David Alan Grier has comedy down to a science.
“The act of laughter, especially someone new, is a physiological thing. Endorphins are raised, that moment when someone says something and makes you laugh out loud, that’s awesome! People want to experience that,” he told Page Six Tuesday.
It’s a concept he hopes to bring audiences with his latest project, “Snap Decision,” airing Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET on the Game Show Network.
“It requires you to profile people,” said Grier, 61, adding that some of the profiling he’s witnessed during filming has actually made him uncomfortable, but amused — and that he doesn’t mind being judged as a game show host, either.
“It seems like all of a sudden game shows are cool. Everybody’s doing them,” he said. “I really wanted to do an original game show, not a reboot, and I needed something where I could be comfortable and I could be myself and not be bogged down in the mechanics of the game. With certain games, like ‘Jeopardy,’ people are really stressed — and these people are not performers.”
Though best known by many for his work on “In Living Color,” Grier is also a three-time Tony Award nominee, most recently for his role of drug dealer Sportin’ Life in “Porgy and Bess” in 2012, for which he also earned a Grammy nomination. He’s starred in “The Carmichael Show” and appeared as comedy club MC Andy Dodd in “The Big Sick,” which reconnected him to his stand-up background.
“The thing that got me repeatedly in my career, it’s funny to me — when I’d do stand-up, people would be appalled, because in New York, people knew me from ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.’ They knew my legit Broadway credits, they didn’t know I tell d—k jokes,” Grier explained. “My audience has always been somewhat segmented. Some people know me from ‘In Living Color,’ they don’t know I’ve done Broadway. Some people know I’ve done Broadway, they don’t know ‘In Living Color.’ Some people don’t know I’ve done serious dramatic work on film. At this point, I don’t really care, but for a while, I didn’t know how to meld all those things together. I still have people who would come to a show and be like, ‘I didn’t know that you did stand-up!'”
‘In New York, people knew me from “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” They knew my legit Broadway credits, they didn’t know I tell d—k jokes.’
Grier got reacquainted with the comedy stage while taking in pal Dave Chappelle’s residency at Radio City.
“I went the other night,” he said. “It was so great, man. I’ve known him forever, since he was 18. He opened for me when I was at Caroline’s — that’s accomplished right there! It was really inspiring to recharge my batteries, so I called my agents, and maybe I’ll perform more dates … I like it because you’re free. You can do what you want.”
That freedom took decades for Grier to achieve. For years, he’d hang around comedy clubs, where he says he learned the craft from friends Robert Townsend and Damon and Keenan Ivory Wayans. When they finally cajoled him into getting onstage himself for the first time at Los Angeles’ famed Laugh Factory, his buddies would shout notes at him to work on his punchlines and cut his setups down.
It worked, and he caught the comedy bug.
“I just started doing it for fun. It was also a way to just burn off energy,” Grier said. “I never wanted to go on the road … When ‘In Living Color’ was picked up and we were on the air, it blew up so quickly and so big … Back then I would do spots if I could in a night. I’d go anywhere there was a stage.” he said. “One place I could go that it was just me: There was no script, no director’s idea, and I could just do what I wanted. There was that freedom.”
But it was also exhausting, and after a few years of combined road work and television success, Grier took a step back to find his center.
“What happened on ‘In Living Color’ was, I’d have two weeks off, and I’d hit the road until two weeks before we went back … and one year we did 36 episodes of ‘In Living Color.’ That’s a lot, and I just got really burned out,” he explained. “I was making all this money, but I didn’t feel a million dollars happier. I started cutting down, and it was right at a point when my agent was like, ‘No, no, you gotta do more! You’re screwing up your career!’ So I’ve always managed that part of my career to do what I want to do when I wanted to do it, because I was always doing other stuff.”