Chris Covert at the redbankgreen house piano. (Photo by Brian Donohue. Click to enlarge.)
By BRIAN DONOHUE
Back in February, the Count Basie Center for the Arts held a “Roast of New Jersey” with a roster of big-name stars, including comedians Joey Diaz and Brian “Q” Quinn, renowned roastmaster Jeff Ross and former NY Giant Tiki Barber, all enlisted to tell Jersey jokes to celebrate and send up an entire state.
One of them was lesser known by many in the crowd, but well-known to locals and no stranger to the stages of the Basie Center: Chris Covert, a Red Bank resident and full-time working comic who’s in his third decade doing standup and comedy from behind the ivories.
“It’s basically all these people, then..who the hell’s Chris Covert?” Covert recalls of the Roast of New Jersey event. “It was kind of cool.”
It got cooler.
Like the local opening band that sets a too-high-to-match bar the out-of-town headliners, Covert opened the show with a rollicking, Uncle Floyd-esque musical tribute to New Jersey from behind the piano that got the night off to a rip-roaring, crowd-yowling start.
Just as memorably, the show nosedived as soon as he left the stage, with multiple performers mostly roasting each other, not Jersey, and Quinn and Real Housewives of New Jersey star Joe Gorga both getting vociferously booed off stage.
In the end, it was a rousing, standing ovation spurring performance by West Orange native Chris Gethard that saved the show like a Knicks fourth quarter comeback.
“If (Gethard) would have tanked, everyone would have been talking about me,” Covert said, in a sit-down with redbankgreen last week.
Gethard’s performance garnered him a solo show at the Vogel, the Basie Center’s 2-800 seat venue next door to the main theater last week.
And this Saturday, June 27, Covert gets his own victory lap, as he and Nashville-based pianist Russ King take top billing at the Vogel with a show titled “Drooling Pianos.“
Comedian Chris Covert in a previous performance at The Vogel.
Covert grew up in Middletown and has lived in Red Bank for about 30 years. For years, he’s been hosting a regular open mic-comedy night, first at the Dublin House and now twice a month at the Basie Center Cinema House on White Street. He also hosts the Basie Center’s annual Jersey Shore Top Comic competition.
When he sat down with redbankgreen, he had just performed in Punta Cana, Mexico and Rhode Island and was about to leave for a gig in Minnesota.
He’s a full-time comic, but stays active working in the food industry, currently behind the counter Mondays at Taliercio’s in Middletown, where he says management understands when he has to miss a shift or two because of a gig.
“I told them I’m a comic who makes sandwiches, not the other way around,” he said. “And they are so cool about it.”
Keeping a day job, he says, keeps him immersed in the real world where jokes and ideas are more likely to come to him.
“I don’t want to say it’s a fuller life, but I feel like you have more apples on your tree when you’re out in the world instead of just being in the basement wondering what’s funny,” he said.
He first became enthralled with the idea of a comedian playing piano when he saw John Valby aka “Doctor Dirty” at the old Club Bene in Sayreville in the mid 1980’s. Valby was known for his raunchy song parodies that got audiences howling and screaming.
“Just the mentality of people yelling out and having a blast, and it was my 1st experience with that,’ Covert recalls. ”I was like, oh, God, I want to do this. I want to do something like this. And here I am doing it.”
The upcoming Vogel show is the first time he’ll share the stage with another comedian behind a piano.
He got the idea for the dueling – or in this case “drooling” – piano show when he was performing on a Mexican cruise trip hosted by New Jersey filmmaker (and Red Bank comic shop owner) Kevin Smith, a longtime Covert backer.
On the cruise, he met the Nashville-based pianist Russ King, a longtime performer and session musician who once played with Prince. Covert pitched an idea he had had for two performers each at a piano, trading jokes and songs with each other and the audience.
“Once you see me,” Covert says, “You’re like, ‘oh, all we need now is one more piano.”
Tickets for the show are available at the Count Basie Box Office via this link.
redbankgreen editor Brian Donohue may be reached via email at [email protected] or by calling or texting 848-331-8331.
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