Interview with Noam Dworman
Noam Dworman is the owner of the Comedy Cellar. He is the host of Live from the Table.
Keynesian Comedy Club
Contents
Max Raskin: Keynes has this section in chapter 12 of The General Theory where he analogizes the stock market to a beauty contest where you get rewarded for choosing the most popular faces, not the most beautiful ones. So instead of picking the faces you find most attractive, you pick the faces you think others will find most attractive.
So my question is: When you're thinking about comedy and who to put on — because the Cellar plays such an important gatekeeping role in comedy — how do you navigate between what you think is funny and what you think people will think is funny?
Noam Dworman: Abe Lincoln supposedly saw an opera or something like that and they asked him what he thought. He said, “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.” I think that’s very difficult to do in comedy.
So my feeling is, and I think Warren Buffet would agree with me, that you're best off finding something that you really understand, and a product you think is great, a community that you think is great, whatever it is, and universalizing the notion that, “Well, if I love it this much, I can't be that unique, other people will love it as well.”
I used to prove that torture worked — I would say, "Look, I know I would crack under torture, and I can't be the only one."
So with comedy, I generally feel that if I like it, it’s a pretty good indication. And I'm not a snob. I don't have really finicky tastes about comedy. I'm pretty much able to laugh at anything that's funny of any type. I'm not offended. Like I said, I'm not a snob.
MR: Do you watch a lot of comedy?
ND: Not so much lately, but I have. But from time to time, I will see somebody just killing. There's a really good comedian, Liza Treyger — and she's a feminist, and she's much younger than me, and I'm just completely not her target audience. But I would go down to the club, and I could sense that she was really connecting with a certain demographic. So I was sensitive enough to pick up on that. It’s not like I listened and I said I couldn't understand how people thought it was funny. She was funny, but I could see that in some way I just didn't have the life experience.
In the same way when my wife — she’s Puerto Rican — when we go to see John Leguizamo, and she thinks he’s the funniest.
MR: Don Rickles — would you say he’s the best?
ND: Well, yes. He's definitely the best. There is a problem that comedy in general doesn't age well. So no matter how good you were…
MR: I think he stays so good. You see him with Denzel Washington on Letterman in 2008 or at the roasts — he was funny till the end and it all holds up.
ND: If you watch Bob Hope now, you're not going to think he's funny. Now, the truth is Woody Allen thought Bob Hope was the greatest living comedian. So there's this thing where comedy doesn't age well, certain words and jokes and things you get — as much as I despise wokeness — I have some Pavlovian response that they've performed on me.
I was watching Star Trek, and Dr. McCoy yells, "Spock, you green-blooded son of a bitch." And I'm like, "Oh! Green-blooded!" It just sounded so harsh. It's so absurd to think I had that little reaction.
MR: We're affected by the culture.
ND: So you hear some of the stuff Don Rickles says, and it is a little harsh. Some of the jokes he makes about black people, you really can't make them today. So somebody might question, “This guy was the best??” But he was. He was. If you measure him and plot his abilities next to his peers, he was by far the most dominant insult comic of his day that there has ever been.
MR: Would you say he's the funniest comic of his time?
ND: No, he was not the funniest comic.
MR: Really?
ND: No, no.
How to Catch a Rising Star
MR: Oh, who do you think was the funniest comic?
ND: I don't know who the funniest was. The old George Carlin, the classic George Carlin Class Clown album. And the classic Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip.
MR: I don’t think those age as well as Rickles.
ND: Oh, no. If you go back and watch that at first Richard Pryor movie, I think it still holds up.
MR: Although I do remember the night before my bar mitzvah reading George Carlin’s Brain Droppings and I was crying thinking it was the funniest thing.
ND: Crimes and Misdemeanors really holds up.
MR: Is it annoying being a gatekeeper to the most important comedy institution?
ND: I guess. Honestly, there's such a mythology that sprung up around the Comedy Cellar — but it’s really not what you think. It's really just a small business. And we need the comedians way, way more than the comedians need us.
MR: But you can decide who goes on and who doesn't.
ND: At the Cellar. But there's other clubs, and there's plenty of people on Comedy Central, comedians that I've never even known about or seen. We're not all-powerful.
MR: Let me ask it this way: When people see you on the street or at Olive Tree, do they try to make you laugh?
ND: No, they don't.
MR: Why not?
ND: I don't know. From time to time people will tell me they're a comedian and ask how they get on. I'll say, "Send me a link," and I'll give them my email address. We have found some people that way.
Actually, we found a really good comic that way. You know Jamie Kirchick?
MR: Yeah.
ND: He recommended a friend of his brother's, who turned out to be a really good, really great comedian.
