P aul Reiser is wasted on the young. It was in 2022 that the actor and comedian noticed something was amiss, after returning to stand-up for the first time in two decades. “People would come up to me and say their kids were confused,” Reiser explains, from his Los Angeles home.
“That they’d say, ‘wait a second – the doctor from Stranger Things is trying to be funny now?’” Thanks to his role as a morally questionable (and decidedly non-comic) scientist on several seasons of the Netflix smash, we now live in a world where Paul Reiser isn’t automatically associated with homespun comic observations about life. Or even with his role as Axel Foley ’s long-suffering detective buddy in the Beverly Hills Cop movies . And while there may very well be a 13-year-old out there who adores the gentle marriage-themed wit of his Nineties sitcom Mad About You , Reiser has yet to meet them.
All of this is a bit of a bummer: no one is quite so good at the harmless, deadpan dad joke, spoken with the performative shrug of a Manhattan cab driver. “I’ve lived in LA far longer than I lived in New York,” he tells me. “I came out here when I was 27 or 28, and now I’m well into my thirties.
” Badum-pshh! The 68-year-old is quicker to gags at the start of our conversation than at its end, as if to wrest a modicum of early control from the journalist on the other end of his Zoom call. Take the room he’s in. There’s an exercise bike propped up behind him; further back, a .
