By:Susan Lin
Not that everything comedian Gregory Carey likes to talk about involves race, but being a 6-foot-3 black man, he said, it's bound to come up in his routines. Carey will be on stage at the Brokerage in Bellmore this Friday and Saturday.
One time the issue came up was when he performed recently at the Spence School, an all-girls private institution on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. "Rich, white, 11-to-15-year-old girls -- and their dads," said Carey.
"You can imagine the fathers looking at a 6-3, bald, black man in front of their cute, white daughters from the Upper East Side, waiting for me to ..." give them a dose of not-so-proper street language. "They were just waiting for it to happen at any moment," Carey said.
"And it did. And they loved it. They were all coming up to me afterwards, all these little girls, and saying, 'Oh, we love you. Can we have your autograph?' " Carey, 45, recalled.
The Spence School was one venue. The mostly adult crowd at the Brokerage is another one. While Carey said he spent a week before the private-school gig planning out how to avoid offending anyone, he has less concerns about this weekend.
"The night club is the one I enjoy the most because that's the loosest. I don't have to edit everything I'm saying," Carey said. He has also done shows on cruise ships "with old people. That was extremely difficult as a comedian."
For the most part, Carey said, he just talks about his life when he is on stage. The comedian described his work as "observatory." That is, he explained, he watches "the natural things that go on, that happen to people in life" and then shares his viewpoints of those events on stage.
"Credit card debt, the aging process, a trip to Home Depot... anything," said Carey. He also recently did a stint on the Norwegian Cruise lines, and has been "making fun of that." He explained, "I talk to people like they talk to everybody else when they talk about life."
Although Carey has been doing stand-up comedy for 14 years, he had spent most of his 20s and early 30s working in and later managing the marketing department of Executive Life Insurance, a company in Beverly Hills.
After more than a decade at Executive Life Insurance, Carey said he learned an important lesson. He explained: "I worked for the company for 11 years, and I watched it grow from one hundred-something to 12 hundred-something. [In my eleventh year there], they went to retire a guy who worked there for 20 years.
"They called a couple of people around his little cubicle and made a big deal and the president presented him this box. And like, 'Open it up!,' and like, 'A Walkman!' Oh, great, he can jog for the rest of his life.
"And I went, you know something, no matter how much you devote your life to a company, they really don't give a shit about you," Carey said.
His experiences at Executive Life Insurance affect his outlook on life today, said Carey. "Once you work in a corporation, you develop a certain mentality like if you've been in prison," he related.
Carey lives in a six-story brownstone in Harlem. He said that over the past year he has spent most of his free time renovating the recently purchased home. However, he did manage to rent the movie Gladiator the other day.
"I liked the fact that I couldn't figure out the plot right away and that it has twists. I like a movie that takes me on a roller coaster ride," said Carey.
