After nearly 30 years in the game, Modi is finally the new guy. Sort of. With his debut stand-up special Know Your Audience, the New York comic known for his hyper-observant, clean-but-cutting sets has formally arrived—just in time to remind you how many Jewish fundraisers are scheduled every week in America.
“If it’s not cancer, it’s kids,” Modi says in the special, deadpan as ever. “And if it’s cancer and kids? That’s a two-comic night.”
The brilliance of Know Your Audience lies in how deeply Jewish it is… and how universally funny it still manages to be. “You don’t need to be Jewish to laugh at this,” Modi says. “Just like you don’t need to be Black to laugh at Chris Rock.” He positions himself as your charming tour guide through Yiddishkeit, a comic anthropologist cataloging overzealous honorees, pushy donors, overbooked rabbis, and that one token goy in every audience. “I always know there’s one,” he shrugs. “And if not, I’ll find someone and pretend.”
The name of the special isn’t just a punchline—it’s his superpower. “I can tell exactly who’s in the room. I know if they want the fundraiser jokes or the marriage material or the pure bits. I know if someone in the front row is completely checked out. I can see it in their face.”
That skill comes from decades working a circuit that’s part comedy club, part synagogue social hall, part Boca Raton backyard. “I started doing stand-up while I was still in investment banking,” he says. “I wore a suit to my first open mic. Merrill Lynch by day, comedy cellar by night.”
It was the ’90s, which meant no YouTube, no clips, no ‘algorithmic discovery.’ “I had to go to the Museum of Broadcast on 52nd Street just to study Alan King,” he says. “I sat in a booth with headphones like I was decoding Soviet spy tapes.”
That influence—Alan King’s elegance, Jackie Mason’s chutzpah, Don Rickles’ whipcrack speed—can be felt throughout Modi’s act. But over the years, the impressions and characters gave way to something sharper. “Eventually I stopped doing the secretaries and the voices,” he says. “The real voice came out. And it was very, very Jewish. Baruch Hashem.”
That voice has made him a fixture at Jewish events around the world. “And thank God I’ve always been clean. I do corporate gigs. I do fundraisers. I do the occasional Florida room where the average age is deceased. Those are my people.”
So what took so long for a special?
“I never had the right team,” he says. “And then my husband—my millennial husband, God bless him—took over. Got me an agent. Got me a publicist. Got the thing made. The pandemic changed everything.”
Yes, the pandemic. Remember that? Modi does. In fact, Know Your Audience was filmed before the current war in Israel—though he now closes every show with “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem, and finds that gentiles respond to it most of all. “I’ve gotten DMs saying, ‘We looked up the song and cried.’ It means hope. And people want to feel that.”
But if you think this means he’s become solemn or reverent, you clearly haven’t heard his Bruno Mars joke. “We were both in Israel the day the war began,” he says. “Bruno got whisked out to safety. I said to my husband, ‘Thank God. If a bomb hits this hotel, and it’s me and Bruno Mars? I will get zero press coverage.’”
Even during the darkest hours, he found a way to Zoom-stream backyard sets with fake laugh tracks and thousand-person audiences. “I learned the trick from Scorsese and Fran Lebowitz,” he says. “One person. On camera. Laughing like they’ve lost their mind. It works.”
Now, with tour dates selling out, a thriving podcast (And Here’s Modi), and enough material to start shaping his next hour, he’s basking in the belated glow. “People are saying, ‘This is the first special I want my parents to see,’” he says proudly. “That’s a high compliment.”
Just don’t expect him to coast on that anytime soon. “I’ve got more stories. I’ve got more jokes. I’ve got more Gentiles to explain things to.”
And more Yarmulkes to pass out.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
