Robert De Niro, Standup Comic? The Actor on Testing His Comedy Chops
Robert De Niro is back in theaters this week with The Comedian, a comedy-drama about Jackie Burke, a gone-to-seed standup trying to reinvigorate his fading career. The legendary actor isn’t exactly known for his comedy chops, but it’s no surprise De Niro was all-in during filming, performing a standup set in front of a crowd of extras. Were they in awe and laughing on command? “No, I wouldn’t think that,” said De Niro, who spoke to Yahoo Style at a recent event, along with his costar Leslie Mann.
The actor noted that entertaining even a fake audience was serious business: After multiple takes of telling the same anecdotes, the crowd grew restive and bored. “It’s different and it’s not easy,” he said. “I did a little of it. Not as much as I would have liked. When I was doing the standup — the routines with the extras and some actual audience and part of the crew — the first or second time, they laughed. After, they know the joke. I really needed them to feed me back. I took it for granted that they would. It helped me a lot when I got their reaction.”
Related: Leslie Mann and Patti LuPone Tear Into Each Other in NSFW Clip from ‘The Comedian’ (Exclusive)
To be good at comedy, says De Niro, you have to just not care what people think. “You have to go up and be prepared to fall and fail. The audience is always with the comedian. If someone like me would get up, they’d give me a minute, and if I have a couple of bad jokes, they’d turn on you,” he says.
His costar Mann — who plays a woman Jackie meets during community service — chimed in that there was one joke De Niro tells that will always get a giggle.
“Can I tell her what you do when you take pictures?” she asks De Niro. “When we take pictures, he says, ‘Yabadadoo, cheese, one two three, yeah, yeah, yeah.’ It makes me laugh so hard. I look like such a fool in all the pictures I take with him.”
Read the rest of the interview with De Niro and Mann at Yahoo Style.
Watch The Comedian trailer:
