Rosie O’Donnell Started Her Career by Telling Jerry Seinfeld’s Jokes

Before she was starring in movies, hosting her own talk show and publicly feuding with garbage people, Rosie O’Donnell began her career in show business as a stand-up comedian. In fact, back in the ‘80s, she won Star Search five times. (For those of you who weren’t around back then, Star Search was kind of like America’s Got Talent, but with Ed McMahon and way more perms.)

But as O’Donnell just recounted on David Duchovny’s Fail Better podcast, her first attempt at stand-up didn’t go so well — mainly because she ripped off another comedian’s entire act.

O’Donnell only became a comic after Richie Minervini, then the owner of The East Side Comedy Club on Long Island, approached her after witnessing the teenager get big laughs during a high school performance. (Note to any modern club owners out there: Randomly approaching minors following school productions probably wouldn’t fly anymore.) Minervini told O’Donnell: “I own a comedy club, I think you’d be a great stand-up comic.” 

O’Donnell’s response? “No way, I’m gonna be on Broadway.”

She was eventually convinced to perform at the club, but as a random inexperienced 16-year-old, she obviously had no act to speak of. So O’Donnell just mimicked some young comedian she happened to catch on The Merv Griffin Show one day: Jerry Seinfeld. “I would do his act, but not only his act, I took his cadence and his delivery,” O’Donnell explained. 

Unfortunately, while she killed with an audience of classmates, she totally bombed playing to “strangers” at the club, even while using the pilfered Seinfeld material. 

Despite the fact that Seinfeld wasn’t exactly famous at the time, the other comedians hanging around the club picked up on what was going on. “They surround me in the back little green room and say, ‘Rosie, where’d you get that joke? I said, ‘Jerry Seinfeld,’” O’Donnell recalled. When the comedians informed her that comics have to write their own jokes, she innocently protested, pointing out that “Barbra Streisand does not write her own songs. She sings other people’s songs. I’m not a writer, I’m a comedian.”

To his credit, Minervini didn’t give up on the teenager. “He said to me, ‘Why don’t you come down and be the MC, and you can learn how to incorporate your own life into your material?” After hosting shows for several years, O’Donnell eventually performed in front of Ed McMahon’s daughter, which is how she landed her first ever Star Search slot.

While she stopped directly copying his routines, O’Donnell did still think of Seinfeld’s vocal style as “the standard comedian voice. I thought, in order to be a comic, you gotta talk like that,” she admitted, adding that “it took me a long time to try to make my stand-up, which is mostly storytelling and conversation, much more conversational than it was presentational.”

And just imagine how different A League of Their Own or Exit to Eden would have been if she was still doing the Jerry Seinfeld voice the whole time.

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