Interview: Jonathan Katz

Katz brings his show One Man, Many Games  to ImprovBoston
By SARA FAITH ALTERMAN  |  April 15, 2009

090417_joshi_main

The moment I step into the Newton home/sound studio of comedian Jonathan Katz — who's probably best known for creating and providing the voice of a neurotic psychiatrist on the notably squiggly cartoon Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist he warns me that he's a show-off and invites me to admire his kitchen. What could be pompous quickly turns playful; I have 30 seconds to find the three refrigerators masked by gorgeous cabinetry, he tells me, looking down at his watch, and I scramble around like an Easter Sunday jellybean hunter on speed. I didn't find all of the refrigerators, but I did find a gentle, sharp-witted soul whose decade-plus battle with multiple sclerosis hasn't done a damned thing to slow down his quick-draw punning and brilliant comic timing. Both of which are evident in the goal he sets for himself: to create something funny every day. He brings that funny to ImprovBoston this Thursday and next with his show One Man, Many Games.

What's your daily routine, both physically and professionally?
Physically, I do the same thing every morning. I get out of bed and I stretch my legs by lying on my back and sort of exercising in a door jamb. I stretch my legs at a 90-degree angle, and then in many different other ways. This has to do with increasing my mobility, with maintaining the level of mobility I have in my legs now. Let me try to put this in a sexier way. You know how sometimes grown-ups . . . no, I don't know what that means. So that's what I do just to feel slightly normal in my legs. And then I'll drink a lot of coffee, which I do every day. I love coffee, I even wrote a song about it, called "Caffeine," which I'll be glad to sing for you. So then I'll keep drinking coffee all day, until my heart tells me I should stop. And it's never told me that, by the way.

Post-coffee?
I come down to my studio and I mine things I've already done, or from my own life, for comedy. I'll give you my favorite example — and I'm saying this softly because she's upstairs — but my daughter, Mandy, once came into our bedroom when she was about six, and she said, "Dad, am I sexy or gay?" And that became the first line of a sit-com [From Where I Sit] I wrote.

Did you ask her why she couldn't be both?
No, I just wanted to go back to sleep. But that line came out of the mouth of an actress named Daveigh Chase, who's now on Big Love, and the person she was asking, playing the father, was David Paymer, who's this amazing actor, in a million movies. Marcia Gay Harden was the woman playing my fictitious wife, and she called my actual wife one day and said, "Suzi, what would I say? What does a woman like me do in a situation like that?" And my wife said, "I don't know. Learn your lines?"

1  |  2  |   next >
Related: 52 ways to leave 2009, Photos: GoreFest VIII: Cirque du Slaughté, John Harbison plus 10, More more >
  Topics: Comedy , Celebrity News, Entertainment, Science and Technology,  More more >
| More


Most Popular
ARTICLES BY SARA FAITH ALTERMAN
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   INTERVIEW: ANDY RICHTER  |  November 25, 2009
    We have a chub for Andy Barker, P.I. (just released out on DVD), because we have a major chub for the show’s star, Andy Richter. Richter plays an accountant who is mistaken for a detective-for-hire and decides to just roll with it. 
  •   REVIEW: SPREAD  |  August 19, 2009
    If only there were some way to watch a con-artist houseboy give his cougar sugar mama a squirming reach-around, charm the pants off a candy-necklace string of countless empty-eyed Hollywood stick figures, lose his heart to an untouchable social chameleon, and, in the process, find himself .
  •   NORTHERN EXPOSURE  |  July 29, 2009
    While New York is grittier, Los Angeles juicier, and Boston is wicked smahter, for some odd reason it is Montreal that, for two weeks every summer, becomes the epicenter of the comedy universe.
  •   JUST FOR LAUGHS  |  July 27, 2009
    Blogs, Tweets, and comedy video direct from moose country
  •   BEAT THE TWEET  |  July 22, 2009
    Warm weather is supposed to be accessorized by lackaday, by a breezy sensibility best enjoyed with a frosty tall boy in one hand, the sloppy product of a back-yard barbecue in the other. Instead, I find myself struggling to balance my beer between my knees and my overstocked paper plate on my thigh as I furiously poke at my BlackBerry.

 See all articles by: SARA FAITH ALTERMAN