Comedian Andrew Kennedy

Knows That Timing Is Everything

 

By Shannon Hicks

Andrew Kennedy started his stand-up comedy career by doing shtick over the phone to Treehouse Comedy Club owner Brad Axelrod in the summer of 1994. Now the Sandy Hook resident is preparing to shoot his own Comedy Central Presents special next month at The Hudson Theatre in New York City.

In preparation for that event Mr Kennedy will be headlining at the Treehouse Comedy Club in Danbury on Saturday, July 29, at 9:30 pm, in his first Connecticut performance since the Treehouse Clubs reopened early last year.

“That’s where I got my start, at the Treehouse,” Mr Kennedy said this week. He can’t help being funny, or at least animated, as he talks about his life and the career that derives most of its material from the life he and his wife Amy have made together. His family, which includes their sons Aidan, 4, and Ian, 2½, and newborn daughter Keira, is often fodder for his stand-up work, which he sees as storytelling with punchlines.

He is personable and engaging to spend time with, and completely serious about his comedy career. Yet he is often humorous or slips into accents during conversations, and seems to enjoy finding and pointing out moments many of us overlook. He also enjoys exploring so-called “normal” moments of parenting, which the Treehouse audience will find out later this month. Listening to Mr Kennedy describe a typical toddler-parent conversation that took place when he and one of his sons were in the shower recently, when the 4-year old boy made an observation about his father’s body, one cannot help but think of the long-running comic strip Baby Blues, in which co-creators Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott have turned a magnifying glass onto their own lives as fathers and are continually making readers go, “Oh yeah, that’s so true!”

Whether audience members of Mr Kennedy (or readers of Baby Blues) have children of their own or are affected by children around them, everyone has family members and life episodes that they recognize in Mr Kennedy’s performances.

“My shows are pretty much organic — they begin with autobiographical details from my early life and my parents, and evolve into my life today,” he said. “I talk a lot about parenthood, sometimes politics. I try to get some current events in there.

“The best sitcoms,” he said, “are based in part on the true lives of the writers. I follow that idea with my own material, which constantly evolves. I just come from an honest point of view, which allows me to be graphically honest about things.”

All this, and he makes a point of keeping his performances clean.

“Absolutely,” he said. “You have to. You’re painting pictures with words, that’s what you’re doing. It’s all in the presentation.”

In addition to traveling the comedy circuit, Mr Kennedy maintains about five clients from a lawn service business he started a number of years ago. When he graduated from college, he bought a truck and mowers and went into business for himself.

Even then, he couldn’t stop himself from trying to make people laugh.

“I’d get paid for a job and every time I’d cash a check I would make the ladies at the bank laugh with my impressions of President Clinton or Arnold Schwarzenegger,” he said, easing seamlessly into the appropriate voice for each of those men, “and they’d always tell me I was in the wrong business.”

A stint in Norwalk Community College’s production of Grease changed his life.

“I went in to audition and they had all but finished casting,” he recalled, “but I ended up stealing the part of Keniecke from the guy they had planned to give it to.”

Working on that production, Mr Kennedy said, revived a love for the theater that he had had during most of his high school career.

“I went in for that audition because I wanted to get closer to the girl who ended up playing Sandy,” he admitted, “but I loved the theater as a kid and I realized that I wanted to do something on the stage, but on my own, and I got the bug to try an open mic night and that’s how everything started.”

Once his comedy career began taking off, he was able to cut down on the number of people whose lawns he needed to take care of in order to make ends meet, now working one full day to complete those lawns, and devoting the rest of his professional time to his comedy

Between booking some of his own shows and having an agent who fully understands his family priorities, Mr Kennedy has been able to balance fatherhood, family, and a career that keeps most of his contemporaries working most days until 4 am, and then sleeping until very late in the morning. That kind of lifestyle would be impossible for this father of three.

“The lawn work helps keep me home, instead of having to go on the road all that time,” he said this week. “The schedule is much simpler than that. I’m on the road eight or nine days a month, traveling across the country and sometimes abroad [he performed at the Kilkenney Comedy Festival in Ireland in May], and when I’m home on the weekends I’ll shoot into the city on Friday and Saturday nights to do five or six sets at a number of clubs.”

He appears regularly at clubs with familiar names: Gotham Comedy Club, The Comedy Cellar, Comic Strip Live!, Stand-Up New York, New York Comedy Club, The Laugh Lounge.

The club shows do not pay too well, he admitted, but “you string a few of those together, stack up the performances, and it begins to add up.”

Mr Kennedy resides in Sandy Hook with his wife Amy,. The couple met at The Treehouse in Norwalk in 1995.

Mr Kennedy was born in Bogotá, Colombia. His mother is Colombian and his father is English. By the time he was 13 the Kennedy family (he is the middle of three Kennedy brothers) had already lived in Colombia, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Hong Kong before finally settling in Connecticut. It is said children learn languages much faster than many adults. Perhaps all of these temporary homes around the world helped the young Andrew pick up some of the accents and inflections that seem to come so easily to him today.

