How to go
What: Jay Mohr
When: 8 p.m. Friday
Where: Taft Theatre, 317 E. Fifth St., Cincinnati
Cost: $32.50
More info: 513-232-6220 or www.tafttheatre.org
Jay Mohr, stand-up comedian and “Jerry Maguire” movie alumnus, doesn’t know why he has never performed in Cincinnati, or anywhere else in the Midwest for that matter.
“Comics are just creatures of comfort,” he said. “We get used to playing the same places, and it doesn’t dawn on us to go to other cities. When I got the offer from the Taft Theatre, it was like a light bulb went off. Cincinnati is a huge city, my radio show is on there, and I get tons of calls and tweets from there.”
Since co-starring as Tom Cruise’s nemesis in “Jerry Maguire,” Mohr has been a Hollywood leading man, a sports radio commentator and a podcaster. Yet Mohr said stand-up is the love of his life, and every side project is ultimately a means to help fill theaters.
“Stand-up is what I’m passionate about, and true comics never leave the road,” he said. “Jerry Seinfeld has no (financial) reason to do stand-up, and he’s never stopped. Some guys hang it all up once they get a sitcom, and that never made sense to me.”
Mohr’s comedy is a mixture of social commentary, personal anecdotes and celebrity impressions. The latter is a holdover from his stint on “Saturday Night Live” in the mid-1990s, yet despite his notoriously brief and invisible tenure on the classic sketch show, fans still expect Mohr to do Christopher Walken in performance, which Mohr finds odd.
“It’s revisionist history,” he said. “When people say they remember me from ‘SNL,’ I have to gently take them aside and remind them that I don’t remember me on ‘SNL.’ My recurring character was the guy who waves goodbye at the end of the show.”
Mohr has had his share of stumbling blocks: His public disagreement with NBC over the direction of the competition series “Last Comic Standing” (“It’s still on, so I was wrong”) and his one-time rejection of a late-night talk-show gig that eventually went to Jimmy Kimmel (“I’d bend over backwards for a gig like that now”).
But one regret he definitely does not have is “Jerry Maguire,” the project he’s still most known for and the one that Cuba Gooding, Jr. once accused of ruining his own career.
Mohr snorted at that. “I’d happily trade his Oscar for my AM radio show.”
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