MR: What do you think is the best way for people to impress you as a comedian?
ND: Comedy, comedy. Oh my God, all these comedy questions.
MR: Do you want me to stop asking?
ND: No, no, I don't care. I'm just always uncomfortable with the notion that I have any real insight into comedy because I really believe that it's so obvious who's funny and who's not.
MR: Comedy and horror are the two genres of art where there’s really defined criteria of whether it’s good or not. Are you scared? Then it’s a good horror movie. Are you laughing? Then it’s funny. It's kind of simple.
ND: Yeah, I think that's right. There are always exceptions. There's certain people who tell long, captivating, humorous stories that don't actually expect a big laugh. There are certain exceptions to rule, but in general, if you're able to get a whole room heartily laughing, you're funny. You think you can do that without being funny? I mean, I suppose you could do it by stealing material. But even then, it's hard. Even then, it's difficult to separate the charisma of the performer from the material.
Norm and the Gang
MR: I don’t want to ask you more about comedy, but Norm MacDonald.
ND: No, you can ask.
Nobody funnier than Norm McDonald. Nobody funnier.
MR: I'm so upset I never got to meet him.
ND: I never met him either, but just so fucking funny.
MR: How do you never meet him?
ND: I never met him. He didn't perform at the Cellar. He might've one time. I think I wasn't there.
MR: Who makes you laugh the most off-stage in real life?
ND: Offstage, people like Colin Quinn, Jim Norton. A lot of those guys who were on Tough Crowd. They are really fucking funny — amazingly funny, remarkably funny in person. David Attell is unbelievably funny.
But of course, all the guys that are super famous, like Chapelle and Rock and Ray Romano and Louis C.K. and all the giants — Jon Stewart, who I knew for many years, these guys are not there by luck. These guys are all really funny and really talented.
MR: Are they always “on”? Do they make you laugh off-stage?
ND: At the table, there's always people being funny, but they're not “on” in a sense like performing. That's annoying.
Tracy Morgan is hilarious, and he's very similar to the way he is on stage. You don't even know if it's a put on or not.
It's funny bringing this question of “on,” because early on when I was a boy, Steve Martin was a huge, huge star. He is one of the greats.
This was before we had a comedy club and Steve Martin was on a talk show, and my father commented to me, “Oh, he's not always ‘on.’ I like that." My father was impressed by that because he hated people who were always on. And then sure enough, it turned out that Steve Martin had a lot of depth in a lot of other ways. He's a musician, he was a playwright, he was a screenwriter, he was an actor.
MR: Who's someone like that today? Do you have any friends who are comedians?
ND: So I keep a friendly distance from all the comedians that you would mention. It's not that they're not my friends.
MR: It sounds like Modi's a friend.
ND: Yeah, Modi's a friend. I consider Louis C.K. a friend, but we don't socialize.
MR: You guys kind of look similar.
ND: He's six foot-something, and he’s a redhead. He is part Jewish though.
I always feel like there's this notion that it's my ball, so I get to play. So I always don't want to overstep with the comedians, so I always just give them their distance. They don't need me to be their pal.
For instance, there's a comedian, Robert Kelly, who lives in my town. We're actually friends and socialize. We go out to breakfast, that kind of thing. Jon Stewart and I had the same girlfriend years ago, so he wasn't famous then.
MR: What do you mean you had the same girlfriend? At the same time?
ND: I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Jesus Christ. It's a good thing you corrected me. Jon Stewart and I, our girlfriends were best friends. That's what I mean to say.
MR: That's like a Freudian something.
ND: I did have the same girlfriend with another comic. I don't want to say who it is.
Political Science
MR: People wouldn’t necessarily think that the owner of the most important comedy club in America would think so seriously about political theory and politics generally. For instance, you have this theory of historical events you told me that I’ve been thinking about — can you share it?
ND: Well, my suspicion is that a lot of the people involved in major historical events were as shocked as we were to see them come off as successfully as they did and to have the impact they did. For instance, I wonder if bin Laden ever actually thought that he could bring down the World Trade Center. I expect that the January 6th protesters never in a million years expected to find themselves waltzing around the Capitol building, being led in as they were. That’s not a political statement.
And I suspect that Hamas, unless they really knew something we didn't, they did not expect to land in Israel or break down the wall to Israel, and then just have their way running around the country for a few hours, just slaughtering people.
I thought a little bit more deeply about that after we spoke. And this was brought to mind by the stories that have come out about the Michigan kidnapping plot of Gretchen Whitmer, which was a ridiculous plan. The plan was to go into one lake, and then come into another lake, but the lakes actually didn't even connect. All sorts of ridiculous stuff.
