GROWN-UP LAUGHS
Jim Bruer’s profanity-free comedy focuses on morality issues
When Jim Bruer wakes up in the morning, the first thing he does is Google the New York Mets.
“And then 500 million things pop up on the computer,” he says. “That’s pretty much the extent of how I keep up with the world. It’s too depressing to feed into all of the news.”
For nearly 30 years, Bruer has found a home on stage with comedy.
He’s traveled across the world performing and even had a stint on “Saturday Night Live” from 1995 to 1998.
He also starred in the film “Half Baked.”
If you ask Bruer about that time in his life, he simply says it was a “small chapter.”
Today, Bruer is known for his comedy shows — which air on Comedy Central and Amazon Prime — as well as hosting his own podcast, aptly titled, “The Jim Bruer Podcast.”
He’s been profanity-free for more than a decade and enjoys being on stage more than ever.
“I’m a deep-rooted family guy with hard-core blue-collar roots,” he says. “My father was a World War II vet, and my mom lost her first husband to WWII. As a child growing up in Valley Stream, N.Y., I lived in low-income housing, then an attic apartment, to eventually moving down the street into a home of our own, always surrounded by faith and love. My career reached a new level when I started to raise a family of my own and realized
I should stick to what I know, what everyone could relate to, no matter their socio-economic status. My oldest daughter just went to college, and we’ve dealt these past few years with mortality issues, and I’m just there to find the funny in that.”
The crazy state of the world today makes Breuer’s coming tour, “Jim Breuer Live,” all the more essential, as we seek perspective and comic relief from the day to day insanity that drives the constant news cycle and social media.
His set will be decidedly nonpolitical, but he will have much to impart about the foolishness of ruining our lives over media-generated frenzies that we have no control over.
“My huge focus is, listen, stop getting caught up in the hoopla — the news, politics and all that jazz,” he says. “If every day you wake up and you’re watching five to six hours of it, it starts to darken your soul. If you spent even 10 percent of that time on your wife, husband, child or someone else you love, your personal life would get better and you could help so many people. I’m here to say that life isn’t that horrendous.”