Strong talk from a man who ferrets out yodeling poodles, whistling navels and confessed extraterrestrials. But Stephenson, 32, readily admits that off-screen he's often out of character. "Comedians are a very strange breed," he shrugs. "We are scared, lonely people. With me, there's always the fear that if I'm not hurting, I won't be funny. I have always used humor as my way of fighting bitterness."
Sadly, he can draw from a wealth of material, including his mother's sudden death when he was 15. "She went into the hospital for a simple gallbladder operation and never came home," Stephenson mourns. "No chance for a goodbye, nothing. I was very bitter, very angry. My dad died a few years back, and I felt the same way." A 1977 divorce from his wife of three years, legal secretary Jan Walton, provided grist for his stand-up comedy routine—he refers to her incessantly, if fondly, as "Plaintiff"—but floored him personally. "I can't live with her, and it's damn hard living without her," he grumbles. "I was destroyed. I used to get in my car and drive around the freeways like some guy out of a Joan Did ion novel. I was lost, and I still am.
"My experiences have made me careful about relationships," Skip continues. "I tend to shut them off before they get serious." Comedy-writing collaborator Meri Mayfield softens that stark picture slightly. "Skip doesn't have a lot of friends," she says, "but the ones he does have, he's there for. Once, when I was very sick, he just stayed by my bed—having quit a job to do it. He's also the easiest touch in town." "Basically, I'm a lonely person," admits Skip, who lives in a cluttered, closet-size North Hollywood studio. "I just bought a new house in Studio City, but there's no one to share it with." Then he muses, "Maybe I'll get a dog. They travel light."
That would be a suitable companion for someone with such Rockwell-esque roots. Born Charles Fredrick Stephenson to a telephone lineman in Omaha, Skip recalls "going to Mass every day and serving as an altar boy at Holy Name High School. But I always thought I was pretty funny, too." Not to mention an Omaha Olivier in school plays (with roles like "Blunder the Fat Kid and other tours de force"). He flunked seventh grade but regained favor in high school by chauffeuring nuns to after-school appointments in "my old Plymouth with bored-out cylinders. That car was a hot item. I did a lot of time at the A&W root beer stand."
He did two semesters at the University of Nebraska before dropping out to become a radio announcer, then moved on to Colorado Springs' KRDO. In 1974 he quit to try comedy in L.A. "I was going to send back for my girlfriend," Stephenson recalls, "but I guess I waited too long, because she married somebody else." Comedy proved equally depressing. "I played places where sailors would scream at me and I'd scream back," remembers Skip, who lived in dingy motels while earning $75 for "a six-night-a-week gig, four shows a night." Finally he began to rise alongside pals Freddie Prinze and Richard Pryor to "the better clubs, where the audience's IQ was higher than their age." Prinze helped him get his first Tonight Show bid, which Stephenson daringly turned down because a guest host was filling in. By waiting for a second invitation, from Carson, Skip became a favorite of the proprietor and a frequent guest. George Schlatter, who produced TV's watershed Laugh-In, cast him for Real People in 1979. Recalls Skip, "I felt that I was onto something big."
Stephenson finds sanctuary in an uninterrupted grind of Real People reporting, stand-up gigs and writing. "Plaintiff always used to say I was married to my work," says Stephenson, "but actually I'm a slave to it. Sometimes I go to movies. But my office is in my head, and I'm always open for business. I'd like to take a vacation, but I think it would just make me nervous." He doesn't, however, flatter himself that his troubles are unique. "Aw, hell, I'm no different from anybody else," he sighs. "I'm just trying to get out of this alive."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
