So I had no idea what to expect about Jerry’s phone style. Nowadays, it’s a little too aggressive to just pick up the phone and call someone. But since we’d exchanged numbers, I felt like I should just text a short message, like, “Hey, man. So great talking to you. Let’s grab a bite next time I’m in New York.” And that would be that.
I didn’t hear from him for a few months, and then, when I did, it wasn’t direct. His production company contacted my agents with excellent news: Jerry wanted me to appear on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, his hit web series.
This was huge. It was a Johnny Carson moment to me.
When I was growing up, I would watch Johnny Carson and I always loved it when he invited comics to sit on the couch and talk to him after they finished their sets. It was like being anointed by the king, the ultimate seal of approval with the whole world watching. From that moment on, your life would never be the same. In this day and age, there are so many platforms to be seen on—cable TV, Netflix, YouTube, Instagram, a dozen talk shows. There is no one show that everyone watches like they did with Carson’s Tonight Show. But, for comedians, there is a show that gives you a sense of validation, an “I’ve made it” kind of feeling, and that’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. He only invites comedians he genuinely enjoys talking to—whom he’d want to hang out with in real life. And now it was my turn. I was getting the Carson couch invite—from Seinfeld.
The Comedians in Cars concept is like a talk show, except instead of a desk and a couch, the host and the guest are in a car. The ride Jerry chose for our show was an orange 1969 Camaro Z/28, the original Guido muscle car. He said he could see me driving around in it in high school. My real high school car was 1984 Toyota Celica, shit-brown with a brown interior and roll-down windows that doubled as a forearm exerciser. The only thing that had power in the car was the engine, a robust four-cylinder that went from zero to sixty in two days.
Jerry picked me up at a house in L.A. It wasn’t my own house, although I opened the door like I owned the place. It belonged to a friend of the producers. My home in Hollywood was too far from where we were going in Santa Monica. We greeted each other, shook hands, and I realized we were dressed like identical twins in white shirts, navy blazers, and jeans. There were subtle differences: My jeans were skinny and his were sneaker cut; my shirt was a designer tee and his was a button-down. Jerry wore his blue-and-orange Mets Nikes; I wore boots. But standing side by side, it was like we’d called each other to wear matchy-matchy outfits.
Jerry commented on my cologne. He said he didn’t wear any. I was taught how to put on cologne by my grandfather. The technique was passed down from generation to generation in the Maniscalco family and it goes as follows: a spritz on each wrist, two in the air, and then a walk through the mist. On the lawn, I showed Jerry how I do it, and he cracked up. I liked how the joke played, and later I included that footage in the video I use before I come out onstage at standup shows. Hey, if you had five seconds of video of yourself making Seinfeld laugh, you’d show it every chance you got, too.
The first five minutes of filming were almost surreal. On the show, it looks like we’re just riding around Los Angeles—him driving, me grinning like a chimpanzee in the passenger seat—with a dash cam and multiple GoPros throughout the car, a guerilla-type production. But in reality, we had a police escort on a motorcycle and a production team in two vans, with three cameramen, a boom guy, and producers riding alongside and behind. Seeing the scope of what it took to make this show floored me.
Jerry’s only direction was the same one that I’ve heard since my earliest days in comedy: “Just be yourself!” He told me to be comfortable and pretend like the eighty-nine people buzzing around us weren’t there. I remember him saying it seems a little chaotic in the beginning but I’d get used to it. It took twenty minutes before I felt like I could have a normal conversation. I’m so sensitive to energy, it was hard for me to be natural with all those people hovering. How to ignore the cameras? How can I “be myself” in front of eighty-nine strangers? I can perform in front of strangers, but the only time I’m completely myself is with my wife. I’m a different version of myself depending on who I’m with, so I just had to find the one that would shine best in this scenario.
