When stand-up comedian Keith Robinson was ten years old and growing up in Philadelphia, his father was stabbed to death in a bar. Sitting in the restaurant above the Comedy Cellar in New York on a recent weekday afternoon, Robinson impartially explained what had happened, adding that the killer died shortly afterwards.
“He was shot on purpose by accident,” he told me, grinning mischievously and saying nothing more.
It’s the kind of story Robinson, 60, likes to tell, one with spiky, awkward humor and a tough-guy swagger. But Robinson is currently at the center of a different kind of dramatic tale, less HBO, more Lifetime: He suffered two strokes in four years, temporarily robbing him of his speech and mobility; he then, against the odds, recovered enough to return to the stage.
Robinson has been a fixture at the Cellar for thirty years and is as much a part of the legendary club as the microphone and the hummus. He was a Zelig comedy star and did stand-up on “Star Search” in the 1980s; was a regular on the Comedy Central show “Tough Crowd,” inspired by the table at the Cellar where Robinson, Colin Quinn and others hung out and bickered; and even wrote about the aborted third season of “Chappelle’s Show.” He has been a mentor to many comics, especially Philadelphia stand-ups, most famously Kevin Hart, who produced Robinson’s latest. special a decade ago.
When Amy Schumer heard in 2020 that Robinson was having trouble speaking after his second stroke, she told me over the phone, “I thought he was completely done.” Now she’s an executive producer on his new special, “Different Strokes” (Netflix)a shockingly unsentimental look at his health crisis that tells a feel-good story with cantankerous irreverence.
On stage, Robinson says that confronting death has taught him this lesson: “If there’s someone you want to hit, hit him now.”
He walks slowly but speaks quickly, sometimes slurring his words. His right arm is bent at an angle, but when I ask if he’s motionless, he adjusts it slowly, with a limited range of motion, like a boxer preparing to shadowbox. Always cheerful, he told me he was thinking of a specific person in that joke about punching someone — adding that his lack of action still bothers him. “If you think too much,” he said, “you can’t be a gangster.”
It has become common for comedians to turn tragedy into jokes. But Robinson isn’t looking for tears or applause. And nothing irritates him more than pity. When he dropped his cane during the taping (Schumer walked onstage to retrieve it for him), he poked fun at the audience for making sympathetic noises.
“I don’t like ‘aww,’” he told me, referring to the audience’s concerned look. “I just want to be laughed at. ‘Aww’ irritates me. ‘Aww’ irritates my soul.”
Robinson isn’t just yelling. He’s so concerned with gaining cheap approval that he makes jokes designed to alienate, he said. If an audience member doesn’t laugh, he points his cane at them and says, “You don’t like black people with disabilities?” In one instance, a woman responded by bursting into tears. The club gave her a ticket.
With the changes in his movement and speech, Robinson’s stand-up has a new gravitas and pace. After significant speech therapy, he can tell jokes but has to work harder to be understood. “Everything has to be more precise now,” he said, likening his shift to that of an athletic quarterback who can get out of trouble by becoming a pocket passer. “Everything counts. I can’t rely on movement.”
Wanda Sykes, a longtime friend from before they moved to New York at the same time, took him on tour when he first returned to the stage in 2022. She said by email that his material had become more personal: “He’s become more open.”
Some of his funniest jokes are short, like when he asks God why he has allowed these strokes to happen. He pauses, gives a look that suggests a lifetime of occasional sin, and says, “Oh yeah.”
After his second stroke, which was much more debilitating than the first, Robinson briefly thought he should quit performing and become a comedy writer. Chris Rock hired him to help with his recent special. But Robinson missed being on stage, hanging out with comedians and, most of all, “busting chops,” which, honestly, is his love language.
Sykes recalled how early in her career she would wear a sweater that mocked Robinson, calling it “a comedy cape” that contained all her comedic powers. “He talked so bad about me that I never wore it again,” Sykes said.
To hear Robinson tell it, losing the social aspect of a comedian’s life hurt as much as the physical damage from the strokes. He was placed in a Covid ward in the hospital. In the kind of contrarian attitude he likes, he laughed at the nurses during our interview. “Before I had the second stroke, I was applauding the nurses,” he told me. “After the second one I wanted to throw something at them.”
Perhaps the most striking thing about Robinson is how much two strokes haven’t changed him. “Keith is Keith: hasn’t changed,” says Noam Dworman, the basement’s owner. “Most people would be psychologically crushed by what he went through. He’s an artist who has trouble talking and walking. You see people get depressed when they lose their hair. And he had this guts. Nothing stopped him.”
And yet there are new concerns. For example, the fear of falling is persistent, he said. He also shows a new attitude towards mortality. For a while, Robinson said he simply wanted to live longer than his father, who died at age 35. Now, after a stroke, he puts it this way. “I always said I wanted to live for three more ‘Avengers’ movies,” he said. “Now I’m one and a half.”
