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I spoke with Joey Kola between performances at the Brokerage in Bellmore, Long Island. He said he first started making audiences laugh when he was about seven or eight. “I consider my open mike training to be my family parties,” says Kola. “My uncle Ralph, who played guitar at the parties, encouraged me to get up and just fool around. I would do impressions of Mohammed Ali, or my father, or my grandfather laughing and stuff… and some of that I still do in my act today.”
Soon Kola was entertaining friends with his comic stylings as well. But it wasn't until seeing an HBO documentary about the Brooklyn Comedy Club Pips, during his college years, that he really gave performing stand up any serious thought. “I saw a young Jerry Seinfeld, Dennis Wolfberg, and a bunch of comics… David Brenner and Steve Landesberg and Robert Klein doing stand up. And when I saw that documentary something struck me. I said to myself, ‘Oh my God, I can do that.’ ”
And the down side of being a stand up comic… “Sometimes the traveling can get grueling. Generally you're on the road for three or four weeks at a time and (performing) Tuesday through Sunday,” says Joey admitting that even though he loves his work life on the road can get a little hard on you after awhile. But he doesn't have to worry about that when he's working warm up for a television show. “I get to stay here and I can do local clubs or just do weekends on the road. I'll fly to Milwaukee on a Friday and come back by Sunday morning.” Which means less jet lag, more time with his family, more of the simple advantages that come with a nine to five job.
Kola had already worked as a warm up comedian for a few other TV shows filmed out of New York before Rosie O'Donnell approached him for her show. “I used to work with Rosie in the clubs all the time,” Kola says, recalling the days both of them played the comedy clubs on Long Island on a regular basis. “I was doing stand up. She was doing stand up. We used to trade jokes. We were in an improv group together.” Then when Rosie got her talk show she gave him a call. “I asked her … ‘Gee, Rosie, what kind of a show is it going to be… people throwing chairs at each other? 'Cause I really don't want to do that.’ And she said… ‘No, it's going to be a show about fun and raising money for kid's charities.’ And I said… ‘I'm there.’ ”
Kola loves working with Rosie and the rest of the gang on her show. “Rosie doesn't put any restrictions on me. She lets me run the room like a comedy club,” says Kola of his day job. In fact Kola loves his day job so much, that in the five years he's been with Rosie's show he's only missed two days of work. And as much as Kola loves being Rosie's warm up guy, Rosie loves having him. Rosie and her audience missed him so much those two days that as soon as he got back to work Rosie gave him a raise.
What is it about what Kola does as a warm up comic that makes the television studio audiences love him so? “It's all pretty up beat,” says Kola of the atmosphere he creates for everyone that comes to watch a live taping of one of Rosie's shows. “I just want everybody to have fun.”
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So he went down to Pips in Brooklyn and tried five minutes, then on to the Improv and other Manhattan clubs. Soon he was doing five minute sets all over Manhattan and Long Island. “It was a way to get attention… like being a rock and roll star without having to play the instrument. Once you get on stage and you hear all these laughs, and it works, it's like heroin. I can't begin to describe what a feeling it is to get that laugh.”
