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STRANGE BREW

Park Slope comedian scores five minutes of fame on Comedy Central’s ’Premium Blend’

By Lisa J. Curtis
GO Brooklyn Editor
Brooklyn comedian Todd Levin will appear on Comedy Central next month.

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Although comic Todd Levin is at home performing in small, dark alternative clubs in Downtown Manhattan, he leapt at the chance to do stand-up in the spotlight, on a stage before hundreds of un-inebriated spectators, as part of Comedy Central’s "Premium Blend."

The episode, which airs on Dec. 2, features a small portion of Levin’s act, but his television debut, hosted by Damon Wayans, reveals the Park Sloper to be a hilarious, smart comedian.

In his set, taped in August, Levin distinguishes himself from the three other featured comics by poking fun at his blazer, long hair and beard: "I’m aware that I have a look about me that some might consider aggressively Jewish."

GO Brooklyn spoke with Levin for 40 minutes about his five-minute set.


GO: I saw a tape of the show last night, and I have one question: Are you REALLY Jewish?

Todd Levin: [Laughs] No, it’s part of my stage persona. I’m actually Presbyterian. The beard is false.

GO: The "Premium Blend" episode features a snippet of your routine. Is your whole act derived from mocking your ethnicity?

TL: The Jewish stuff in that set may come across a little bit unbalanced. The jokes that you heard about Nazis and me being Jewish in the beginning are literally the only jokes I have about my ethnicity at all.

But certainly being Jewish is part of my identity and feeds into a lot of my anxiety and paranoia and the way I look at the world with a suspicious eye - waiting to be rounded up.

Honestly, the whole thing at the top about me being aggressively Jewish - I’ve been in Brooklyn for 10 years [and] somehow I’ve transformed into this weird cultural stereotype.

It’s weird, because I’ll talk about it on stage, tell an audience of 500 that I’m Jewish, but when the Hasidic Jews on the corner in Park Slope ask me if I’m Jewish - because they want me to put on the tefillin and pray with them - I always feel compelled to tell them I’m Greek.

I’m asked pretty often.

GO: You’re in demand!

TL: I’m an easy target. Since I grew my hair out and the beard, I get mistaken for people’s Kabbalah instructor. It wasn’t intentional by any means. In fact, if anything, I’m really bad at being Jewish; I don’t make it to synagogue very often. I feel guilty about assuming it as a cultural identity.

GO: When growing the beard, were you thinking Billy Joel, circa "Nylon Curtain"?

TL: [Laughs] No one ever said that before! I get Cat Stevens a lot. I’ve been told I look like him by an uncomfortable number of people, actually.

GO: What’s your opinion of those legendary Brooklyn comics that have come before you? Andrew Dice Clay? Colin Quinn?

TL: Legend is your word. When I was in high school, I thought [Clay] was hilarious. To a 14- or 15-year-old kid, Andrew Dice Clay is really, really funny. I’m not sure how I feel about him now.

Colin Quinn is great. I think he’s one of the funniest comedians working right now. For people who want to be a serious, working comedian, he’s an incredible role model because he’s never stopped.

GO: Do you perform regularly in Brooklyn?

TL: There are fewer opportunities in Brooklyn [than Manhattan], but there are fun, alternative venues like the Brooklyn Comedy Company. They’re a bunch of Brooklyn comics who have sort of made it their agenda to put more comedy venues in Brooklyn, so they have a comedy night in Williamsburg, Carroll Gardens and Prospect Heights, so I do those shows quite a bit.

I’m not a regular club comic who does the road all the time. I tend to do more of the more alternative downtown rooms like Rififi and Upright Citizens Brigade, which I really like doing. They’re a lot of fun.

GO: Before taping "Premium Blend," did you have any pre-show jitters?

TL: Oh god, of course, yeah. It’s quite a long process. I think I found out about it in late May, early June and they taped it in August. So you have plenty of time to freak out. And during those two months, I was still fussing with my set. I do this all the time as a comic anyway, it keeps me interested in telling [the jokes]. I spent a month, month-and-a-half maybe, trying to figure out what I was going to do for my set.

GO: And you were on stage for seven or eight minutes?

TL: It seems silly, but for some of the people doing that, myself included, there are several years of performing that lead up to those seven minutes.

GO: Was it more difficult to perform in front of the sober "Premium Blend" audience than the usual club crowd?

TL: There’s a very different energy to the crowd. For the "Premium Blend" taping, you’re dealing with a huge space, a lot of distance between you and the audience, and it’s a television audience, which means they’ve been whipped up into a frenzy by the emcee, by the warm-up comedian. A lot of the comedians who did "Premium Blend" said this, too - and it’s a great complaint to have, I guess - the audience is almost too enthusiastic. To the point where it could potentially throw you off your rhythm because you anticipate a certain amount of laughter at certain beats in your performance. Sometimes you’re getting it way before you anticipated or it’s way more than you anticipated, and you have to decide whether to wait it out or to talk over them. But it’s so much fun.

GO: Was it very competitive with the other comedians backstage?

TL: It wasn’t competitive it all. In fact, it was incredibly friendly. It kind of reminded me of taking the SATs in high school. There, everybody had to take them, and there wasn’t a sense of competition because we all knew we had to do this. There was a built-in sense of camaraderie. We would go over our stuff with each other, we would freak out and complain to each other, we were each other’s therapists.

The only thing weird about backstage is that there are cameras everywhere. It made me so self-conscious. As you step off into the wings, there’s a camera in your face asking how you feel. That was a little unnerving.

GO: What has been your worst heckle to date?

TL: Once, I had a free show at the Upright Citizens Brigade in Manhattan and a drunk, homeless man wandered into the show. He wasn’t so much heckling me as having a stream of consciousness conversation with me with whatever came into his head. And I had to deal with him throughout the show. But that was kind of fun, because the things coming out of his mouth were inherently funny. Nonsensical. But it was not malicious in any way.

GO: So you don’t have a big ego. You’re happy to share your set with a drunk, homeless man as long as he’s got good material?

TL: [Laughs] Absolutely, yeah. He’s helping me write my stuff. He’s helping me with a crash course in crowd work.

GO: Jerry Seinfeld has "Seinfeld." Chris Rock has "Everybody Hates Chris." If you get some buzz from "Premium Blend," and you’re offered your own TV show, what would it be called?

TL: I’ve been writing a book of essays, so if I had a TV show, I would probably give it the same name, "The Boy with Perpetual Nervousness."

GO: It’s not going to be "Un-Levined"?

TL: No it’s not. [Laughs.] How dare you?

 

Comedian Todd Levin will perform on Comedy Central’s "Premium Blend" on Dec. 2 at 11:30 pm. For more information, go to www.ComedyCentral.com.

For Levin’s upcoming performances, go to his Website, www.Tremble.com.

©2005 Community Newspaper Group


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