Paul Reiser
By Jen Banowetz
October 2025 View more Spotlight
This multitasker brings his standup to the Mac
There are a million ways you may know Paul Reiser: As husband Paul Buchanan in the NBC sitcom Mad About You. The weaselly corporation guy in Aliens. A detective in the Beverly Hills Cop franchise. The Legend in Amazon Prime’s The Boys. The empathetic doctor in Stranger Things on Netflix.
The man is a consummate hyphenate: comedian-actor-TV writer-author-musician. (Did you know he co-wrote the theme song for Mad About You in addition to co-creating the show?) His 1994 book, Couplehood, sold 2 million copies (later followed by bestsellers Babyhood and Familyhood.) He’s earned a spot on Comedy Central’s list of the 100 Best Comedians of All Time.
Reiser will bring his standup comedy to Glen Ellyn’s McAninch Arts Center (425 Fawell Blvd.) with a 7:30 p.m. show Oct. 17. We recently had a chance to catch up with him.
Q: What are some of your favorite things you’ve done in your career?
A: People think I’m being cute or coy when I say the only one that’s really fun is doing standup—that’s the thing that I love. [People ask,] “Why do you go back? Why do you do it? You don’t need to.” Well, I need to, personally. I need to. I love it.
The good news, bad news about is that you never lock it in. You have a great night, and it’s like, well, the next night might be not as perfect or that one joke that worked great might not. See you’re constantly fine-tuning, and you’re chasing some sort of moving goal post, and I find that equally exhilarating and challenging.
Here’s something I didn’t know about or didn’t appreciate early in my career: When I was just doing standup—and that was when I started—that was all I had in mind. I wanted to get on The Tonight Show, and I’ll figure out the next step from there. But I just wanted to be a comedian. So what I didn’t fully appreciate now having been on a lot of networks and studios and developed a lot of things myself, you see how much time it takes and how slowly things can move and how you have to get six different people at a network to agree on something and then to greenlight it and then get a pilot or get a film, you have to raise the money, you have to get a distributor—all these things. Standup just cuts all that out. It’s just so pure. You show up, you come out by yourself, you tell people what you thought of that you think is funny, they laugh, and then you all go home. You don’t have to raise money and you don’t have to get notes…I didn’t appreciate it until I saw the contrast and went, “Oh yeah, that’s part of why this is so fun.”
Q: How would you describe your standup style?
A: I’ve never been able to describe it; I can only, by contrast, tell people: Have you ever seen Cirque du Soleil? Well, this is the opposite. There’s no jumping, there’s no leaping, there’s no high wire, there’s no silly music.
I tell people, I’m not smart enough to make anything up, so I’m just going to tell you what happens in my house, and people go, “Oh, that’s so funny because it sounds like my house.” And that’s all I got. And that was really the secret sauce of Mad About You. [People say,] “You guys must’ve been in our living room.” No, we just all have the same living room.
Q: Is there anything else you would like people to know about you that maybe they don’t know about you?
A: No, if they don’t know it about me, I must’ve wanted it to be a secret.
I did a movie that I wrote, and it came out last year, called The Problem with People, and we shot it in Ireland—and I wrote it because I wanted to go to Ireland. It was a beautiful movie and it was just everything that I had hoped it would be, and it was a very small little indie movie. Nobody saw it. So I tell people go on Amazon or go on Apple and find The Problem with People, and it’s a nice hour and a half that you will be happy you spent.
Photo: Paul Reiser