So what's going on there? I think there is a comradery of these quixotic ventures. You have this organization, you all feel, “Let's plan to do this.” And that in some way is its own reward. It boosts morale. It's a project. It's something to get up for in the morning. "We're going to take down the World Trade Center." And you go to flight school, and it's over many, many years.
And maybe it'll have some success, maybe you'll get one plane into the building, maybe you'll get caught. But could they actually imagine it was going to go off even better than planned? And that changes the world. Was bin Laden hoping or expecting to spend the rest of his life in a cave until he died in hiding? In other words, a lot of these events imply the reaction that came. If you believed you were going to be able to succeed, were you then planning for the reaction?
MR: Like the dog who catches the car.
ND: Exactly.
MR: I was thinking about the flip side, which is that there are a lot of people who are planning something world-changing but good. They want to be really successful or do something big. Do you think that the successful comedians you know that really hit it thought they were going to do so? Or in the same way as the bin Ladens of the world, they were surprised at their success?
ND: I think there's both. I know maybe even more about musicians trying to hit it. Some musicians are so good, they might actually be fully confident they were going to hit it.
MR: Like who?
ND: Like John Mayer. I know him a little bit. He said to me, "I was always a brass ring guy." He always just had this self-assurance. Some people understand it's a crapshoot.
I think Shane Gillis seemed to have an inner confidence in himself that was borne out. But on the other hand, I've met people with total confidence in themselves who weren't even that talented and never got anywhere. So I don't know that that feeling is actually reliable.
MR: Dangerfield started late in life. Was he a confident guy?
ND: I didn't know. I met him once or twice. He became famous later in life. I don't know that he started later in life. He might have.
MR: I think he was a salesman, and I don't think he started doing stand-up until 40.
ND: I don't know enough about him. But boy was he a great comic.
Lucille Ball didn't hit it big until she was in her forties. You hear these things from time to time.
Girls and Guitars
MR: What does your political journey look like? What were you like when you were younger?
ND: When I was younger, I was more typically liberal. I grew up in a liberal home where civil rights was the most important issue, but I was a child of my times. I don't really remember much about the seventies; I remember late sixties. But always, always, always — this is a personality trait — I always thought for myself, and I was never much affected by the opinions I was supposed to have if I couldn't really understand them.
So for instance, when I went to law school, I would infuriate my classmates by telling them that I thought Roe v. Wade was nonsense. And it wasn't because I was pro-life. It just seemed like they made the whole thing up. It just didn't make any sense to me. And I was always like that. I always needed to be able to comprehend the logic and agree with it on my own. I was never much affected by peer pressure, either my political views or even just in my personal life or my friendships.
MR: Did you take drugs when you were younger?
ND: No, not much. Not in high school. Maybe in college I smoked pot a little bit from time to time. But even not much then, no. And I never did cocaine or any hard drugs.
MR: Were there any books that you read or political figures that impressed you when you were younger?
ND: No. The truth is, when I was younger, all I was into was girls and playing the guitar. And then I opened a nightclub, and I was playing guitar in a nightclub. I didn't calm down until probably my forties when I finally got married. So although I was always pretty smart, anything academic was always something that was a burden to me. I was not the kind of kid in college who was anxious to go dive into philosophy books. I wanted to get my homework done, cram for exams, and then party. Not party and do drugs, but just enjoy myself, play guitar, pick up girls.
MR: What was your first guitar you ever owned?
ND: My first guitar was a nylon string Favilla three-quarter or maybe half-size guitar when I was in the fourth grade.
MR: When you think of your platonic ideal of a guitar, what comes to mind?
ND: Well, for many years I played a Paul Reed Smith that I loved and a Gibson 336 that I loved.
MR: I think John Mayer plays Paul Reed Smiths now. Right?
ND: He has.
I also just bought a very, very expensive acoustic guitar, an Olson. He makes James Taylor's guitars, and it's the finest acoustic guitar I've ever had. I also played Renaissance acoustic-electric guitars for many years. If you go on the Rick Turner Renaissance website, I'm one of his endorsed artists.
MR: How often do you practice?
ND: Now, not formally…just whenever I feel like it. When I was younger, I was quite good. I played classical guitar. I was hired as an accompanist for a world-famous oud player.
MR: I love the oud. Do you know Stéphane Wrembel?
ND: No.
MR: He does all the music for Woody Allen. He’s just an amazing gypsy jazz player and was my guitar teacher. He has an oud player in his band and it’s just incredible.
ND: The father of the jazz oud was an Armenian oud player named Chick Ganimian, who used to play with my father years ago. So I knew him as a boy.
MR: That's so cool.
