30 Rock star is gearing up for Cats’ challenge
Tina Fey, Friedlander’s co-star on the Emmy Award-winning show 30 Rock concurs. “He’s one of the all-time weirdoes,” she told Letterman, but stressed he’s “such a lovely guy” he gets away with it.
Friedlander’s one-liners tend to be sharp. “I saw a one-handed man in a second-hand shop,” he says, deadpan on stage, “and I told him, ‘I don’t think you’re going to find what you’re looking for’.”
Friedlander is visiting Ireland for the first time to take up a few slots at Kilkenny’s Sky Cat Laughs Comedy Festival, where he’s slated for sessions with David O’Doherty, who might dress like the American but has nothing of his chutzpah.
Friedlander trades on his outlandish persona. He dresses in shabby, slacker gear, wears over-sized glasses, has a beard and keeps his mop of unkempt hair under a trucker hat.
He likes to challenge audiences to throw a problem or national issue at him, which he solves on the spot. Homelessness? “A big problem,” he admits during a gig at Caroline’s, one of his regular haunts on the New York comedy scene. “We have a lot of homeless in this country. What else do we have a lot of in this country?” he asks an audience member from the front row, but answers himself. “Cars. And what do cars run on?”
“Gas,” replies the person in the audience.
“Roads,” says Friedlander, correcting him condescendingly. “I don’t know where you drive dude, but cars run on roads. And what do a lot of roads have? Tollbooths, little houses. We should make the homeless live in tollbooths. They’re already good at asking for change.”
Friedlander, who was born in 1969, has been at the live stand-up game since the age of 19. His first gig was at an open-mic session in New York.
“I was very nervous,” he says. “I was pretty introverted when I was at high school, and at college, too, probably. I got there at about six o’clock.
“I didn’t go on until 11, so for five hours I was hanging out the back of the comedy club, on the stairwell, on the parking lot, going over my act, again and again. The crowd was starting to really dwindle.
” Right before I go on stage, the host goes, ‘I’m cutting you to three minutes.’
“I didn’t understand that he was just trying to get all the comics up before the audience left. I thought it was a slight against me. I went on stage thinking, ‘How do I cut five minutes material to three? Do I talk faster?’. But I went on stage and it immediately felt like home. It felt very warm. I did get some chuckles, but I didn’t do stand-up again until six months later because I thought that’s how it worked. I didn’t realise you were supposed to be doing it every night.” These nights, he’s been known to do five stand-up gigs a shift, whizzing from venue to venue around New York. He’s had parts in comedy films such as Zoolander and Meet the Parents, a leading role alongside Paul Giamatti in American Splendor, and has also been involved in two of the best comedy TV shows of the last decade — Curb Your Enthusiasm and Flight of the Conchords. He’s at the stage where he’s been noticed on the street, although not always for the right reasons.
“I was walking through Washington Street Park, which is well-known,” he says. “It’s a couple of blocks big. It’s in the Village in New York. Some drunk guy — not a guy you’d think would be picking fights, about 27, a Wall Street, financial guy — just keeps bugging me with political stuff. You could tell he was right wing. He was yelling all this abuse about the left wing.
“I don’t do any political stuff in my act. It got to the point where I thought this guy wants to fight me. He just keeps harassing me, until I realise he thinks I’m Michael Moore.”
* Judah Friedlander appears at the Sky Cat Laughs Festival, Kilkenny Ormonde Hotel, Kilkenny, 9.30pm Saturday, June 1; and at 6pm and 9.30pm, Sunday, June 2. For more information, visit: www.thecatlaughs.com.
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