The Clown Whisperer
Joe List stood before the bathroom mirror in a filthy condominium in Tampa, checking his gumline for proof his teeth were about to fall out of his head. Unable to find any dental rot, he enlisted fellow comedian Greg Stone, his roommate for the weekend, to conduct an amateur exam. Stone said List’s teeth looked fine, but List was unconvinced; he demanded to speak to Stone’s dentist friend on the phone, who inspected his mouth over FaceTime and found nothing. It did little to soothe List. He wondered if he was suffering from brain cancer and rifled through his contacts, calling every medical professional he knew, asking them to corroborate his self-diagnosis. None did.
It was, on paper, a pretty idyllic weekend for List. He was in town headlining a series of shows at Side Splitters, and the Tampa comedy club had provided the condo as a “perk.” After years of climbing the rungs of the New York City comedy scene, this was a mark of success (even if the floors left his socks black with dirt). Mentally, though, List was cracking up. The panic attacks came almost daily. His hands shook uncontrollably. His breathing was labored. At times, he struggled to make it through his routine onstage.
So List turned to a last resort. All of his comedian friends—Sam Morril, Gary Gulman, Robert Kelly—talked up one man constantly, making him out to be something of a quasi-mystical miracle worker for struggling comedians. Apparently, this man had helped everyone from open-micers to superstars, Seinfeld writers to Comedy Cellar regulars. Rumor had it that he was impossible to get time with after Pete Davidson was cast in Saturday Night Live at the tender age of 20, leaving other comics wracked with jealousy. Richard Lewis, the original neurotic comic, had started seeing him back in the ‘70s, people said.
Desperate, List called Morril, who gave him the phone number. Then, List called Alan Lefkowitz, therapist to seemingly all of New York’s most successful stand-ups.
I knew what Lefkowitz’s voice sounded like long before I met him. Every comedian who sees him does an impression of his low, throaty grumble. (List insists he does a better Lefkowitz than Dan Soder, even though he concedes Soder is a better impressionist overall.) But as Lefkowitz greets me in the railroad apartment he shares with his wife Beverly, it comes off even froggier, even more quintessentially New York—like if Kermit was a Lower East Side-dwelling Jew.
I also knew more or less what he’d look like. “He’s straight out of Central Casting,” Stavros Halkias, stand-up comedian and cohost of the podcast Cum Town, told me days before I met Lefkowitz this past July. “It’s classic New York therapy shit. It’s very Woody Allen.” Sure enough, Lefkowitz, 75, looks like a therapist ripped from a New Yorker cartoon. He’s five-foot-eight with a grizzled beard and male-pattern baldness. His remaining hair is tied back in a ponytail, and he’s dressed in his usual uniform of black T-shirt and black jeans. “Welcome,” he grumbles, then promptly ushers me to his living room at the front of the apartment, which includes a tiny home office wedged between the couch and window. The apartment has no interior walls, so we can hear Beverly, also a therapist, providing counsel to a patient in the back.
We settle into our respective seats, me on the couch, Lefkowitz in his desk chair, and he proceeds to come alive when I ask him about the psyche of comedians. “You need to compete with someone to get into a particular club. You need to make a living, or you define your success by whether you get a TV show,” Lefkowitz says, leaning forward in his chair and gesticulating his points like a seasoned professor rehashing a subject for a fresh crop of students. “There’s a value judgement in terms of how you measure your success and self-worth that interferes with your original connection of why you became a comic,” he explains. Midway through his lesson, Lefkowitz challenges me to think about why most comedians are either the youngest or only child. The answer I eventually land on is only children are used to having attention lavished upon them unconditionally, while youngest children have to fight for it. “Smart. Good,” Lefkowitz tells me, and I’m embarrassed by how happy I am to receive his validation.
