Grosz played Moses in a skit on “The Colbert Report,” and counts “SNL” funnyman Seth Meyers as a longtime pal.
Grosz played Moses in a skit on “The Colbert Report,” and counts “SNL” funnyman Seth Meyers as a longtime pal. (
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Long before “Saturday Night Live” and “The Colbert Report” found them, Seth Meyers and Peter Grosz were cracking each other up at Northwestern University, where they pledged the same fraternity.
“I had every intention of being the ‘funny one’ in the pledge class,” Meyers tells The Post. “We were all walking to dinner [one night] and Pete pretended to bang his head into a street sign. I’ve been playing catch-up ever since.”
Meyers, “SNL”’s head writer, wry “Weekend Update” host, Jimmy Fallon’s eventual replacement on “Late Night” — and best man at Grosz’s wedding — is being modest. But Grosz’s career hasn’t been too shabby either: After honing his chops at Chicago’s famed Second City, he moved to New York six years ago to write for “Colbert,” piling up Emmy, Writers Guild and Peabody awards along the way. He acts, too — in film, onstage (off-Broadway’s “A Kid Like Jake”) and TV (“Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Veep”).
And now he’s cooked up a one-man show for the Fringe Festival: “Recipe for Success with Chef Michael Denardi.”
Part live cooking demo, part (demented) motivational speaker seminar — typical tip: “Don’t pick your battles, fight them all!” — it may be the only time you’ll see someone make a baked ziti burrito.
“The thing is, I’m actually a good home chef,” says the 39-year-old, who lives in Park Slope with his wife and 4-year-old son.
“I watch a lot of Food Network shows and I’ve waited tables for years and years, so I’m not just making fun of it from the outside. A baked ziti burrito is possible.”
A baked ziti burrito is also silly, and that’s the point.
Grosz (it’s pronounced “gross”) has been serious about being silly all his life. Growing up in Scarsdale, he used to shoot James Bond parodies with a friend (“We had no editing equipment, so we had to shoot everything in order”) and religiously taped “SNL” sketches, watching them over and over and even transcribing them.
After Northwestern, Meyers and he went to do sketch comedy together in Amsterdam for about a year, and had a high old time. Or, as Grosz puts it: “It was 1997, we were 23 years old, had a decent paycheck and no responsibilities.” Not only that, he says, but “we were surrounded by tall, lovely Dutch blond women who couldn’t be less interested in us, but we tried our best.”
The two roomed with Allison Silverman — a tall American brunette. That worked out better: She went on to work for “Colbert,” paving the way for Grosz to join the team, both as a writer and performer.
Maybe you caught him on the show as Moses, in a “Passover” sketch in which Colbert set free the Jews under his desk. Or the one about McGnaw the beaver — mascot to gluten-allergic kids, who urged them to chow down on wood instead.
“My favorite is the bit about a family of bobcats that occupied foreclosed homes in Nevada,” Grosz says. “Stephen wondered, ‘Who was giving loans to a family of bobcats?’ So we had an image of a bobcat in a suit behind a desk, [whose] nameplate read, ‘Robert Katz.’ ”
So what does his boss expect him to be doing five or 10 years from now?
“I see him working on my show, but that’s just in my dreams,” Colbert says via e-mail. “In reality, I’m sure he’ll be running his own.”
Seems somebody’s ready for prime time.
“Recipe for Success” begins Wednesday at SubCulture, 45 Bleecker St., with other shows through Aug. 24; information and tickets ($15 to $18) at FringeNYC.org.