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| Sunday, March 13, 2005 |
Rob Kutner rules the world
He has gone from the daily grind of bad TV to the daily show -- the best TV around. Check out one of the funniest writers Atlanta ever produced.
The half-under construction theater at Actor's Express is packed, so packed in fact that there's concern the fire marshal might mind. While a few attendees mill about the lobby, representatives of the New Israel Fund (NIF) and Jewish Arts and Culture (JAC) -- host to the evening's festivities -- try to make sure everybody can get in.
"You're going to have to stand," says one woman, and by stand she means file into the narrow passage leading into the theatre. One might be put out by such accommodations, but everyone seems in high spirits. They end up in even better spirits when the guest of honor walks into their group.
With no other way to enter the stage, Rob Kutner waits out his introductions amidst the seatless patrons eager to laugh at his jokes. As unassuming as you could be, the writer for Comedy Central's The Daily Show patiently watches the proceedings, which are descending into a form of ad hoc guerilla theatre.
The microphone stops working while a woman speaks about the important work of the NIF. It goes out three more times before she gives up and picks up another. It doesn't work either. Finally she introduces the spokeswoman from Actor's Express, who then hands it off to a speaker from JAC, and finally the executive director of the NIF takes over.
By the time Kutner makes his way out to speak, the event is about half-an-hour behind schedule. Jewish standard time is in full effect.
"The last time I got to speak to this many Jews, I got a wallet and some savings bonds out of it," says the bespectacled television writer to open up his routine. The joke gets the laughs, but it's more appropriate than you'd imagine. The front row is crowded with his wife, parents, and friends. With an audience full of hometown admirers, Kutner still seems as nervous as a bar mitzvah boy struggling through his Torah portion.
Of course, Kutner has come quite a long way from his days growing up in Atlanta.
Back then he was a Jewish kid at a Christian private school -- Westminster to be exact --and as he remembers it, "I was definitely aware that I was growing up in unusual surroundings. At the time, it was more about just getting by and surviving and keeping my sanity."
In response to the Christian environs of his education, Kutner turned even more deeply into his own faith. His family started out at The Temple, Atlanta's oldest Reform synagogue. Today, Kutner jokes about the name.
"You've got to think of the brainstorming session that came up with that one," he laughs. "What do the synagogues that come after that call themselves, a Temple?"
From The Temple, Kutner then found himself at AA -- the synagogue, not the alcoholics group -- and living a more Conservative Jewish lifestyle. His Jewish journey would ultimately take him to the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, an open and pluralistic but decidedly non-Reform place to study Judaism. On returning to the states, he'd also end up a member of the Shtibl Minyan in Los Angeles, a self-proclaimed "Chasidic egalitarian" prayer group.
Before all that, however, he had to graduate and go to college. Looking back on Westminster, Kutner remembers "they listed where all the graduating seniors were going after high school." He pauses for comedic effect.
"Next to my name, they put Hell."
The punch lines keep rolling as Kutner tells his life story to a rapt and raucous audience, many of whom have been a part of that story. After Westminster, he found himself at Princeton University, and it was there that he met his wife Sheryl Zohn. On this night, as he tells his tale at the Actor's Express, she sits in the front row admiringly. More than a life partner, she's also a writing partner -- which is exactly how they met.
"We met at Princeton actually," he remembers when I get him on the phone the next day. "Our first thing we did together was we wrote the end of the first act of a big production number for a school musical. It was a kick line. Men dressed in drag as female cannibals."
Thus a brilliant partnership was born. So far it's yielded a handful of short films and plenty of collaboration on their mutual day jobs; she writes for Showtime's weekly Penn and Teller: Bulls**t while he does The Daily Show. Yet for all its creativity, the relationship has its challenges. Foremost among them is the long-distance nature of the relationship.
After graduation, Kutner spent a year in Israel studying at Pardes. So did his wife a year later, which added up to a two-year cross-continent romance. That was preparation, you might say, for their current cross-country marriage; she remains in L.A. (where Kutner lived prior to his current gig) while he camps out in New York.
"When we think about how many years we were together, we had to figure out how many years we were actually together," he joked on the phone to me. During his stand-up routine in front of his friends, family, and a packed audience the night before he was much more risqué in joking about it.
"You know you're interesting when your life sounds like a title of a progressive children's book," he says to get the audience rolling again. "My wife has a roommate." He's called his relationship "bi-coastal, which is sort of like bi-curious, but with more frequent flyer miles."
When you meet Kutner, in fact, it's not his humor that strikes you. Instead what's most obvious is how much he loves his life, and specifically his wife. Yes, he's got a dream job that gets him "crazy celebrity status" back in his hometown of Atlanta (though none in New York). He's even won an Emmy for his work, and got to schmooze up Sharon Stone at the awards, but when the paparazzi snapped a shot of The Daily Show writers with Stone, he was the only one not looking at the actress.
