Ethnic comedy
Polish performer creates tour based on his heritageBy Keith Frederick, kfrederick@altoonamirror.com
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If you go
What: ''Three Poles Walk Into a Bar'' Comedy Tour
When: 7 p.m. Saturday
Where: The State Theatre, State College
Tickets: $21, available at the State Theatre box office or online at www.StateTickets.com
For years, comedian Bob Golub watched his peers make it big on themed tours and films like "The Original Kings of Comedy" and "The Blue Collar Comedy Tour."
When he caught a bunch of them on TV, he decided to catch the wave with a show of his own - one that had a personal connection with him.
"I was kicking back and I saw these theme shows like 'Blue Collar Comedy Tour' and the 'Kings of Comedy,'" Golub said in a recent phone interview from his home in West Hollywood, Calif. "They got big and I looked at it and I (said) 'Why am I running away from my heritage? Why don't I do a Polish comedy show?'"
His idea, still in its infancy, will make an appearance at The State Theatre in State College. Golub is the headliner of the "Three Poles Walk Into a Bar" Comedy Tour, which will be presented at 7 p.m. Saturday. The tour will feature two other Polish comics, David Kwiatkoski (who also tours as David Kaye) and Michael Stankiewicz.
It's the fourth show in the tour - it made previous stops in Erie, Pittsburgh and Chicago - and features what Golub calls a strange double standard in political correctness.
"Why are Pollack jokes less offensive than everything else? Everybody tells Polish jokes," he said. "We have a hidden theme in our shows: If we, the Polish people, can take a joke, then maybe everybody needs to lighten up a bit."
The 50-year-old Golub is a Sharon native whose career took him from a stint in jail in 1978, to working as a roofer in Florida, to a Hollywood set, to a steady job as a headlining stand-up.
Golub first tried stand-up comedy when he was in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and making ends meet with roofing jobs. Having gotten a taste for the business, along with some success, Golub took a leap of faith and moved to Los Angeles.
It wasn't a good decision, as it turned out.
''It didn't work out in L.A.,'' Golub said. ''I couldn't get any stage time without a big name. And I wasn't that good (yet).''
So Golub returned to the East Coast, this time to New York City. The city was experiencing a boom period in standup, he said, though he sold what he called ''Bob's Lucky Potatoes'' on the streets to make ends meet at first.
''In New York in (the mid-'80s), I worked every night,'' Golub said. ''I built my way up to headlining.''
It was during his time in New York that he auditioned for Martin Scorcese's ''Goodfellas.'' According to the biography on his Web site (www.bobgolub. com), Golub walked into the audition dressed like a mobster, with $2,000 in cash and a gun.
''I didn't know any better,'' he says in the biography.
Though he auditioned for a lead role that eventually went to Robert DeNiro, Golub was cast as a tough-talking truck driver whom Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta rob in one scene.
With his career going well in New York, Los Angeles came back into Golub's life.
''(Producers) were looking to develop some shows around me,'' he said. ''That didn't work out, but I got married and moved out here in 1993.''
Golub's career has been steady since then, with appearances on ''The Tonight Show'' and the short-lived Comedy Central show ''Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn.'' He also had success with a documentary that he starred in, wrote and directed himself, ''Dodo,'' about his relationship with his distant father.
But most of Golub's recent work has been in getting ''Three Poles'' off the ground.
The tour features Golub in the headlining spot. In between sets, polka music is provided by Grammy-nominated accordion player Kevin Solecki and Polish food is available. At the State Theatre, fresh-made pierogis and kielbasa sausage will be brought in on the day of the show by Plumpy's Pierogies of Jessup, Pa.
"I didn't want to do just a Polish show ... so I decided to bring food and music and make it in an event," Golub explained.
The polka music is a big part of the event, Golub said.
"When people think of polka, the first thing (they) think of is a lot of old people at a Polishfest," he said. "I wanna change that and make it hip.
"What we're trying to do is make polka appeal to kids. We wanted to make this hip. So we're working now on getting a rocking polka sound."
It's all part of Golub's effort to turn people back to their Polish ancestry, which is so often a punchline.
"People are losing their ethnicity," he said. "It used to be that Poles only married Poles or Slovaks. We want to turn that back around."
But the tour also shows that there's no shame in telling the jokes that we've all heard. In fact, Golub says the jokes are often told with affection, something he looks for when he takes a video camera around the area before the shows.
"I had a black guy in St. Louis tell me a Polish joke," he said. "He spoke pretty fluent Polish he learned from a guy he was in the service with in Korea. And you can tell by looking at him that telling the joke makes him remember this guy - who was the one who told him the joke in the first place!"
The State Theatre certainly isn't offended, according to Kristy Cyone, marketing and sales manager.
''We (the programming committee) thought it was pretty funny," Cyone said. "It's all in jest and I don't think there's anything too harsh. I mean, I'm Polish, and I make fun of Polish people."
While Golub says it isn't easy to start a tour from scratch, he thinks that a Polish show can tap into a niche, just like the ''Blue Collar Comedy Tour'' and ''The Original Kings of Comedy'' did.
''There's a Slavic market out there to tap into that (Hollywood doesn't) know about,'' he said. ''If we sell out Penn State and we sell out (the next show, in) Milwaukee, people will start noticing that.''
Mirror Staff Writer Keith Frederick is at 946-7466.
