Worldly comedian comes home
Comedian Tom Rhodes has returned home to play the Orlando Improv the week before Christmas the last seven years.
“The city has changed tremendously,” said Rhodes, 50. “Growing up in Oviedo, I wanted to explore the world, and I wanted to see things and know things. In the time that I’ve been traveling the world, Orlando has grown into a world-class city. It’s amusing to me that I could have sat perfectly still, and the world would have come to me if I had stayed in Orlando.”
Sitting still isn’t the Rhodes way. He didn’t live anywhere for a decade, and his wife, who is from Holland, traveled with him eight of those years. These days he’s based in Los Angeles but on the road two weeks each month. Recent trips have included Switzerland, France, Mongolia and Japan.
“I try to hit the universal themes,” he said. “I like to ask if there’s anyone from a different country in the audience.”
For the most part, he has a story about every place.
“I was maced in Paris, I almost drowned in Thailand, I had my own late-night talk show on Dutch television,” he said. “There’s not many people that can do the worldwide circuits. I don’t modify it that much. You can’t be regional if you play around the world.”
He’s salty, too, and he won’t be altering the act for the hometown audience.
“I just do what I think is funny,” he said. “Coming up with jokes is not easy. I liken it to when people make swords. They’re banging out the steel on the anvil.”
He has been forged by his experiences, and he’s frank about them. On Jan. 1, he will mark four years of sobriety.
“After meeting my wife, it’s the greatest thing that’s happened to me,” he said. “I went through a period of grief and sorrow, which is very difficult for a comedian. My father was killed by a drunk driver in 2009, my darling little sister died of breast cancer in 2011.”
A couple of weeks before he was supposed to marry, he was told his sister had just 24 hours to live.
“I didn’t want her to miss my wedding,” he said. “On April 20, 2011, I was married at my sister’s
hospital bed side at the Orlando Regional Medical Center. She clapped and said congratulations through her breathing mask. It turned out to be the last words she ever spoke.”
Family tragedy moved him to get sober. “I’d always been a life-of-theparty guy,” Rhodes said. “I was medicating myself by drinking heavily, I was starting to look terrible. I blacked out in Philadelphia and busted my head open. I decided, in honor of my father and sister, I was put here to do better things than be drunk every night of my life.”
Rhodes acknowledges that vanity, too, was a big part of giving up drinking. “I started to look terrible,” he said. “I had a puffy, white alcoholic guy face.”
Sobriety gave him a new appreciation of comedy. “I started in Orlando doing stand-up at 17. I was in high school, I had a fake ID. It was such an exhilarating adrenaline rush,” he said. “What I found immediately was the same rush when I started out. Comedy is the drug for me once again the way it was when I started out.”
A professional setback — the failure of his NBC comedy “Mr. Rhodes” in 1996-97 — put him on the global road. He looked at the sitcom as “my NBC artist’s grant” and started playing London, which led to the international circuit.
He’s working on a memoir about how Orlando shaped him. At the Improv, he’ll share jokes and stories he’s gathered in a year traveling the world.
“I truly love Orlando and Central Florida. It’s been a great place for me in my life to go home and lick my wounds when I’m out fighting battles in the world. I love that my family is still there,” he said. “When I grew up in Oviedo, it was a charming citrus village. We had one stoplight and a tractor crossing. Now my charming citrus village is a highway exit. I still love it. My skinned-up knees are on the sidewalks there.”