It’s common practice for hosts on late-night TV to predetermine what you’re going to talk about. The host comes in with a stack of questions and discussion topics that have been worked out ahead of time. A good host makes it seem off the cuff, but it’s all arranged so that the comedian can do his or her act within the pretense of a spontaneous conversation. Before Jerry and I got in the car, he said, “I want to set you up for that joke about taking your shoes off at somebody’s house. I’ll just weave in a question that leads to that.”
He teed me up by talking about how I’m an obsessive groomer, how I like to polish myself up to a brilliant sheen, and we got to talking about slob culture. I ran with it:
The airport is a prime example. People put on pajamas to fly. The way I grew up, when you see the world, the world sees you. When did it become appropriate to wear flip-flops to a nice steak dinner? I got to sit there eating a T-bone, looking at some guy’s hoof? Put a shoe on!
That dovetailed perfectly into:
We went over for a dinner party last week at some guy’s house, and as soon as I walk in, there’s like twenty-five pairs of shoes sitting by the doorway. The guy says, “This is a shoe-free environment.” So I’m walking around his house with my socks on, meeting people with their socks on. How can you have a conversation with another man, looking at their Gold Toes? I can’t do it.
He said, “Meanwhile, they got a dog dragging his ass around.”
I asked about his social life and how his wife has opened him up more. “She has, because she’s a normal person,” he said. “Just a human being. I have none of that.”
I told him, “My wife wants me to smile more. She thinks I have a ‘mean resting face.’ If I’m not smiling or talking, it looks like I could murder your whole family.”
Jerry claimed his wife never saw his true personality. “My real-person personality is nothing but judgment and hostility.”
“You can’t bring that home.”
“No.”
“I try to be friendly,” I said. “It doesn’t work.”
“Maybe it’s the murderer face.”
The entire drive was like that, a volley back and forth of one- or two-liners, light and easy.
I had no idea where we were going until he just pulled into a parking lot of Intelligentsia, an extravagant coffee place where the coffee beans are raised like Kobe beef cows. They go to Guatemala and personally massage each bean for months. It’s one of these hipster places where the barista has a handlebar mustache and all of the customers are on their laptops. If the Wi-Fi went down, the people would flee faster than if the health department condemned it. Modern-day coffeehouses cannot exist without Wi-Fi and vice versa. They have a totally codependent relationship.
We walked in with a production team, three cameras, a boom mic, and a lot of commotion, not to mention a living icon of comedy, a guy who had the most successful show in the history of television—but the customers didn’t peel their eyes away from Throwback Thursday posts. I was checking for people’s reaction to Jerry, and they didn’t care. The president could have skipped in there holding hands with Vladimir Putin, and they would have kept staring at their computer screens. It was eerily quiet, too, like at one of my sets in the early days.
It was not at all what I had expected from being in public with Jerry. No commotion, no nothing. A couple people sneaked peeks, but no one lost their shorts or anything remotely approaching gawkery. In L.A., a celebrity sighting is like seeing a McDonald’s on a corner. If it was Cincinnati, they would have had to shut down the streets and bring riot cops. But this was a full-blown production and people literally didn’t bat an eye. I was stunned.
Jerry took in this strange environment, too, and said, “The world h
as turned into the monkey cage. Darting eyes and a little fear.” Funny, creepy, and so true.
Only the waiter wasn’t too cool for school. He was shy or nervous, rattling the porcelain cups and shaking a bit. Jerry engaged with him to calm him down, asking him what he wanted to do with his life, where he saw himself in twenty years. While they talked, I caught my breath before we picked up the conversation again. We’d gone through all the preplanned stuff, and our talk became more organic: exterminators, growing up Sicilian, the comedy world. He asked, if I weren’t doing comedy, what were my other career options?
I said, “I would be in the hospitality business, although I had a problem with people.”
After coffee, we walked around in Venice and popped into a hat store. We spent twenty minutes goofing around, trying on fedoras and cowboy hats (cue the rom-com “shopping montage” soundtrack). For the record, I’m not a hat person. My head is too large. When I wear a hat, it looks like a bottle cap on a watermelon.
