Erik Visits an American Grave Part 1,723

This is the grave of Richard Jeni.

Born in 1957 in Brooklyn, Richard Colangelo grew up in an Italian-American family there. A very good student, he went to Hunter College, graduating with honors and a comparative politics degree. He went into PR work but had trouble keeping a job. It seems he was spending a lot of nights out. One night, he ended up at an open mic in 1982. He got up and did some comedy bit, realized he could make people laugh and not just the people he knew, and so decided to go into comedy.

Performing as Richard Jeni, he moved up the comedy ladder pretty quickly. In fact, it did not take him long to start getting specials on Showtime. In 1988, he performed on The Tonight Show for the first time. When Jay Leno took over the show in 1992, he became the most common stand-up act on the show. Anytime he had new material, Leno was happy to book him. He became a huge figure in the comedy world. In 1989, he won Comedy USA’s Best Nightclub Comedian, which is voted on by comedy club owners and workers. HBO had a show called The HBO Comedy Hour, which ran one-hour specials around a single comedian. It did not take them long to get Jeni on a show. He did and they loved it and so he did two more. In 1991, his special Crazy from the Heat had the highest ratings of any comedy special in Showtime’s history.

By the mid 90s, Jeni was a pretty big comedian, but without great acting ability, there really wasn’t that much else to do. He kind of stalled out. He did have a show on UPN in 1995 called Platypus Man, which was based on one of his stand up routines and revolved around a bunch of men doing guy things. This sounds like a cut-rate Seinfeld concept. I have no memory of this show at all and I was watching a lot of TV at the time, though not necessarily UPN. Anyway, it had 13 episodes and was cancelled.

So Jeni basically turned into the reliable funny guy people knew but didn’t know too well. That made him perfect for ad campaigns and he did quite a bit of that, including for the American Dairy Association, as well as for Arby’s. Given the latter, I assume he is embedded deep in Farley’s memory. He also appeared in a number of TV shows and a few films, usually in small parts. He was a good guy for game shows as well. He also helped write Chris Rock’s material when the latter hosted the 2005 Academy Awards.

In 2007, Jeni was hanging out in bed with his girlfriend. Nothing much was happening, they hadn’t been in an argument or anything. She went downstairs to cook breakfast. Jeni took out a gun and shot himself, successfully committing suicide. He was 49 years old. As it turned out in the aftermath, Jeni had a long history of severe depression, was on some pretty heavy meds, and had moved toward schizophrenia. Of course, many comedians do this work as a way to deal with the hell going on in their head.

I don’t particularly recall being a big fan of the guy’s work and the clips I watched didn’t exactly lead to rethink that too hard, but here’s some of them. I am sure some of you were big fans.

Richard Jeni is buried in Moravian Cemetery, Staten Island, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other comedians, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Lenny Bruce is in Mission Hills, California and Jack Benny is in Culver City, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.