My new book is CANCER ON $5 A DAY* *chemo not included written with comedian Robert Schimmel. If you don’t know Schimmel, he is simply the funniest, filthiest comedian in the world. You just might not have heard of him.   

Despite HBO specials, bestselling CDs, consistently sold-out club dates, and frequent appearances with Howard Stern and Conan, Schimmel still manages to fly under the radar. Unless you’re a comic. Schimmel is the comedian’s comedian. He’s the guy comics pay to see, and comics never pay for anything.   

I met Schimmel in 1999 when I profiled him for Emmy Magazine. I knew about him but hadn’t seen him perform. My editor sent me his HBO special. I popped in the disk having no idea what to expect. An hour later I was a mess. I had not laughed that hard and helplessly since I had seen George Carlin live twenty years before.   

After I interviewed him, Robert invited me to see him perform in Los Angeles. I visited him backstage after the show. He was drained and slightly disoriented, perhaps from the pressure of what had been a show business industry performance, or perhaps from the rapidly advancing but undetected cancer that was coursing through him.    

The next day we spoke for an hour on the phone. He told me about his parents, Otto and Betty, both Holocaust survivors. And he told me about his son, Derek, who had died from cancer at the age of eleven. What Robert didn’t know was that I, too, had lost a son. This made our bond stronger. We had both been inducted into an exclusive club that had only one savage requirement for membership.    

Two weeks later, Robert was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He went through seven months of chemotherapy. He fought the cancer and beat it.    

But the big story is how he beat it.    

He beat it by refusing to allow the disease to stop his life, and by dedicating his life to helping others the only way he knows, by making them laugh. He saw how attitude matters. Laughter is the best medicine, according to Reader’s Digest. Robert Schimmel proved that to be true.    

CANCER ON $5 A DAY is an as-told-to biography and the funniest book ever about cancer, narrated in Robert’s truly unique voice.    

The book is also a page turner, deeply emotional, and uplifting. As Schimmel says, “If you read this book and you don’t cry and laugh out loud, then you must be dead.”