ND: When I was doing that, I played at Carnegie Hall, I played at Town Hall. I toured the country a little bit. I had a whole little career as a high school student, as a professional musician, that I enjoyed very much.
MR: Do you ever wish you could play jazz?
ND: No, I never wish I could play jazz. And I'm not sure I couldn't play jazz, it was just never my thing. I can accompany, I can hang playing rhythm guitar in a jazz band. My knowledge of the chords is pretty good. I even sat in playing bass one time with the Duke Ellington Orchestra back in the nineties in a music festival, and they were happy with my playing. Some swing stuff. It wasn't complex stuff, but they were happy with my feel and my playing. I got some nice compliments.
What was the name of the bass player…Victor?
MR: Wooten?
ND: No, I played with Victor Wooten, but the bass player who took up for Jaco in Weather Report after Joco died. Victor Bailey!
My most obvious talent as a musician was as a band leader. I think the people who have played with me would agree. I was just born good at that. And I could always make a band sound better just by standing on the stage with them, even without playing.
MR: Who do you think has that quality in spades?
ND: Count Basie…not that I want to compare myself to Count Basie, God forbid. But I heard a documentary one time where they mentioned that he would just sit at the piano bench before he hit the keys, and the band would start sounding better…something about his vibe.
MR: Do you think that's true in the comedy world too? Do you think you bring something out in people?
ND: No, not in comedy.
MR: Really?
ND: No, it was only in music. A guy used to play with me for many years, then became Adele's musical director, and he did an interview where he talked about how much he learned from me. I find that more flattering a moment in my life than almost anything else I've accomplished. There's a few important musicians out there who've spoken very kindly about me, and that really matters to me, made me very happy.
Midlife Existential Crisis
MR: I heard you say in an interview that if you had to work a 9-to-5 job you’d kill yourself.
ND: Now? Yes. That's not a joke. If I went out of business and had to start reporting for work in the morning for a boss, I don't know if I'd had the mental strength to do it. I'd like to think I wouldn't kill myself. I have a family that depends on me, so that might be the reason that I wouldn't, but I just can't imagine.
MR: For someone like you with a lot of interests it’s hard to pin down exactly what you do, but what’s the first thing that comes to mind when I ask you what you do?
ND: Well, what I do is I run a comedy club. But you are actually hitting on a little bit of a midlife existential crisis I'm having, because I don't really know what it is that is my priority anymore in terms of what interests me. And I have to figure that out.
I mean, I have my kids, but except for my little one, even they need less of my attention now as they're heading towards high school. I get a lot of pleasure out of the fact that I have a little impact on the world in a lot of different ways. The little forays that I've done into politics and political thoughts, just the fact that influential people listen to my podcast will write me an email…I get huge pleasure from that. There was no nepotism of any kind. There was no privilege of any kind that could get that for me.
MR: Do you feel nepotism with the Comedy Cellar because of your dad?
ND: Yeah, absolutely. There was nepotism. Obviously, I inherited the club — not that I didn't grow it and do stuff with it — but there was definitely that advantage I had. I started other businesses without my dad, which were very, very successful. So it's not like I felt I couldn't do it.
I did this interview with Ken Roth, and a lot of influential people wrote me about it. And apparently, I was the first guy to ever really lay a glove on Kenneth Roth.
I was really, really happy about that. I felt like I was doing my bit for the cause, and I felt like I was intellectually fair and exposed him for being dishonest. And he didn't know who I was. He just agreed to do the podcast like a schmuck, and he walked into a buzzsaw.
I get tremendous happiness from that.
MR: I know you’re friends with Coleman Hughes — is there any other public intellectual you particularly admire or resonate with?
ND: I do enjoy Sam Harris' monologues from time to time. I find his thought process to be extremely thorough and rigorous, and I enjoy that. I like Glenn Loury.
The Righteous Mind from Jonathan Haidt had a huge influence on me. It’s made sense of everything I've kind of felt all my life about the way people behaved and arrived at their conclusions. And it gave me a confidence to dismiss the opinions of real heavyweights and not think, "If so-and-so says it, it must be true." And that really armed me with a certain confidence to take on some of these podcasts like I did with Phil Bump and people like that. So Jon Haidt is a big hero of mine.
Tyler Cowen is a huge hero.
Jewish Practice
MR: Do you have a Jewish practice today?
ND: To my discredit, I don't. And I wish I did. I don't believe, and so I have trouble going through the motions.
My father didn't either. That was painful for him. My grandfather, on my father's side, taught Hebrew School, and was religious. My grandfather on my mother's side was not religious, but a very important founding Zionist. They lived next door to Ben-Gurion, across the street from Ariel Sharon.