Trying to entertain people with nothing but words is the most panic-inducing scenario fathomable to most people. Jerry Seinfeld even has a bit about it: “If you have to be at a funeral, you’d rather be in the casket than doing the eulogy.” Surely those who actively seek that experience must be overcompensating for some deep-seated sense of inadequacy. That, or comedians are such brave yet tortured souls that they have no choice but to pursue a career telling it like it really is (see: egomaniacs). At the same time, comedians are keenly aware of their psychological hang-ups—they joke about them constantly—but suffer from the delusion that their neuroses are the source of their creativity and humor, and that getting healthy would therefore mean transforming into some kind of bland, unfunny asshole. This makes them, as a class of people, desperately in need of and uniquely resistant to psychotherapy.
Lefkowitz has managed to break through to this population by adopting a two-pronged approach to therapy, playing both good cop and bad. Comedians describe him as both a patient listener and purveyor of infinite wisdom—the professorial man who’s sitting across from me now—and also as a total hardass who isn’t afraid to tell them, in no uncertain terms, exactly what their problems are. Lefkowitz will tell patients outright to stop drinking, or to end a bad relationship. He raises his voice and refuses to take “I don’t know” for an answer. He lets them know their psychological epiphanies are way off-base. Soder, co-host of the radio show and podcast The Bonfire and a star on Billions, once told Lefkowitz he had finally discovered the source of his romantic problems—he suffered from a Madonna-whore complex, alternately worshipping and objectifying women. “No,” Lefkowitz told him. “Your problem is you lack intimacy.” Comedy Cellar regular Robert Kelly has yo-yoed in weight throughout his adult life. Lefkowitz’s advice to Kelly: Either accept that you’re fat or stop eating so much.
“I can be very gentle,” Lefkowitz assures me, in his soothing tone. “But there are some people who need to be yelled at.”
Sometimes that straightforward approach slides into outright confrontation. Comedian Chloe La Branche struggled with alcohol and relationships when she first saw Lefkowitz four years ago. Lefkowitz forbade her from drinking and from talking to “toxic boys who are psychopaths,” as La Branche puts it. But she couldn’t comply, so Lefkowitz stopped seeing her. “I needed a lot of nurturing,” she says, “but Alan was very cut and dry.” Among those comics who pride themselves on being averse to bullshit, this approach has earned Lefkowitz their respect. “He’s not a nerdy little guy. Back in the day, he was a badass,” says Kelly. “He’s one of us.”
I get a taste of Lefkowitz’s bluntness when we discuss comedians, like List, who struggle with anxiety onstage. “Comedians can solve their stage fright by drinking, or they can look at why they’re anxious about getting up there,” he tells me. “Why is your entire self-esteem on the line?” For that answer, he teaches them to turn this talent inward and re-examine their families and relationships—two areas ripe for both emotional breakthroughs and comedy. That, and he assures them that getting better doesn’t mean getting less funny.
It’s become common to see neurotic, white guy comedians confess their traumas and psychological struggles onstage. The Great Depresh, Gary Gulman’s 2019 HBO special about anxiety and depression, which he filmed 13 years after he started to see Lefkowitz, was so well-received that it earned him an invitation to perform at Carnegie Hall and a book deal. Bo Burnham (not a client) won three Emmys and was nominated for three more for Inside, his Netflix special about mental health during the pandemic.
But it wasn’t always that comedians divulged their darkest secrets on stage. “Borscht Belt comics weren’t talking about their problems. They were talking about their mother-in-laws,” Lefkowitz says of the comedians of his youth. There were exceptions—Lenny Bruce in the 1960s, Richard Pryor in the later part of his career, and Woody Allen in his films—but they were considered genre-defying talents. It’s only in the past 20 years that comedy has turned into an intensely personal medium.
Lefkowitz enjoyed Henny Youngman and those other Borscht Belt comedians, and he was one of only 47,133 Americans to vote for Dick Gregory, the comedian known for his incisive comments on race in America, in the 1968 presidential election, but he never intended to corner the market on comedic neuroses. It just so happened he was perfect for the gig.
Lefkowitz grew up in a New York defined by crime, gang violence, and ethnic tribalism. He was mugged several times as a kid, the attackers holding knives to his throat. He remembers an Irish-Catholic classmate picking a fight with him because he was Jewish. But Lefkowitz’s greatest childhood struggle was in his own home, with his own Orthodox Jewish family. At age 5, bedridden for six months with rheumatic fever, Lefkowitz started questioning his faith. “I felt like I was being punished for some reason,” he remembers. “That’s when I thought, I don’t know if I believe in God. Why would he do that to a little kid?”