I was sure that our day would end there, but Jerry took me to the Tasting Kitchen, an Italian restaurant. It was closed except for us. We sat down, and Jerry looked across the table at me and said, “I’ve never taken anybody on this show for a glass of wine, but I think it’s appropriate. You being Italian, you loving wine, I love wine, let’s go get some wine.” I played it cool, but now we were speaking my language. It is almost impossible for me to turn down a glass of good wine. Talk about being myself: throw me a glass of Cabernet or Tuscan wine, and there I am, in my element.
Out came the Italian wine, olives, and cheese, and we started talking about our marriages. I told him that Lana is Jewish. I have a joke in my act about the Italian-Jewish connection (“same corporation, different divisions”), and Jerry suggested I call her so he could say hello. I phoned Lana and put her on speaker. By the tone of her voice, I could tell she was surprised and a bit flustered. It goes up a few octaves when she’s nervous.
My wife is very supportive of what I do, as well as a huge part of it. The ostensible reason Jerry had suggested the call was “I’m a Jew; she’s a Jew. Let’s have Jew talk.” But I think he knew how much the day meant to me, and that involving my wife would give Lana and me a shared memory, something to savor together later on.
LAST TIME I was in New York, Jerry and I went to dinner at Estiatorio Milos, a Greek restaurant on West 55th Street and one of my favorite places in the city. We were joined by the Mazzilli brothers and George Wallace, a comedian.
If I invite you to dinner, it’s a rule for me to pick up the tab. I don’t care who the hell you are. I invited Jerry and the whole group to my favorite restaurant, so it was on me.
My dad always carries around a huge knot of bills (pulled from the ceiling), even now when everyone uses cards. He’ll say, “What if the credit card doesn’t work?” You have to have the amount of cash in your pocket to cover wherever you are going to eat. That was instilled in me from the get-go: always carry cash. And when you have a wad of bills, it’s easy to pay for dinner without having a big commotion about it and without having to wait for the check to be brought back and nowadays the need to check your credit card statement to make sure the place didn’t rob you or steal your identity.
A lot of people wait until the check is dropped, and then hesitate long enough for someone else to grab it. You have a big song and dance. If you really want to pay for a bill, you give the credit card to the guy before you even sit down (thank you, Scott Lutgert). Just say, “Make sure that the bill goes on this card.” Or you do what I did. After we finished, I got up as if to go to the bathroom and asked the waiter, “Can you bring the bill to me off to the side?”
I went back to the table and said we could go.
Someone asked, “What about the bill?”
“It’s taken care of,” I said.
Sometimes, like that night, there might be a protest, as in “What are you doing? You don’t have to do that.”
Oh, but I do. Especially if my companion paid the bill last time. Jerry insisted on picking it up when we had dinner at Mozza in L.A. It was not only my invitation, it was also my turn.
I’m sure he’ll get another chance to wrestle me for the bill. It’s been three years since I made fun of Jerry’s scarf at Gotham, and now I consider him a friend. We’ve bonded over our two favorite things: food and comedy.
MY BEST FRIENDS aren’t part of comedy at all. They’re from the old days, high school and college. They’re working-class guys, real estate agents, housepainters, and money managers. They’ve been with me this whole time. When they used to come to my shows out of town, we were all so broke, we’d share one hotel room. So now, I get comped enough rooms at a casino for all of them to have their own, plus a steak dinner, too. I love to share what I’m doing with my family and old friends. That’s where I get my enjoyment. No matter what, I can count on these guys to keep me grounded and rip me to shreds. These days, we’re in better hotel rooms, but the relationships haven’t changed.
People can get a big head in this business. Yes, I have an actual big head physically, but I’m so turned off by big egos. There are no guarantees in comedy, and I’ve noticed that the bigger people’s heads, the more they lose sight of the reason they’re here in the first place. I love what I do; that’s what’s important to me. I keep my head down and just do what I’ve been doing for nineteen years: booking gigs, traveling, working on my material. I’ve picked up some momentum, but it’s happened over a long time. It’s not like I was doing bowling alleys yesterday, and today it’s Caesar’s Palace. Every year, my road has gotten smoother. More people come out to see me. More opportunities are cropping up. The progress has been so gradual that when I glance at the speedometer, I’m shocked to see that I’m doing 110.
