His career is a joke
Orny Adams has flirted with fame more than once
There is no wondering about Orny Adams, no searching the corners for clues. It's all right there on the table.
What is it like to be a stand-up comedian in the age of YouTube and Comedy Central and a million distractions? What do you say when Jerry Seinfeld bumps you from the club stage? How do you prepare for Jay Leno?
Just ask.
Five years after the star-packed documentary "Comedian" introduced the talented but insecure up-and-comer, the 36-year-old Lexington native languishes between obscurity and fame, and discusses his steady and sometimes excruciating ascent through showbiz with candor.
So you want to be a star?
"You have all these hopes and dreams and you hear they're handing out these six-figure deals, and you're thinking, wow, that would change my life, and you think, I'll do stand - up for a few years and then I'll do a show like ' Seinfeld ' and then people will come out and see me and I'll be famous," Adams says. "And it just doesn't work that way."
What works for Adams is stand-up, to which he has been committed since he first stepped onstage. Wedged into five minutes between Rainn Wilson and The Shins in his second appearance on "The Tonight Show" in April, Adams jabbed at the unreliability of things. "Everything breaks," he said. "Cable goes out once a week, did you know that? No. You people work. People like me have to call it in for you."
To get ready for "The Tonight Show," Adams wrote 38 versions of the set of jokes and tried on "every suit by every designer in this town," he said over the phone from his home in Los Angeles a few days before the show. "I didn't sleep last night," he said. "I'm a wreck. I've got to get it together."
He often is the butt of his own jokes. In his debut DVD, available on his website, and titled "Path of Most Resistance," Adams pokes at the alleged roll of fat around his midsection. "At least I waited until I got older," he tells the boisterous crowd in a March 2006 show at The Ice House Comedy Club in Pasadena, Calif. "You see how fat some of these kids are getting? . . . It's not all their fault; we overfeed 'em. First of all everyone goes, 'What's the solution? . . . Stop feeding the fat kids!"
Making people laugh might be tougher now than ever. "First of all, everyone is exposed to so much comedy, with MySpace, YouTube, with all the television shows," Adams says over coffee at a
And once a comic captures their attention, the trick is to keep it. "Can we go five minutes without checking our cellphones, our e-mails?" Adams says. "There are people text-messaging during shows. People don't know how to act. They're going to yell, they're going to throw up on themselves. A guy starts throwing up in the front row of a show in California. I go, 'You all right?' The guy is now throwing up and giving me the finger at the same time. . . . I'm in my 30s, and this is what I'm doing, huh? Wow. OK."
Adams sometimes frets about his career path, but his father sees inspiration. "Orny's been in his own business from day one," Barry Orenstein says. "No suit and tie, no getting in the elevator in the morning and going to the 30th floor and going to the cubicle."
Adams' cubicle is the comic's stage, his office the club, theater, television, and -- on one occasion so far -- the big screen. His mouth and talent secured him a spot in "Comedian." In the 2002 documentary about the creative process of an established comic struggling to rebuild his stand - up act from scratch, director Christian Charles and producer Gary Streiner shadowed Seinfeld for 16 months starting with the New York club circuit.
Three months into shooting, Charles still hadn't found a working comic to juxtapose with Seinfeld. One night, he discovered Adams. "I think we were at Gotham Comedy Club, and we had just come off of shooting one of Jerry's sets, and Orny came up to me and said, 'You know, that's the third time this week that Jerry Seinfeld has bumped me off the stage,' " Charles says.
Adams recalls, "I had reached this modicum of success in the comedy clubs in New York and I was working every club every week and I was proud of that. And then who comes along? Jerry Seinfeld. So every club, I'm about to go on and they're like, 'Hey, Seinfeld's coming in. So you're going to go on after him.' Well, do you know what it's like to go on after Jerry Seinfeld?"
The filmmakers asked Adams what he thought of Seinfeld's stuff. "And I think the quote was, 'I've seen it all before,' " Adams says. "Imagine this: some little punk club comic, me, now giving advice to Jerry Seinfeld."
Charles had found the comic he was looking for. "Jerry has this ability to express exactly what it is that he's doing in his craft," he says. "And Orny does the same thing but almost involuntarily. He just wears his emotions on his sleeve. And he was the perfect partner for Jerry in the movie."
In the documentary Adams suffers, soars, bristles at criticism, and absorbs wisdom from Seinfeld, who also is plagued by self-doubt in the movie. Adams says in the film, "I never felt pain until I started doing comedy."
Adams was stunned when he took a pounding in several reviews of the film. "I think it's hilarious when critics come after comics," he says. "We're just trying to make you laugh."
The movie follows Adams to the Montreal comedy fest and David Letterman show. George Shapiro, Seinfeld's longtime manager, helped land him a development deal with Warner Bros. for a television show, according to Adams. "We never shot the pilot," the comedian says. But it helped pay bills and provided further Hollywood credibility.
These days he continues doing stand - up and also stays in touch with his mentor, Garry Shandling, for whom he has written jokes for the Emmys. Since the latest "Tonight Show" appearance , he has met with several networks and film companies about possible development deals and projects .
He's single. "By choice," he says on the DVD. "Not my choice."
Adams, whose real name is Adam Orenstein, graduated in 1989 from Lexington High School and four years later from Emory University, where he majored in political science and philosophy. A high school Spanish teacher allowed him to recite monologues from the Johnny Carson and David Letterman shows. In his sophomore year at Emory, he auditioned at a club in Atlanta "during the day in front of an empty room with somebody in the back not laughing." But he got the nod.
Scouts from
It didn't work out. "And the next thing you know I'm on a flight home," Adams says. "It was the loneliest, longest six-hour flight of my life."
But the experience gave him a headstart in New York. "I never had to audition at any clubs in New York City," he says. "I was very fortunate."
He comes back home occasionally to visit his parents, two sisters, and two nieces. "I feel very comfortable with my family," he says. " They're my biggest fans."
