Hear our full chat on my podcast “Beyond the Fame with Jason Fraley.”
Are you looking for a hilarious way to kick off your Labor Day holiday weekend?
Comedian Adam Ferrara cracks up the Bethesda Theater on Friday, Sept. 1.
“Come in, start your long weekend with a laugh — I will make you laugh,” Ferrara told WTOP. “I love the D.C. area every time I come back and see you guys. … I take my life, I put it in a blender and I talk about it. When it comes to politics, I don’t make enough money for the Republicans to care about me and I make too much for the Democrats to give me stuff, so no matter who’s in charge, I’m screwed. I’m just trying to be the best man that I can be.”
Rather than politics, he thinks the best comedy comes from everyday life.
“I sit here and I wait for Amazon boxes to come, then I curse,” Ferrara said. “Every day these boxes come with the smirk on their face! For the money I’m spending, (Jeff Bezos) should deliver those boxes to me personally! He should be handing me those boxes! I turn them upside-down, so I’m like, ‘Now they’re frowning. How’s that?'”
Ferrara says his family also provides plenty of material for his act.
“I call my mom everyday because she lives by herself,” Ferrara said. “I say, ‘Hi, Mom, I love you,’ and that’s the end of my participation. … I just put her on speaker and I do stuff around the house, I do the laundry. I went through security at JFK (Airport) with my mother on the speaker in the bin. Shoes off, belt off, she’s still going like, ‘My feet keep swelling up.’ … The guy is wanding me, I have my arms out, and he’s like, My mother has the same thing.'”
Raised in Huntington Station, New York, Ferrara grew up collecting comedy albums by such legendary comedians as Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Robert Klein, Don Rickles, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks.
“I got to meet Pryor,” Ferrara said. “I was nominated for an American Comedy Award and they showed a clip of my standup before we went to commercial. … I went over and there was a big line to meet him, but I said, ‘Mr. Pryor, I’m a big fan, I just wanted to shake your hand and say thank you.’ He goes, ‘Was that you that they just showed on the clip? You’re funny!’ That’s all I need to hear! Richard Pryor said I was funny! That’s my ring tone!”
He actually got his start doing standup at the bars on Long Island in 1988.
“I got out of college and told my parents, ‘I’ve done one of your things, now I’m gonna try mine,'” Ferrara said. “I went to this open mic on a Wednesday and started doing standup. I got lucky because the bar owners in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut found out it was cheap to do comedy and I had a car, so I would drive around, pick up the headliners and learn how to do standup that way. … Then I got my first TV deal and I came out to L.A.”
In 2009, Ferrara performed an hour-long stand-up special on Comedy Central, aptly titled “Funny as Hell.” He also landed roles on scripted TV series like the ABC cop show “The Job” (2001-2002) co-starring Denis Leary, with whom he reunited on FX’s hit firefighter series “Rescue Me” (2004-2011), which captured America after 9/11.
“I joined the cast at the end of Season three until the end,” Ferrara said. “My character was Chief Needles, one of the young chiefs that got promoted after 9/11 because all of the guys were gone, so people had to step up. … Denis asked me to play that part and it was great. As an actor, it’s one of the best jobs you can get because you get to do funny, you get to do drama, and I get to work with my pals, so it was one of the best times of my life.”
He next played Frank Verelli across “Sopranos” alum Edie Falco in Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie” (2009-2015).
“That was great,” Ferrara said. “My character was her love interest, so we went through this whole romance and breakup. When I got that show, my mother became the queen of the dayroom in her condominium complex. She was telling everybody, ‘You know, my son is working with Edie Soprano.’ ‘Really? I thought he was the fireman?’ ‘No, no, this is much better.’ So they all had lists of questions they wanted me to ask Edie.”
In addition to guest starring on “Criminal Minds” (2017) and “NCIS” (2021), Ferrara regularly hosted History Channel’s “Top Gear USA” (2010-2016) and competed on the reality cooking competition show “Hell’s Kitchen” (2014). Today, he hosts “The Adam Ferrara Podcast: 30 Minutes You’ll Never Get Back.”
“Tony Kornheiser was on my podcast,” Ferrara said. “Jay Mohr was on this week, Nathan Lane did one for me, Andrea Martin, Joe Buck for any sports fans, we had a nice talk about his dad. I had an FBI agent who worked on the (Ted) Bundy case, that was creepy and I’m pretty sure he did it. If you’re a music fan, I’ve had Stevie Van Zandt, Ann Wilson from Heart. … That’s the fun thing about this podcast: I get to call people I really want to talk to!”
Dito, Ferrara, ditto.
Hear our full chat on my podcast “Beyond the Fame with Jason Fraley.”