It’s my tendency to be observant, but not necessarily introspective. When I take time to slow down and reflect, like looking in the rearview mirror of life—or writing a book about the road I’ve traveled—it only makes me want to turn back around, face forward, and go faster. I have a deep-seated fear of resting in one place. No amount of validation, even from Jerry Seinfeld, is going to make me feel complacent, slow down, or stop.
My wife says that I’m superstitious about it. If I were to say to myself, “Wow, you’re doing great,” it’d be a jinx. She’s right. I do believe that if I relished my success at all, even for a minute, I’d hit a wall and it would be over. I’ll probably never relax about where I am or where I’m headed.
In the long run, which, hopefully, we’re all on, I don’t want to be built for comfort, like a Cadillac. I don’t care about being built for speed, like a Camaro.
I want to be built to last, like a Camry.
11
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CHIP
Lana and I started trying to have a baby right after a vacation in Greece and Turkey. We felt we needed to get some travel under our belts before jumping into parenthood. Lana got pregnant immediately—we couldn’t believe it, we’d just begun trying—and we were over the moon.
We wanted to tell everybody, but we knew about the rule that you should wait twelve weeks before you share the news because of the possibility of a miscarriage. We were too excited, though; we couldn’t hold off. We arrived in Naples for Christmas at her parents’ house. Her whole family was there, and it seemed a shame to wait another month and a half to tell them over the phone when we could make the big announcement in person. The only issue was that she was so early on, and the doctor was a little hesitant about whether it was going to be a viable pregnancy. But we said, “Screw that,” and felt optimistic.
The idea was to tell our families by catching them off guard with some kind of clever Photoshopped meme. I could have recycled that mailing I sent to agents and directors when I arrived in L.A., something like, “Coming soon! Baby Maniscalco!” But I’d come a long way since then, and now I had better ideas and just the guy to pull it off.
Steve Mitrano makes memes for my social media accounts, to publicize gigs and podcast
s by transposing my head into recognizable settings and in strange situations. I didn’t find Steve; he found me. He would share his memes of me on social media, and they caught my eye. They were so well done, spot-on—and funny. When I started noticing and loving his work, I thought Steve was just a fan with phenomenal talent. In fact, he’s an Emmy-winning graphic artist in the news field. He was just doing memes of me for fun. I was really impressed that he could combine his talent with my comedy to make these incredible images, and I had to make him part of my team.
Lana said, “Hey, Mom, look at this new thing Sebastian is doing.” We often shared all sorts of career stuff with Lana’s family, so it didn’t seem unusual for me to pull up an image on the computer to show them. They looked at the meme of Lana painting a picture of a baby whose face was a combination of our features. I was expecting cheers, tears, an emotional explosion. My wife’s family was definitely excited, but their reaction was subdued, like, “Congrats! Great news!”
Over the next week, Lana had some signs that the pregnancy might not be a go. I’ll spare you the details, but since we had shared the news with her family, and we wanted to remain optimistic, we decided to tell my family, too. Everyone was going to be together in L.A. for New Year’s, so we would do it then.
We pulled the same trick on my family with the meme. Their reaction was just a little different from Lana’s family.
My father did his signature laugh-yell that comes out in every emotional scenario, because he doesn’t know how to respond. It’s just a lot of teeth.
My mom screamed, rattling the windows with the volume.
Jessica yelled (like mother, like daughter), right before she started crying, which set off Talia, my five-year-old niece. She was so startled at the intense volume in my sister’s voice, she threw herself on the couch crying. Then I started crying, too, because it’s how I do. Everyone in the house was hugging, weeping, jumping up and down, clapping like they had just won an all-expenses-paid trip to Jamaica on Family Feud. A lot of shit went down in the living room. Lana was a bit quiet, because at this point, she was feeling pretty hesitant that everything was okay.
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