Jay Mohr started doing stand-up in New Jersey as a 16-year-old, so it makes sense that he'll be headlining the Spokane Comedy Club on Monday night.
What makes little sense is the circuitous route Mohr's career has taken in the intervening years. In between delivering jokes and excellent impressions in theaters and comedy clubs virtually nonstop, Mohr. now 47, has created one of the more expansive entertainment careers you'll ever hear about. To wit:
• He successfully auditioned for Saturday Night Live and was in the cast from 1993 to 1995. He was largely forgettable, save for a mean Christopher Walken impression.
• His first major movie role was a doozy, playing skeezy sports agent Bob Sugar opposite Tom Cruise and Renée Zellweger in 1996's Jerry Maguire. A year later, he played a romantic lead opposite Jennifer Aniston in Picture Perfect.
• In 2004, he wrote a best-selling memoir about his battles with panic attacks and depression while on SNL called Gasping for Airtime: Two Years in the Trenches of Saturday Night Live.
• He's starred in numerous TV shows. The best of the lot, Action, was a short-lived Fox series skewering the movie biz. The most successful was Last Comic Standing, a show he created and hosted through its early years, earning a Primetime Emmy nomination.
• Mohr's entertaining guest spots on sports talk radio, the Jim Rome Show in particular, led to him getting his own nationally syndicated show, Jay Mohr Sports, that ran on Fox Radio from 2013 until early this year. He continues to host a weekly talk-show podcast, Mohr Stories, numbering more than 400 episodes to date, in which he chats up entertainers, comedians and sports figures.
• Most recently, Mohr is executive producer of a documentary called Finding Joseph I, exploring the failing mental health of legendary punk frontman Paul "HR" Hudson, aka Joseph I, from the band Bad Brains. The movie will be released nationally Nov. 3.
Through all those projects, Mohr has continued performing live throughout the country, and he'll do just that for one show only in Spokane on Monday night. ♦
Jay Mohr • Mon, Sept. 25 at 8 pm • $22/$30 • 21+ • Spokane Comedy Club • 315 W. Sprague • spokanecomedyclub.com • 318-9998
