Don't Bungee Jump Naked and other important stuff

By Jeanne Robertson

Humorist Jeanne Robertson has entertained audiences for five decades with her original, hilarious stories. In her new release, this "Grandma Gone Viral" with millions of views on YouTube shares some of her classic stories and introduces new ones. Jeanne's collection of stories, Don't Bungee Jump Naked and other impo

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeanne Robertson
• Release date: Jun 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9780578668628

Jeanne Robertson

Jeanne Robertson, one of America's most loved and respected speakers and humorist, has amassed over 142 million views on YouTube and thousands of followers on Facebook. She is theauthor of 4 books and 9 CDs/DVDs, and she wrote a regular column for one of several local magazines from 2000 until 2021. Her most popular stories include "Don't Send a Man to the Grocery Store," "Don't Bungee Jump Naked," and "Don't Snap an Elephant to a Tree." During the pandemic, her "Live From the Back Porch" Facebook live shows were frequently in the top 10 for worldwide viewership, according to Pollstar.Originally from Graham, NC, Jeanne lived in Burlington, NC, for many years. In 1963, she wonthe Miss North Carolina Pageant and participated in the Miss America Pageant, where she was voted "Miss Congeniality." She is the tallest woman ever to compete in that pageant. After graduating from Auburn University in 1967, she taught physical education, coached basketball, and was a part-time professional speaker until 1976, when she began speaking full-time.She was a professional speaker with more than 50 years of experience. She received numerous awards, including every award and honor bestowed by the National Speakers Association and the highest Toastmasters Award, The Golden Gavel Award. Jeanne proudly asserts that speaking both English and Southern helped her achieve these honors.In 2010, she teamed up with Al McCree Entertainment. Together, they took her humor into theatres, where she introduced audiences to her cast of beloved characters, including her husband Jerry, a.k.a. "Left-Brain;" son Beaver; her long-time Executive Assistant Toni, a.k.a. "The Queen of the Tickets;" her "Bestest Friend" Norma Rose; and Jane Tucker "from NYC."On August 21, 2021, the world got a little less funny when Jeanne passed away peacefully in her home after a short illness. She was preceded in death by her beloved husband, Jerry.Jeanne's friends, family, and fans continue to remember her stories, ensuring that her legacy lives on as we all follow the advice that she so consistently gave: to keep laughing and look for the humor in any situation.

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 by Jeanne Robertson

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Jeanne Robertson

www.JeanneRobertson.com

ISBN 978-0-578-66861-1

eISBN 978-0-578-66862-8

Printed in the United States of America

Book Design by Erin Erdos/Al McCree Entertainment

Cover Design by Erin Erdos/Al McCree Entertainment

Cover Photography by Dennis Carney Photography

First Paperback Edition.

For Jerry

Table of Contents

Extra Excitement for Left Brain People!

Introduction

Brief Bio . . .

Cast of Characters

Section 1 Best Place to Look for Humor? In the Mirror!

This is a Test

So Proud of Myself

QVC

The Saga Continued . . .

Home Sweet Home

Driving Miss Jeanne

The Toothpick Man

Section 2 Meet Left Brain - Gotta Love This Guy.

I Don’t Know Bob Sharpe

Don’t Ask Left Brain to Bring the Luggage

Don’t Send a Man to the Grocery Store

Section 3 Another Place to Find Humor? Check Out the Family!

Don’t Hire a Hit Man

Dealing with Teenage Hussies

Learning Cursive . . . or Not!

Gray at the Pool

Daddy’s Pride! Can’t Top It!

Shopping with Mother vs. Shopping with a Teenager

Don’t Forget Your Sister’s Birthday

Young Entrepreneur Sparks Family Crisis!

Twenty. Nine. Years. The Wait Worth Every Second

Section 4 Toni - Queen of Everything

Hiring Toni

Sleeping in Tubes

In Sync

He’ll Work with Me

The Alabama Fan

Oh, that Hurts . . .