Lefkowitz was filled with the creeping suspicion that he might be fundamentally evil. At times, he thought his struggle with faith was a religious test, à la Abraham on the rock, or that the devil was tricking him into disbelief. Other times, he was convinced organized religion was an utter crock of shit. By 16, Lefkowitz was so disillusioned with his family and their religious zealotry that he dropped out of high school, hopped a Greyhound, and fled to Miami with a woman, expecting never to return. His family sat shiva for him when he left. He didn’t speak to his parents for the next five years, and his brother, a rabbi, and his sister, the wife of a rabbi, didn’t speak with him for 20.
Just months after they hightailed it to Miami, Lefkowitz’s girlfriend got pregnant, so they moved back to Brooklyn, married, and started a family. (They would later divorce.) At 17 years old, Lefkowitz was a high school dropout trying to provide for a family of three. He took a job stocking shelves and started night classes, sleeping two to three hours per night. “In certain ways, growing up in my family aided in that process. I didn’t have anyone to rely on, so if I needed something, I knew I had to do it myself,” Lefkowitz says matter-of-factly, his voice betraying no emotion when discussing personal history. “And since I was already a failure to them, I didn't worry about succeeding and failing.” Amid the tumult of being disowned by his family, Lefkowitz had discovered Freud, and so began his fascination with what makes people tick. He received his high school equivalency, enrolled in Long Island University, and later completed a master’s in social work from New York University. If he could help people gain perspective on their childhoods, he figured, perhaps he could free them of the feeling of inadequacy he had been all too familiar with during his own.
Lefkowitz started seeing comedians in the early 1970s, when Richard Lewis first laid on his couch. (Lewis declined to be interviewed for this article, and Lefkowitz declined to say how he came to have Lewis as a patient, citing doctor-patient confidentiality.) Back then, Lefkowitz says, a lot of people, not just comics, were ashamed to be in therapy. But once he got the Lewis seal of approval Lefkowitz was in, and his name has been passed around in comedian circles ever since. “Comedians are pretty hacky,” says Dustin Chafin, another patient of Lefkowitz’s. “Once one of them does something, everyone does it.” Now, more than half of Lefkowitz’s clients are comedians, and another chunk work in show business as producers, managers, and agents.
Part of Lefkowitz’s appeal is that he’s amassed an enormous amount of institutional knowledge. He understands the worries of not getting enough stage time, and watching your contemporaries book late night spots and land TV deals. Patients don’t have to explain that “J.F.L.” stands for Just For Laughs, the Montreal comedy festival that serves as a launching pad for so many careers. He knows about Estee Adoram, the notoriously hard-to-please booker for the Comedy Cellar, the most coveted club in the city. Plus, he works on a sliding scale, adjusting his rate based on a patient’s income. He told Gulman, “If you become homeless, I will treat you for free”; Chafin paid Lefkowitz in Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson CDs when he was a struggling young comic. Lefkowitz even watches his patients’ specials, and sometimes attends in person, to get a more complete view of the brains he’s working on.
The mythos around Lefkowitz has grown so large that when Halkias started seeing him five years ago, it was about more than just addressing his mental health; it signified his acceptance into one the most competitive scenes in all of show business. “It was like, I’m going to the therapist all the comedians go to,” Halkias remembers. Soder jokes that Lefkowitz is the Clown Whisperer. “There are doctors who are famous for doing knee surgeries on NBA and NFL players, or doing Tommy John surgery in baseball,” he says. “Alan is like that for comedy.”
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Kelly sees it more intimately. “He’s a surrogate parent for many comics,” he says. “We leave everything behind, our safety net, to come to this fucked up city and do this fucked up job, in this fucked up industry that doesn't care about you. And then all of a sudden you find this little Jewish guy in a room.” If Lefkowitz is a surrogate parent, then he’s the platonic ideal of a father—compassionate when he needs to be, but willing to dole out the tough love.
