Entertainment

Tough crowd

Tom Cotter — a stand-up comic from Rockland County — could become the first New Yorker to win “America’s Got Talent.”

“You’re the man to beat!” judge Howard Stern proclaimed after last month’s quarterfinal performances. “You know how to take a crowd in 90 seconds and win them over. You’re phenomenal!”

But Cotter’s 9-year-old twins were less than impressed by the endorsement.

“Their favorite act on the show is [street-dancer] Turf,” he tells The Post. “They are firmly in his corner.

“They took a photo with him and they run around the neighborhood showing it to everybody with my iPhone. I am persona non grata. They can relate to his dancing, and I am almost happier that they are not getting my jokes.”

Cotter, 48, will get another chance to win the kids over during tonight’s live semifinals on NBC.

“The [AGT] format is brutal for comedians,” he says. “It is just 90 seconds. Most comics take 90 seconds just to move the stool and get the mic out of the stand and say hello.”

Cotter, a former Nantucket police officer, is no stranger to the restrictions of performing on TV.

He’s already appeared in his own Comedy Central special and on NBC’s “Last Comic Standing.”

In 2006, Cotter and wife Kerri Louise — a fellow comedian — landed their own reality series on the WE network.

Two Funny: Cotter & Louise,” which followed the newlyweds as they juggled their careers while tending to the twins — was canceled after six episodes.

“It was not my demographic,” he says. “They told us from the get-go that WE was the third of the female networks, behind Lifetime and Oxygen. We were literally sponsored by Tampax. It was very emasculating.

“They kept telling us, ‘The people who watch our [network] will not like that.’ There was one scene where I was throwing my son in the air and catching him, like every dad on the planet does — two feet over my head. And they said, ‘We can’t show that. People will be upset.’ I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ”

The show ran out of money in mid-production, Cotter says, “So they literally had film students editing the episodes for free.”

The Denison University graduate briefly worked as a private detective in Massachusetts before diving full time into comedy in 1986.

“My dad wanted me to be a lawyer,” he remembers. “He paid for me to go to prep school and college along with my five siblings. So when his youngest decided to tell jokes in bars about his digestive system, he, of course, was not thrilled.

But, recently, his father has come around, Cotter says: “When I did ‘The Tonight Show,’ he realized I wasn’t the waste of sperm he thought I was. Now, he gets that I don’t suck.”