Seth Meyers does not employ people to floss his teeth and buy his toilet paper

I often think of celebrities as America’s version of royals, and I imagine they employ a phalanx of guards to carry out their duties, like buying toilet paper and flossing their teeth.

I think that way, because those are the idiotic things I dream of having assistants do for me, if I were rich and famous like, say, Seth Meyers.

But then Seth Meyers called me from his NBC office at “Late Night with Seth Meyers.” (You can see him perform stand-up comedy tonight at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas.)

And I asked him to describe his celebrity phalanx of royal guards.

“I have a very capable assistant, but there’s nary a phalanx in my life,” Meyers said.

Meyers even answers his own emails. Isn’t that crazy?

“I have to be honest,” the comedian told me comedically. “I think you’re making a big mistake treating celebrities like royals. Your life is going to be full of disappointments, and it will be all your fault. This is a very strange take you have on things.”

In fact, Meyers said, I should steer clear of celebrities who “treat themselves like royals.”

“You want no part of them,” he said, without naming names.

What’s odd about interviewing Meyers is, he interviews celebrities for a living. So I was interviewing an interviewer — a house of cards and mirrors and smoke and fog.

“You’re one of us,” I said, trying not to make that horror-movie sentence sound creepy. “You seem to have a better idea of interviewing than most people in the world.”

“That’s interesting,” Meyers said. “It is very strange to be interviewed, and to answer questions.”

Meyers said he knows the following, for sure: If someone is interviewing you, you have to be careful of what you say, to avoid being taken out of context. This especially applies to Meyers, since he has to remain likable by TV viewers.

And to tell you the truth, Meyers’ reputation at my newspaper is he is very nice, yet he’s sort of guarded about what he says in interviews.

That’s why I then said, “You have to be guarded. But you have to say things to get you publicity, or else, why do the publicity? It’s a weird trap we put you (celebrities) in.”

That’s true, he said.

But Meyers said he has been telling more intimate life stories on TV as time goes on, just as he has always done in his stand-up gigs.

A good example of Meyers’ getting more personal on TV is when he recently told a funny story about how a friend broke his nose during a game of street hockey.

“The moment after the hockey stick cracked into my face, I was thinking, ‘Well, at least this will be an anecdote. At least I’ll have something to talk about on my television show,’ ” he said.

“The hilarious thing is having a job where you try, every night, to have some personal thing to say.”

Yes, I totally understand that. I’m always living my own life pretty publicly for that exact reason.

SO THIS HAPPENED

Friday, I went to the bank, and the teller asked, “Are you doing anything fun this weekend?”

“Yes. I’m going to Crazy Horse III tonight,” I said.

“What’s that?” she said.

“A strip club,” I said.

“Do you want some ones?” she said.

“No thanks,” I said. “They’ll have ones there.”

But isn’t that good bank service? I like this bank. It cares about me.

Doug Elfman’s column appears on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Email him at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He blogs at reviewjournal.com/entertainment/reel.