Lefkowitz and I have spent the past two hours dissecting the sad clown stereotype, and all the while he has maintained a zenlike demeanor, articulating his points precisely but keeping emotions at arm's length. The only time he’s wavered is when he tells me about his eldest son, who died last year from lymphoma. “I don’t want to let go of that pain,” he says, then swallows the catch in his throat and averts his gaze. “People have a tendency to look at feelings as either good or bad, which is not a real way to relate to the world. Pain is also a good thing.”
He then tells me he takes a dialectical approach to therapy, which emphasizes the unity of opposites. “There’s no up without a down, or yes without a no.” Just, I realize as he talks about his son, like there’s no pain without joy, no resentment without love, and no laughter without sadness. This is perhaps the most crucial element to Lefkowitz’s success with comedians. He helps them not just realize that investigating their emotions won’t make them humorless bores. In fact, he shows them, it will have the opposite effect, allowing them to create even more resonant comedy. “Humor,” as Lefkowitz says, “is a way to say something that’s otherwise too painful.” Comedy equals tragedy plus time might be a cliché, but it’s a nonetheless true one in Lefkowitz’s experience.
Those comedians who can withstand his hard-line directives are so effusive in their praise that you suspect they’re laying it on thick, perhaps for comedic effect. But as their endorsements piled up over the weeks, it became clear none of them were doing a bit.
Soder’s father drank himself to death, but for years Soder insisted that, despite his own heavy drinking, he wasn’t an alcoholic himself. Lefkowitz called him a pussy—Lefkowitz might be one of the few therapists for whom “pussy” is a clinical diagnosis—and told Soder he was scared to admit he had the same disease as his dad. Soder quit drinking.
After years of struggling as a New York comic, Bill Masters landed a cushy gig as the warm-up comedian for The Cosby Show in 1985, telling jokes before the live taping to loosen up the audience. Suddenly, he started experiencing panic attacks while performing, struggling to breathe and battling the urge to run off stage. He was scared, so he looked Lefkowitz up. “Eventually, I realized these fears existed only in my head. They weren’t real. A large part of that was because of Alan,” he says.
Four years after his Tampa meltdown, List’s teeth are, like most people’s, imperfect but fine. When he sat down with Lefkowitz upon his return to New York, Lefkowitz helped him see that his fear of performing wasn’t based in reality; it was a coping mechanism he had developed as a kid in response to his family’s incessant criticisms. Lefkowitz convinced List that his audience wanted him to be funny, that they wanted him to succeed—why else would they pay to attend? The guidance stuck. List has since gotten married, quit drinking, and wrestled his anxiety into a more functional state. If anything, he’s funnier now. Over the past four years, he released a comedy special, appeared on Netflix, and launched a podcast, Mindful Metal Jacket, devoted to mental health. “My wife loves me, but she doesn’t shape and form my perspective on things as much as [Lefkowitz] has,” he tells me. “It’s immeasurable how much he’s changed my life.”
List also accomplished his lifelong dream of writing a movie, a semi-autobiographical tale in which List plays a jazz pianist who confronts his dysfunctional family after undergoing therapy. Naturally, the therapist character is based on Lefkowitz.
It is not an exaggeration to say that over four decades, Lefkowitz has guided comedy into a more confessional, psyche-plumbing art form, albeit off stage, away from any audience. “Alan has had a major influence on a number of comedians who have influenced how comedy is done in New York City and wherever those comedians wind up,” Gulman says. Without such encouragement, comedians might still be telling audiences to “Take my wife. Please.”
Lefkowitz, however, dismisses such praise. “I don't think or see myself in those terms,” he tells me. “Yes, I help people grow. The relationship I form with someone and being part of their growth is meaningful. But whatever someone does in their life is what they make out of it.”
It’s only several feet away from his living room, but Lefkowitz, a gracious host, walks me to the door. He plans to go back to conducting therapy by phone after I leave. It’s a rainy afternoon in New York, and some funny people need healing.
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