The sun set earlier than I expected. We turned off 113th Street and headed north up Amsterdam. We could hear the buzz of the streetlights as we walked through the autumn air in the greatest city on earth. It was pre-Google and nearly pre-email and we had to find our way to a new place—physically and philosophically.
The Jewish Theological Seminary is a part of Columbia, but at the same time it’s not—at least not for a kid from Florida and another from Wyoming. Going past 120th Street at night was something you only did with clenched fists and after a few confidence-building breaths. But we were young and invincible and needed to go find a guy named Hofstetter.
Steve was a 6’3”, redheaded Jewish kid from New York. He was oddly confident, which was both appealing and annoying. We found out he had started some popular sports website that Sports Illustrated was going to buy out. Or was it ESPN? Either way, we knew he was a guy we needed to know. Dotcoms were still on rapid growth mode and so were we.
“Hofstetter’s Sports Jerk of the Week” highlighted memorable athletes doing something memorably terrible. Or memorably foolish. Or just downright ludicrous. They were usually pretty well written, informative even. I remember he had a special penchant for Bud Selig—he always appeared in the Top 10. To build his brand awareness, Steve pretty much just stole the NBA logo and put a jackass in place of the player. Genius. He owned the coveted 18-25 segment.
On this particular night we were making the trek up Amsterdam to ask Steve to join our little start-up: a fledgling company with an interesting first round cast. We were looking to shake up a centuries old industry and green-light a new chapter, and we thought this 6’3”, redheaded Jewish kid might be right to help us with that.
We finally made our way up to his apartment, about one turn away from ending up in the wrong part of Harlem. Steve was smiling. Steve is always smiling. Something inside must make him do this. He’s probably the happiest sarcastic person I know. It’s off-putting and endearing and sometimes just confusing. It’s Steve.
Behind the open door was his other roommate. We knew this was a package deal—a two for one trade. Maybe because we wanted to make Steve’s decision easier or maybe we just had that weird startup nature where we need bodies and tend to see the best in people: “Well he’s smart too and we need the other guy so if he can’t do the thing we hired him for we can probably morph him into another area.” (By the way, that doesn’t work—didn’t in this case, either. But at least we got Steve).
Steve showed us his latest “Jerk of the Week” (I’ll save you the suspense: it was Bud Selig) and started talking about the Yankees. It was playoff time in New York and the Yankees were in the mid-stages of the Torre dynasty. The way Steve kept going on and on about their style, their play, their success was logical—we were in the midst of Yankee fury in New York. Then I noticed all the Mets pennants on the wall. And learned that he hated the Yankees. But he loved baseball. He was eloquent about it, its history and its mystery.
I’m pretty sure Jeter made Jerk of the Week that year.
“Steve, you need to be a part of what we’re building. We want you to be a SigEp.”
The best thing about a start-up is speed to market and agility. That also brings about its fair share of missteps. David Kelley, founder of IDEO, one of the most creative design firms on the planet, is a believer in the mantra “fail fast to succeed sooner.” We knew that Steve could help us with that kind culture, given his own penchant for doing things just a little bit different.
SigEp brought out the best in Steve. Or maybe it’s Steve that brought out the best in us. We started hard on growth and building mode that day. Steve quickly rose to take the helm and get our little start-up, New York Phi, on a fast pace to success. He was chapter president when we won our first Buchanan Cup and went on to SigEp’s National Board of Directors. The investment we made that night was starting to pay off, but that was only the beginning.
When I told Steve I was writing this, he reminded me of something I used to tell him when we were on the executive board together: “The thing about you, Steve, is that you have a thousand new ideas every day. All but one of them suck, and it’s our job to make sure that’s the one you pick.”
We sure had a share of failures (#swingep). But those failures transformed our start-up; they built our culture of success and reinforced the brand of who we wanted to be—of what we wanted to be remembered for.
Steve brought those big ideas to the national SigEp stage—even a crazy one about “an online, social yearbook that would only be for SigEps or people they specifically asked to join––it would be something where you could document what you’re doing when you’re doing it so you wouldn’t just have a once a year yearbook, but rather a daily or real-time yearbook.” Yeah, this was more than five years ahead of Facebook. Oops—guess we let you down on that one, Steve.
Steve used to do 50 push-ups a day, religiously (which was about his only religious bone—“I’m a Jew Jew, not a religious Jew”). We might be in the midst of some breakthrough when he’d drop his all-black-clad six-foot-three frame to the floor mid-sentence and start huffing them out: “It’s 11 p.m. and I almost forgot these.” Every. Damn. Day.