Section 5 Friends are Forever

The Christmas Surprise

Don’t Go to Vegas without a Baptist

Norma Rose the Salesperson

The Merch Director

That’s a Wrap

Don’t Jump to Conclusions

Make a Statement

Section 6 Humor in Everyday Experiences

Ay Need Some Hel’up

It’s Fun to Play Along

Can’t Be Miss Congeniality All the Time

Help! I’m Speaking and I Can’t Shut Up!

The Great Marmot Standoff

Remember the Nantahala!

Eight-day Whitewater Rafting Trip

Don’t Bungee Jump Naked

Acknowledgments

Extra Excitement for Left Brain People!

To make Don’t Bungee Jump Naked even more exciting to left brain readers and in honor of my husband Jerry, the one we all now call Left Brain, I’ve deliberately sprinkled a few misspelled words and punctuation errors throughout the book for you to find. Not too many, just a few. Now, is that exciting for all you left brainers out there or what? Have fun!

Introduction

I’m a professional speaker - a humorist - and I’ve been one for a long time. It’s been my good fortune to have given speeches with signed contracts and make people laugh since 1963. It has always kept me as busy as I could possibly be and I’ve been quite content and happy in my career. Then . . .

In 2010, I was approached by Al McCree, a friend in the National Speakers Association for about twenty years. He had an idea. At that point, I had been speaking professionally for forty-seven years and had released six DVD/CDs of humorous, original material. One of my YouTube clips, Don’t Send a Man to the Grocery Store, had gone viral. (Meaning it had reached a large number of views in a short time.) It was soon followed by a second viral clip titled Don’t Bungee Jump Naked. SiriusXM satellite radio was airing many of my clips on the Family Comedy Channels. And, my DVDs were being shown every week to travelers on motorcoach tours across the country.

Al thought that due to this exposure I had enough name recognition to appear in one-woman ticketed theater shows across the country. I was so thoroughly entrenched into the mindset of booking speeches for conventions and corporate meetings that I was apprehensive and certainly didn’t get excited about his idea . . . at first. Actually, I was extremely hesitant and had to be convinced by Al and my longtime assistant Toni to give it a try. I had many questions. Who would come? How would we promote the shows? How would we sell the tickets? What if only a handful of people showed up? Could I walk out onstage to an empty auditorium and recover from the pain to laugh about it later? I was spoiled by meeting planners presenting me to rooms packed with attendees. Why would I take time off from my lucrative, busy and more importantly, fun speaking career to try theater shows? And of course, my husband Jerry, a.k.a. Left Brain, was concerned about who would pay for us to try this? (Gotta love this guy.)

Al had recently sold his record company and was looking for new opportunities. He was confident that we could figure out how to be successful promoting theater shows, but he cautioned that it might take years to build up the audience sizes. Already in my mid-sixties, I wasn’t sure I had the years.

Eventually I asked myself several questions. Why not? What did I have to lose? And the question we always ask in my office: did it seem like it would be fun?

I loved being a professional speaker and had spent decades developing my name recognition with a small, important group of people: meeting planners. I had all the work I could possibly do. Toni and I had figured out years earlier that my original funny stories were my marketing strategy. All we had to do was be nice and be funny. We called it marketing your mama taught you. We never had to cold call to get work. It was an extremely busy career based mostly on word of mouth advertising and the help of many meeting planners who told their associates about my work. The idea of this bigger theater market that Al was suggesting was intriguing but scary. Very scary.

At the same time, Toni told me that due to the DVD/CD sales from motorcoach exposure (the tour directors played my DVDs on most trips) we were beginning to get calls from all over the country asking when my show would be, for example, in Kansas City. She knew that I would be in Kansas City three times the next year but at conventions. The general public could not attend those private events, but they could attend ticketed events that were open to the public. Many who called Toni could not believe that I didn’t have a touring show. Hmmm.

What Al was suggesting was a whole different mindset. I did not see how my career could be better than the one I had as a professional speaker. I was wrong. I never dreamed it would lead to what it has become today.

