Laughing Out Loud
When actor and stand-up comic Jason Stuart ran into his old pal Rosie O’Donnell recently, it was like a meeting between the old gay guard and the new. He thanked her for coming out last year. “It makes me feel not so alone,” he told her.
Stuart, who headlines four shows at Stanford & Sons Comedy Club in Westport this weekend, was an out performer before Ellen DeGeneres and Will and Grace. In gay pop-culture years, that’s an eternity. It’s been eight long years since Stuart’s last Kansas City gig, but attitudes are still relatively slow to evolve. “I’d love to just be a comic first,” Stuart tells the Pitch, “[but] they’ll sell you as a gay person first and a comic second.”
To remedy that, Stuart might consider starting in his own backyard. The first two words of a press release from his management company are openly gay, and his act is weirdly titled “Gay Comedy With Out a Dress.” It’s easy to admire Stuart’s honesty — “In a closet,” he notes, “you can’t see clearly” — but if he’s ghettoized as a gay comic, he might need to accept partial responsibility.
Still, Stuart takes to the road twice a month, has two independent films on the festival circuit and plays gay character Dr. Thomas on the ABC sitcom My Wife & Kids. He has earned a respectable niche in an industry that might be hugely gay behind the scenes but still puts on a predominantly straight front.
“Despite Will and Grace, television hasn’t changed that much,” Stuart says, dissatisfied with the industry’s lip service. As popular as that show is, he says it’s still wading in the shallow end. “They’re still afraid to delve into Will’s relationships, but they’re willing to delve into his problems with not having any. And Jack is supposed to be a whore, but you never see him with anyone. He should whore it up a lot more.”
During a self-imposed hiatus from stand-up, Stuart made 10 Attitudes with Judy Tenuta, which won Best Picture at the Barcelona Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. He also played a despondent HIV-positive man in the drama Letting Go. But he’s back in nightclubs for what he calls “My Big Fat Gay Jewish Comedy Tour,” ribbing his latest target: Anna Nicole Smith, whom he says is “five minutes from a trial.”
Stuart says that working mainstream comedy clubs like Stanford’s is, if not a world away from the gay-pride shows he frequents, at least a couple of blocks. “The act’s not different at all. But I don’t have to set things up as much for gay audiences; they get it way earlier. My job as a comedian, though, is to adapt to the audience. There’s more shock laughter [at a straight club], but they come along. But are they laughing with me or at me? I don’t care that much.”
