really collect any records

before the Letterman show,

but it became my job to look for records

for "Dave's Record Collection."

It's a comedy bit we do on the show.

We find unintentionally funny

and weird records, and make jokes about 'em.

I'm a bad bird.

Bloopers, I probably would not have gotten,

'cause that's already trying to be funny.

The best stuff for "Record Collection"

was the stuff that was unintentionally hilarious.

But then I started finding

these mysterious corporate souvenir records

marked on the labels

"Not for commercial use," "Not for broadcast,"

"Souvenir use only."

And I had no idea what I was finding.

I just thought, you know, "This is something

we can make fun of right away."

Hey. It's amazing, it's actually more annoying

- than my insurance man. - Yes, you're right.

It seemed like, "This is too easy."

Some big faceless corporation

trying to put on a musical like a Broadway show.

How pathetic.

A whole musical about diesel engines

or Oldsmobiles or sneakers.

Thank you, comedy gods,

because this is hilarious.

These weren't jingles.

These weren't commercials.

This was a full-fledged Broadway-style musical show

for a private audience of people within the company.

You did it, and we are here today

to pay tribute to you.

Some were live recordings,

and you hear audience going, "Whoo-hoo!"

And sometimes you'll see a letter tucked inside.

"Here's the souvenir of the fun we had last May."

You just think, "Well, that's kind of sad, isn't it?"

What kind of people worked on this stuff?

I mean, that must be the strangest dead end

of show business that anyone's ever wandered into.

Do you get out of that?

I thought, probably something wrong with me

that I keep wanting to listen to My Insurance Man

and Diesel Dazzle in my off hours.

I didn't really know anything about musical theater,

but I was pretty sure it wasn't supposed to be this.

What shouldn't you write a musical about?

Let's write it, and let's make it really good,

and let's not tell anyone about it.

I had no hobbies.

I barely had any friends outside the show.

"I just thought, "Wouldn't it be great

if there were, like, dozens of these records?"

about the rest of "Record Collection."

I just want to find more of these things.