At Al’s urging, I agreed to give it a small, safe shot. We decided to try two theater shows and basically underwrite them. The first show was in Dallas in a small theater. We sold out in two weeks. I was stunned. Dallas! (I didn’t even have relatives in Dallas.) That let us know two things: (1) Because of going viral on YouTube and being aired on SiriusXM and due to exposure in the motorcoach world through my hilarious speaking buddy, Carl Hurley, I did have a tiny bit of name recognition beyond the meeting planner/corporate market, and (2) we had selected a theater that was too small. The second show was in Durham, NC in a larger theater and we came within a few seats of selling it out. (Perhaps we should not have scheduled my show on the same day and in the same city as the Duke/Alabama football game.) We began to figure it out.

As mentioned, my greatest fear was that people wouldn’t come. The seats would be empty. I realized there was a safety net in speaking and I was accustomed to it. In general, as a professional speaker, it was not my responsibility to fill the hall. It was the meeting planner’s responsibility. In the theater world, it would be mine, working with Al and later with him and his team whom we dubbed in my home office in North Carolina as Thuh Nashville People. It would be up to my name. My appeal. My ability to sell enough tickets to make this work.

My professional speaker friends all asked one question when they learned of the new, larger direction. What’s the difference in going to Atlanta to speak at a convention or having a show at the Cobb Center in Atlanta which seats 2700? The answer was easy.

At a convention, I have to have a POINT.

Conventions, corporate meetings, banquets, etc. usually have to have a reason for the speech other than pure entertainment. They have to have points. A message. Often, it’s necessary to tie into the meeting’s theme or study the company. Sometimes, the speech has to be constructed so that attendees get CEUs, i.e. continuing education units.

Thuh Nashville People suggested that I just walk out on stage at the theater shows and be funny for an hour and a half. Easy enough for me because I had been being funny at speeches for decades, and I had plenty of original material that grows to this day. (I recently released my ninth full-length DVD.) What Al was describing, though, is what many comedians do when performing in comedy clubs. But I have never thought of myself as a comedian. I’ve always called myself a humorist. Mama said it sounded better.

I tried what Thuh Nashville People suggested. That’s when I discovered that having a point - a reason for all the stories other than pure entertainment - was ingrained in me. I absolutely could not be just funny. If I had wanted to do that, I would have headed to the comedy clubs years ago and that never interested me. Although I was accustomed to making points as a speaker, I knew theater audiences didn’t want a speech. Most folks don’t go out on a Saturday night, have a nice dinner and pay to hear a speech in a theater. Al and I were betting that they would pay to see family-friendly entertainment.

We found out quickly though, that audiences don’t mind leaving with a little something to think about after they’ve had fun laughing.

This book is a reflection of what I’m doing now, and I do hope you enjoy the stories I’ve selected to include this time around. I’ve chosen a sampling of stories that I created and that have served me well through the years, and that I still use today. Many of the stories are based on events that happened recently, so they’re new. Other stories you may have seen me tell before, but they have been updated here, often with little epilogues that tell, as Paul Harvey use to say, the rest of the story.

I’m not a professional speech writer, not by any stretch of the imagination. I write humorous stories for my own speeches, shows, columns, and books. I write for my enjoyment and more importantly, for your enjoyment. I hope you laugh, but I also hope you find value in the overall point: if we make it a priority to look for humor every day, we will find it.

We find it by (1) looking in the mirror first. Straight at ourselves. Then (2) looking for humor in our families, (3) looking for humor in our friends, and (4) looking at the humor that is happening around us daily. Ah, points. Points! POINTS! The professional speaker in me has reared its head.

If humor is occurring around me every day, it is occurring around you, too. If you look for it, you’ll find it!

Enjoy DON’T BUNGEE JUMP NAKED and other important stuff and keep laughing!

Brief Bio . . .

Jeanne Robertson began her speaking career when she was Miss North Carolina in 1963 and no one has milked it for more.

Morley Safer 60 Minutes

I thought it would be helpful if I included a brief summary of how my good fortune led me from a local beauty pageant in Graham, North Carolina to convention halls across the USA and eventually to theater shows. This brief review will also add a little background to many of the stories I selected for this book. My advice: read this part first, and you won’t have to try to put it all together later.

