By Kurt Dusterberg
Don McEnery sits at his kitchen table, flipping through a spiral notebook. “I want to remember a joke, one I wrote a while ago,” he says.
His notebook is otherwise filled with grocery lists and reminders, but the stand-up comedian is less concerned about his organizational skills than finding a particular humorous nugget. When he finally locates the joke, he delivers a quick, unadorned reading: “I’m not in very good shape, so I don’t want to leave my body to science … I’m gonna leave my body to math.”
It’s solid material, and McEnery knows it. The 70-year-old comic has been doing standup for his entire adult life, mixing his stage work with screenwriting. And now, as he approaches his retirement years, he’s making another big adjustment: living in the Triangle. Don and his wife, Laurie, a retired occupational therapist, moved into a rental property in Raleigh a year ago after more than 40 years living in Los Angeles. They recently bought a house in Wake Forest.
“It’s hard to do it,” McEnery says. “We don’t know anybody. My wife is retired, and she wanted to live on the East Coast because that’s where our families are. And I didn’t want to live in New York, either, or Connecticut, because it’s cold—although the summers here are terrible. We looked at different places and this met more criteria than any other.” McEnery grew up in Long Island, writing songs and hoping to become a musician. But the dream was interrupted by a quick self‑assessment.
“Before I turned 25, I had my only panic attack in my life,” he says. “I said, ‘You’re not going to be a musician. What the hell are you thinking?’ And in the next instant, I go, ‘You should be a comedian.’ And nobody I told from then on ever said no.”
As he made his mark on the club scene in New York, McEnery made connections with other comics and writers. His friend Bob Shaw was friends with Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld’s longtime collaborator. One day, David offered the pair a chance to write an episode of Seinfeld. The season-three episode, The Tape, features the adaptation of a real-life story from McEnery. In the sitcom, a woman leaves a salacious message on Seinfeld’s tape recorder during his stand-up set.
“That really happened to me,” McEnery said. “I never found out who it was, but somebody left a sexy message on my tape recorder. And that episode got nominated for an Emmy, so we went to the Emmys. While we were there, we decided that we were going to move to LA.”
The move launched McEnery’s screenwriting career. In the mid-1990s, he left a job as the opening act for comedian Howie Mandel to be part of the writing team for the Disney animated comedy Hercules. His favorite writing contribution to the script? When two boys are trapped under a boulder, one of them shouts, “Get us out, we’re suffocating! Someone call IX-I-I!”
After Hercules, McEnery worked on Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, following on the company’s successful debut with Toy Story. He continued to perform stand-up in Vegas and other casinos in the region, but the screenwriting work took his professional career to new heights. “That’s the most profitable thing I’ve ever done,” McEnery says. “That’s how I got my house in Hollywood Hills.”
When the writing work dried up, he worked cruise ships. “It was lucrative when you were doing them,” McEnery says. “Nobody is paying you that much money at a club. On Norwegian [Cruise Line], I would be on the South Seas for two weeks. I would do two shows in one night the whole time, and it was the same show both times. The rest of the time, nothing.”
These days, McEnery can pick and choose how he works. Shortly after he arrived in the Triangle, he did guest spots for Saturday Night Live alum Kevin Nealon at Goodnights Comedy Club in Raleigh, leading to an invitation from Nealon to work a weekend with him in Charlotte.
Aside from picking up gigs, McEnery would like to launch a project where he could coach aspiring comics in the area. “I did this in LA with a group of comics, and people would come in and do their act for five minutes,” he says. “We would critique them and give them tips, joke ideas, and it went really well.”
Successful stand-up comedy requires a combination of subtle skills that are difficult to master. For most would-be comics, it takes years of perfecting timing, delivery, and stage presence. And you have to know what’s funny.
“If you tell a joke and five people laugh, and 100 people don’t laugh, the joke’s funny—but everybody’s not getting it at the same time, or in the same way,” McEnery says. “So you go, ‘All right, what if I said it this way?’ Or you just put a little more information up front to make them understand what you’re even talking about. Then all of a sudden you’ve got a joke that everybody laughs at.”
For now, McEnery will take some time to sort out what the future holds in his new community. He is indulging his other love—playing piano—at a local open mic night. “I’m not accomplished,” he says. “I’m good at what I play and I sound like I can play the piano, but I can’t do Rachmaninoff.”
As for North Carolina and his new community, he’s made a few observations, but nothing yet that feels like material for his show. “There’s virtually no litter. I hate people who litter,” he says.
“And the people are ridiculously nice. They’re overly nice.”If all goes well in emiretirement, McEnery will still find a few stages where he can practice his craft.
“I’m sure there comes a time where it won’t be happening,” he says. “I just want to get gigs where me and my wife can go away for a weekend, drive there, make a couple bucks, and do comedy.”