MR: What was your grandfather’s name?
ND: Benjamin Galili.
MR: Is your wife Jewish?
ND: My wife's not Jewish, but we had the kids converted — it was a conservative conversion.
MR: You don't believe in God?
ND: I don't believe in God.
MR: Has that always been the case?
ND: It's always been the case.
MR: And have you ever had any dogma or practice?
ND: Yes — I went to a Jewish summer camp — Camp Betar of all places…which was not an ideological decision. It was because a close friend of my family's was a music instructor there when I was very little. I went four years there, and of course, they observed everything there. And every Friday night, every Saturday I had to go to services. And then, I was bar mitzvah'd, and I got my grandfather’s tefillin, and I put on a few times, but it was always just partaking in the tradition. I never felt it was spiritual.
MR: Everyone talks about your dad. Can you just give a little sense about your mom?
ND: Well, my parents divorced when I was very young. My mother is a nice person. She's born in '43. She’s politically very, very active, but I would say she's quite Israel skeptical. She’s a Haaretz Israeli.
MR: Is she Israeli?
ND: Yeah, she's Israeli. Both my parents are Israeli.
MR: Does she live there?
ND: No, she lives on Upper West Side. We have a good relationship.
But my father was a larger-than-life figure who had great impact on many people.
MR: Did the divorce affect you?
ND: I remember it very well. I remember being okay. I wasn't happy about it, but I don't remember being devastated by it.
But for instance, Dave Chappelle did his 50th birthday party at the Comedy Cellar, and at the very end of his speech, just by coincidence, he saw me out of the corner of his eye, and then he began to talk about me a little bit, and then he quickly moved to my father. And he was so moved emotionally by thinking about my father that he began to cry. My father had a very deep impact on a lot of people. He was an important figure in this world.
MR: Do you believe in the afterlife?
ND: No. I don't believe in anything supernatural.
The Fat Black Pussycat and MySQL
MR: Do you floss?
ND: Yes.
MR: Are you fastidious about it?
ND: I'm pretty good about it.
MR: Why do you use Android and not Apple?
ND: I code and stuff like that. I'm a high-end user of all computer technologies.
MR: What do you code?
ND: Back in the nineties, I had the first online reservation system, which would take comma delimited files from an Outlook email. Then I moved to PHP and MySQL.
When iPhones first came out, even a couple of years after they first came out, they really were not geared towards business. It was difficult to mark emails as read. At that time, you remember you could jailbreak your iPhone?
MR: Yeah.
ND: And so I had an iPhone, and I would jailbreak it, and then there was some very good power software written at that time for jailbroken phones. Just like with the DirecTV cards, at some point Apple closed the door and you couldn't jailbreak a phone anymore. And at that point, I switched to Android because Google is just much better for business, and just stayed with it ever since. I have an iPad.
MR: Do you have any apps you like using that people don't know about, but make your life a lot easier?
ND: On a desktop computer, I use a program called ClipMate, which is a clipboard extender. There’s another one called ClipClip, which I'm just trying now, which is pretty comparable. ClipMate has some issues, a little buggy with the latest version of Windows. Maybe they'll straighten it out.
And then there's also a great program called Macro Express, which is a macro coding language for Windows. During COVID, I programmed it to go online and get me vaccine appointments. You needed brute force, constant attempts to get vaccine appointments. So I wrote a program which could get me a vaccine appointment.
You want to hear a story?
MR: Yeah.
ND: So when I first started out, there was a website called CitySearch. I was starting out my bar, The Fat Black Pussycat. CitySearch, which was before Yelp, was very important. And they would have year-end “Best Of” lists.
I had no happy hour at the time, and I downloaded this program, Macro Express, and I started to vote for myself as “Best Happy Hour.” Quickly, I realized that they were not going to allow a vote more than once a day from the same IP address. So I used this program, Macro Express to automatically call up a dial-up connection, wait a random amount of time between one and seven minutes or something, vote for The Fat Black Pussycat for Best Happy Hour, hang up, and generate all these votes.
Then we won Best Happy Hour. Then the following day, I opened my first Happy hour, and we had a line down the block to get in.
MR: That's so funny.
ND: And that's how I launched corruptly the success of my business. I later did the same thing to win Best Lounge, but then interestingly, in later years, we began to win it legitimately.
MR: Does it feel as good?
ND: To win it legitimately? Yeah. Oh, it feels way better to win it legitimately. And then my club, the Cafe Wha?, always won Best Music Club legitimately, which is actually how I was tuned into how important the CitySearch thing was.
MR: Behind every great fortune, right?
ND: Yeah, that was my crime. I rigged the votes.