HEAR HIM RORY
After 14 years at The Daily Show, writer and comedian Rory Albanese is hitting the road and taking a new approach to the small screen.
“When you’re a stand-up comedian, the first thing you always have to overcome is the fact that you’re kind of an asshole,” explains writer and comic Rory Albanese, digging in to a plate of eggs at Locanda Verde, an Italian restaurant in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood. “So right out of the gate, if you’re not well-known, people are like, ‘You think you’re funny, pal? Let’s see.’”
Albanese is perfectly comfortable subjecting himself to a room full of strangers several nights a week—in fact, he recently gave up a job as executive producer and writer at The Daily Show to do so full-time, after years of squeezing in gigs when his schedule allowed. “The hardest part of leaving is not getting to work with Jon every day,” says Albanese, who landed his first job with Jon Stewart just months after graduating from Boston University. “Everything I did at the show in the 14 years I was there was because he gave me an opportunity to do it. But when I told him I had to go, he got it—if anyone understands the desire to go on the road and do stand-up, it’s him.”
These days, Albanese is prone to traipsing to locales like Tampa, Knoxville, and Indianapolis, sharing his philosophical wit with audiences who sometimes like him, sometimes don’t. “One of the things I’m into right now is breaking through why everyone in the country is so mad at each other,” he says. “The country’s so divided, but when you go around and talk to people or bring things up onstage, people aren’t actually as divided as you would be led to believe. The media plays this role in shouting on these two extremes, but most people live in a space between them. I’m working toward that little area—I’ve been calling it Normaltown—and it’s like, ‘Yes, I do care about health care, but not when The Big Bang Theory’s on.’”
When he’s not on a stage, Albanese is tapping out a pilot for CBS as part of his development deal with Warner Bros. “I wake up, eat some breakfast, read the paper, and work on my pilot for a little bit, prep for the show, do the show, go back to the room, order from some weird local late-night pizza place, watch half a movie and fall asleep,” he says. “I’m 36, and I’m not looking for trouble the way you would be at 26. I have much more of an old man routine.”
Albanese’s CBS pilot is a different beast from his work on The Daily Show, and that’s just the way he likes it. “I really want to do a show like the ones I grew up watching,” he explains, citing Cheers, The Cosby Show, and Family Ties as touchstones. “I don’t look back at The Cosby Show like, ‘Aw, man it wasn’t edgy enough.’ It was a network sitcom, but it was hysterical. Writing a pilot for a real television network is an exciting thing I dreamed about doing when I was a kid. So it doesn’t even matter if it gets made. Just being able to say things like, ‘Yeah, I got some notes from CBS’ is cool.”