*

I was a rising junior at Auburn University in the Spring of 1963 when I went home to Graham, North Carolina one weekend to enter the Miss Graham Pageant. I had never done anything like that before. Growing up, I spent all my spare time playing basketball. There were six of us competing in the Graham pageant, sponsored by the local Jaycees, and we were all friends from high school. The night of the rehearsal we joked about drawing for the title and the prizes. Of course, we didn’t do that. At the conclusion of the pageant the next night, I was honored to be named Miss Graham and Miss Congeniality.

Later that summer I represented Graham in the Miss North Carolina Pageant. At that time, it was the largest state pageant in the nation with eighty-four contestants, each of whom had won her local pageant. The competition lasted four nights with the final night broadcast on statewide TV. I think I stood out a little due to my height and I was funny during the talent portion. I also seemed to click with the judges during my interview. Actually, it was fun. I won and started my year as Miss North Carolina the next day.

This victory put me in the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey in September. Or, as we say in the South, the Miss Ah’morica Pageant. At 6’2" tall, I was the tallest contestant to have ever competed in the Miss America Pageant. I didn’t win - you already know that. If I had won the title of Miss America, I would have put it on the cover of this book.

Pageants take a lot of criticism. Some is certainly justified but much is not. Like many other activities we do in our younger years, being in a pageant doesn’t hand you a career, but it sure gives a person the opportunity to develop skills for a lifetime. That certainly was the case for me.

As Miss North Carolina I was required to drop out of college for a year to make public appearances. I was paid for each one. Not much by today’s standards, but I was paid. The good thing was that I was usually asked to say a few words. It took me about a week to realize that when I spoke, I could make people laugh. When they laughed, they seemed to enjoy my part on the program and so did I. Pageants were huge at that time and I developed a statewide reputation for being funny. After that year of speaking, often several times a day, I crowned the next Miss North Carolina and the following week, spoke at three events in the state.

And I never looked back.

Oh, I finished college. I returned to Auburn and eventually graduated with a teaching degree, using my pageant scholarship money to pay for the last two years. And, I continued to give speeches most weekends.

Being Miss North Carolina literally changed my life. It altered the direction of my career, led me into full-time professional speaking and now, into theater work as a humorist. As Morley Safer said in a 60 Minutes segment, Jeanne Robertson began her speaking career when she was Miss North Carolina in 1963 and no one has milked it for more.

I’ve now been speaking professionally for more than 56 years, and I still love making the same point I made while traveling around as Miss North Carolina years ago - look for humor. Of course, my stories have changed as my life has changed, but I’m proud of the fact that I have always written my own material based on what I see happening around me every day.

It’s been a great ride thus far and when my career ends or when the boat comes to take me away to the big stage in the sky (see the Learning Cursive story) people should not be sad. I hope they will think of me . . . and laugh. If you’re so distraught you can’t bring yourself to laugh, visit my gravesite. On my tombstone you’ll see 2666961038.¹ It’s my Delta frequent flyer number. Surely the airline will retire it.

---

1 This is not my real Delta frequent flyer number. It is the number Delta uses in its ads. I’m funny, but I’m not nuts.

Cast of Characters

To get started and to save you time trying to figure out all the characters, let me introduce the cast of characters you’ll meet in this book and also thank them for letting me talk about them in shows and write about them here. Included is a little information that might also come in handy.

Jerry Robertson: Jerry is what a lot of people call my husband because Jerry is his name. I call him LB or more often, Left Brain. He’s a willing source of much of my material, and has to be the greatest sport in the world. Famous for saying quietly, I may have just done something you can tell about in a story but I’m not sure.

Toni: National Coordinator of everything in my office. Has run my office since 1979. Queen of Everything. In charge of everything. Loves Auburn as much as I do. Oops, make that as much as anyone. War Eagle! Like a sister but no one will ever think she’s my sister because Toni is five-foot nothing tall. My career has been a great ride, but it wouldn’t have been as much fun without Toni.

Norma Rose: My Bestest Friend. (We always give our little girls in the South two names in case they want to be in a pageant.) You can have only one Bestest. Met when our sons played high school sports together. Has an accent more Southern than mine. People think we’re sisters because we sound alike. I would do anything for her and vice versa, but she won’t sell my products again. (See the story Norma Rose the Salesperson.)

Jane Tucker: From New York City! Fashion expert