When somebody in the audience asks him how he could not look at such a beautiful celebrity, he just sort of smiles sheepishly then looks to Sheryl: "Honey, could you please stand up," and points her out to the group at the theatre.
I ask him about it on the phone. He holds back, but you can tell he wants to gush. After all, the night before he admitted in front of a packed crowd, "Since I've been married, I've actually lost the physiological ability to see other women."
"I think in general, we are each other's editors," he adds when asked about his wife and frequent writing partner. Then he pivots to some of the challenges of his relationship. "I used to have a writing partner who I wasn't married to. Issues in the script are not always about issues in the script."
There were, at least, a few years where they actually resided in the same zip code. After their mutual stints at Pardes, they helped found a Jewish study group together in Washington, D.C. Then they decamped to the glitz and pseudo-glamour of Hollywood in hopes of making it into the entertainment biz.
He got his break, if you can call it that, as a production assistant on the much-maligned TV series Unhappily Ever After. He now calls the position "pretty high up the list" of worst jobs ever. "Their pay was just above minimum wage, and there were two or three days a week when I'd have to get there at like 5 a.m. just to do copies for everyone affiliated with the show including the janitor -- it was crazy."
The show was, mercifully, cancelled eight months later. Luck shined on Kutner, however, because he managed to land a job as a writer at the Dennis Miller Show. The pay was better, the creativity was higher, and he could be "proud about the product."
"It was such an intellectually stimulating environment -- not even just Dennis, but the other writers too," Kutner recalls while contrasting this, his favorite job (other than The Daily Show he assures me). "There were people who were really intelligent, and well-educated. I think we used some of the best vocabulary in poop jokes."
Beyond the quality of the work, it was an interesting time to be with Dennis Miller. It was during Kutner's stint on the show that 9/11 happened, helping push the libertarian Miller to the right-wing. Critics have lampooned the shift, and an alleged downturn in Miller's comedic edge that coincided with it, but Kutner sees a greater challenge in the response to 9/11.
"He sort of started taking more hawkish stances after 9/11," remembers Kutner. "It got kind of tricky in how we could or couldn't criticize the president." That fine line between comedy and commentary is what Kutner calls, "kind of the third rail of political comedy."
It's at this point that Kutner has to call me back -- something that has happened multiple times -- due to the many demands of being a writer on The Daily Show. When he calls me back, I ask him a follow-up from his speech at Actor's Express. As it turns out, there's a list of who at The Daily Show is most "Jewy," and Atlanta's own Kutner tops the list (even better than Jon Stewart).
"It was based on Timeout New York. They did a profile about a year ago that was called 'Super Jews.' Basically they picked, I think it was 25 people who were identified as Jews and doing some interesting things in New York," he explains. When he made it onto their list, though it was Jon Stewart who got his photo in the magazine, his fellow writers decided to rate themselves.
"In a comedy environment you're razzed for anything you do," sighs Kutner.
Why not give them something else to razz him about? I ask Kutner which city is better, Los Angeles or New York, and he immediately commits blasphemy.
"At the risk of being branded a heretic by my New York friends," he opens before calling the L.A. quality of life better. Then realizing he's risking public flogging, he beats a hasty retreat. "I feel a little bit agnostic. Each one has its pros and cons."
Kutner, himself, is a bit of a contradiction that way. He shuns celebrity ("it can be pretty poisonous") and professes to have no aspirations beyond a behind-the-scenes gig. Rest easy Jon Stewart. But that doesn't stop Kutner from following his own press: "I Google myself. I try to do that four or five times a day," he jokes.
Days of phone tag go by like this, yielding a couple hours of questioning about every aspect of his career, his politics ("I'm on a lot of e-mail petition lists. We're freedom typers."), and his religion ("sort of observant but egalitarian"). We even search for his best poop joke, to no avail.
"After you write so many and read so many, your mind doesn't even hold on to them anymore. Wow. That is actually surprisingly hard."
He tossed me one of his favorite Dennis Miller jokes instead: "If the Clintons' marriage were any more about convenience, they'd have to install a Slurpee machine and a Slim-Jim rack at the foot of their bed."
But like so much of his work and passions, Kutner leaves the interview on the subject of his wife. After being baited to rattle off beautiful Jewish women with a softball question about the hottest Jewish celebrity -- "The Jewish half of Scarlett Johanson, or Natalie Portman but only next to the Western Wall," in case you were curious -- he instead tells me what he loves about his wife.
"She's always trying to make me better -- to make me a better writer, person, and sometimes husband."
Forget his writing, his Emmy, his shy smile and quick wit all disguised under the frumpy blue shirt and glasses. Despite the parody, the fake news, and the poop humor, Rob Kutner is a genuine guy. It's no wonder people are clamoring to meet him.
-- By Bradford R. Pilcher
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