Mr Kennedy and his wife have lived in Stamford, in Redding, and now in Sandy Hook, in a home they refer to as The Kennedy Compound.

His stand-up is autobiographical and centers on his bicultural upbringing, marriage, and fatherhood, a far cry from his mid-90s impressions of Schwarzenegger, Clinton and Sean Connery. His act is high-energy observations and characters created from his family and friends.

His performance style has changed over the years from impressions to story telling, which doesn’t always work on TV, but Comedy Central producers have obviously picked up on something in his performances. So have audiences across the country, which have

In addition to live shows, Mr Kennedy has also been featured on Metro Channel (in New Joke City), Telemundo (Comedy Picante and ¡Que Loco!), and BET (Comic View), and in a few independent films including The Colombian, Love and Chaos, Burning Angel and Manhattan Comedy Night. He is represented by OmniPop.

“Comedy is best when people don’t realize you’re trying to make them laugh,” he said. “You go to a club or to a show because you want to laugh, so what a comic initially does is dismiss any preconceived notion of what they expect you to be or do.”

When Mr Kennedy takes the stage, he’ll offer small talk for a few minutes, gently introducing himself and begin to create some of the characters who will populate his performance later on.

“It may take up to 40 seconds to make an audience have its first laugh, but that’s my point: I disarm them. I walk out and chatter for a bit and actually get them to forget that they’re there to laugh.

“I’ve been asking Comedy Central for this show for a couple of years,” he said with, of course, a laugh. Mr Kennedy appeared in an episode of the comedy channel’s Premium Blend about four years ago; each of those 30-minute programs present abbreviated sets by a few comedians. He has also been featured in Comedy Central’s The World Stands Up, which is also a multiperformer show, this one with four acts including one musician.

Comedy Central Presents is an entirely different story. Each 30-minute program devoted to one comedian.

“I thought I was ready for this two years ago,” he said. “I really thought I was ready last year, but now I know. Like so much with this career, it’s all in the timing. Now I know I’m ready and I hope this Comedy Central Presents will be one of the best ones they have.”

Mr Kennedy will also be working out his TV material this weekend in Montreal during the 2006 Just for Laughs Comedy Festival, where he will be performing for the second time in three years. In this year’s comedy event Mr Kennedy will be featured in five spots culminating with an appearance on the main stage hosted by the legendary John Cleese of Monty Python fame.

His previous Montreal Comedy Festival appearance led to offers from The WB Network, HBO, and CBS for a television pilot he helped develop, produce, and starred in. CBS eventually won the bidding war for the rights to Related by Marriage in which Mr Kennedy had a great opportunity to work with Gary Halverson, executive producer of Everybody Loves Raymond and of Friends fame. The idea for the show was his, and then Mr Kennedy worked with Eileen Conn and Andy Gordon in writing the pilot.

The recording of the pilot went very well — the taping reportedly kept the studio audience in hysterics “for over four hours,” according to Mr Kennedy’s website — and the episode did in fact elicit laughs and giggles when this editor watched it.

Mr Kennedy starred with Christa Miller as a husband and wife (his character’s name was Andrew, her name was Amy, and their son was named Ian, coincidentally). John Ratzenberger was his sometimes bumbling father-in-law (which sounds vaguely similar to the description Mr Kennedy offers of his father, whom he describes as “an absentminded but very intelligent Englishman”; Julia Duffy was his somewhat uptight mother-in-law; Henry Goodman was his father, who arrives at the couple’s home for their son’s christening with a dog as a gift (a dog, not a puppy), a dog that happens to be terribly far-sighted and allergic to its own hair; and Rita Moreno starred as his mother, who is so amazed as her daughter-in-law’s breasts so soon after childbirth that she can’t help but check them out, with her hands.

It was funny stuff, with a fabulous cast and good writing that just did not make it past the final meeting at CBS. The timing wasn’t right when it was time for CBS to announce its fall line-up for 2004. It was “almost picked up,” he said, making that familiar this close thumb-and-forefinger gesture. That season was one of the few years, in fact, when the network picked up only two new pilots.

Now, perhaps, his timing is better.

“The best comedy comes out of your true voice, your honesty, and getting people to laugh without even trying,” Mr Kennedy said this week. “That’s cool — that defines a great comic, and that’s what I aspire to be.”

Andrew Kennedy’s opening acts on July 29 will be Tina Giorgi, who has appeared on Letterman, The Late Late Show, Comedy Central and Conan, along with Johnny Watson, who has appeared on Saturday Night Live.

Tickets are $15. Treehouse Comedy Club’s Danbury location is within New Sorrento Restaurant, at 32 Newtown Road. For reservations call the Treehouse reservation line at 744-5575 or order tickets online at TreehouseComedy.com.

Mr Kennedy’s website, AndrewKennedyLive.com, offers his touring schedule. Timing is everything for a local audience, too: right now Mr Kennedy’s schedule includes shows through the end of the year, but nothing else planned in Connecticut aside from the Danbury show later this month.