So it shouldn’t have been surprising to me when he came up at the tail end of junior year with yet another curveball of his own: “I’m taking next year off of school to go work for the Yankees.”
And he did it. He brought his show on the road (albeit a short road up to the Bronx). He cut his teeth again, branching out with no net underneath him—especially as a die-hard Mets fan. 1986 was a long way away at that point.
But that’s what makes Steve, well, Steve. He’s got that borderline crazy in him that makes other people wonder what path he’s on—but then he owns every inch of that path and he makes people realize how naïve they were for ever doubting that the path he chose would lead to somewhere great.
SigEp did that for him. He did that for SigEp. Shoot, he may have even done it for the Yankees given that they won a World Series that year.
So it shouldn’t have been surprising to any of us when we got a note from him a few years later saying “My first comedy gig is in a few weeks. Any chance you guys want to come watch?” I had to read that twice. You want to be a what? A comedian? Now don’t get me wrong, Steve was a funny guy; but always more entrepreneurial than funny. Or “behind the scenes” funny when he was writing for collegehumor.com or his op-ed’s in the Columbia Spectator.
If anything I thought he’d be the man behind the comedian—booking the venues, working the relationships, getting out the press. But this was Steve. And there was no way I would miss the chance to laugh at my good friend (I mean with him).
He did his first set in the basement of an old dive bar on Broadway called “The Underground Lounge”. I used to go there for a new scene when the other Columbia bars got stale. I was glad the new scene this time was Steve. It was fitting. We sat there preparing to put on the laugh track and “fake it a bit” for Steve’s benefit. Nothing too overt, just enough to drown out the crickets after the punchline missed.
But what we got was kind of surprising, a little surreal: gut-busting laughs were bouncing off the brick walls. And not just us—the paying customers who actually came for the comedy, not the comedian. Steve was actually … good. Really good. Like, “where is all this coming from?” good.
Steve became something new to me that night. All the time we spent making jokes at Steve’s behest (and boy did we love making them) did a full 180-degree shift. Now he was the protagonist, not the punchline. It was incredible. You could feel the start of something big here.
And with that, Steve set out on yet another journey—one that’s perhaps as difficult as any, in any industry: the path to being a professional comedian.
Steve toured college after college. Big ones. Small ones. Ones I’d never even heard of. But wherever he went, he always sought out the SigEp Chapter. He always made sure the brothers of that chapter had free tickets to his show, even at a time when Steve himself was basically working for free as he built up his punchlines and his street cred. Because it’s tough for a 24-year old, redheaded Jewish kid from Queens who never had a driver’s license to get street cred. Or was that what helped him?
Steve slogged. He hustled. He ground it out, day after day, college after college. When most people would have quit, taken their Ivy League degree back to the real world, Steve did it, well, Steve’s way: he kept going. He was on the path he knew he needed to be on.
A few years back he even stopped to buy a comedy club in Indianapolis. Wait, the kid from Queens who’s been playing at every Podunk college from east to west just bought a comedy club in middle-America? There’s got to be a joke in there somewhere. But he did it. He bought Morty’s. And partnered on yet several more. The kid has moxy, I’ll say that much. He’s also got a big heart: SigEps still get in free. He never forgot what SigEp did for him and to this day he keeps paying it forward.
Steve has had a number of accolades the past few years. He’s got over 21 million YouTube views (check out his favorite past time—emasculating the hecklers). He’s been on CBS’ “Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson” and Showtime’s “White Boyz in the Hood” (really White Boyz in Steve’s case). His humor and popularity have led his current album to be #1 on iTunes’ comedy charts.
But even in the face of all that, Steve’s biggest success to date is just starting. He’s the Host and Executive Producer of “Laughs” on Fox Networks. And surprise … it’s really good! Which again shouldn’t surprise me, given how many times Steve has proven me wrong.
Steve and I did a lot together those early years. Our little start up brought in the best, most active minds we could find. We helped each other blaze trails we ourselves were scared to walk down alone. That was SigEp for us. And that same mindset has fueled Steve’s ascent.
We can all learn from Steve, much like we can learn from SigEp. We don’t just do better—we do different. Everything we do should challenge the status quo and carve a new path in our life, and in our world. Just like the lanky redheaded Jewish kid from Queens does every day.
Oh and by the way, Steve tells me he’s 6’4” these days. Must’ve been all those pushups.
Leave a Reply