CHICAGO — There have been many — hundreds, thousands — of people who have worked for the Chicago Tribune in my long time here. Some remain but the majority have departed ... gone on to play golf, write books, learn a foreign language and have other varied experiences. Only one has been named America’s funniest reporter.
That man is Carl Kozlowski and the recognition came from a national competition at the Laugh Factory comedy clubs in New York City and Los Angeles in 2006. “There were only six contestants and they were atrocious,” Kozlowski told me. “There was a pretty good woman who won at the New York club but in the finals I was able to pull it out.”
Being named America’s funniest reporter does not get you a TV series, but Kozlowski has fashioned a very interesting comedic career and it was born here during the 1990s. He enrolled in classes at Second City but found that he had no gift for their improvisational work. He was close to quitting when a new friend said, “Try stand-up.”
“I did, got one laugh and that was that. I was hooked,” he says.
His first professional job was at the venerable Zanies and he also started to write for Screen magazine, Newcity and was, for a time, a reporter at the Tribune. I remember some of his stories and I remember him, enthusiastic and filled with ideas for articles and essays.
“Writing came almost as an accident but easily and I love it but comedy was why I came to the city,” he says. “I was always a fan of ‘Saturday Night Live,’ Cubs, all things Chicago. I lived there with my family for a few years when I was little but came back after college at TCU” (or Texas Christian University).
He made many friends here and performed frequently. But in time he headed west, where he worked for nearly two decades as a writer and arts editor of Pasadena Weekly, interviewing celebrities and still devoted to his comedy career. That ended when the paper was sold in 2019 and he moved to join his family in North Little Rock, Arkansas.
He found the pace there a quiet relief and when the pandemic arrived a few months later it provided time to write. He did so for some local publications there and has had some of his journalism published in the Sun-Times but the bulk of his writing comes with a new book, “Dozed and Confused: Tales from a Nutty, Narcoleptic Life,” available on Amazon. It’s his third book, after two other comedy-related books co-written with Chicago comic Tim Joyce.
The book’s introduction comes from actor Stephen Tobolowsky, best known perhaps for his turn as insurance agent Ned Ryerson in “Groundhog Day.” He writes that Carl “has always been a joyous, catastrophic, and somewhat mysterious figure in my life.” He goes on to mention Kozlowski’s “indomitable spirit and his relentless imagination … his unique vision has the power to see hope and delight in almost any situation.”
Those situations are plentiful as Kozlowski cruised through most of his years shadowed by what he called “the worst cases of sleep apnea on the planet — a case that made me so tired at so many unpredictably disastrous times that I am virtually narcoleptic.”
He does not complain about that malady or the latter diagnosis of diabetes and bipolar disorder. Of the physical burdens he writes, “They’ve made my life interesting, funny and rarely if ever dull.”
The book is fashioned from Kozlowski’s work in journalism, on comedy club stages and his longtime podcasting career (he started and ran the Radio Titans podcast network). His book can be viewed as a memoir and it is entertaining but also uplifting.
Its topics include his encounters with Scientology and the Guardian Angels, growing up Catholic, falling asleep at a Rolling Stones concert and while interviewing actress Hilary Swank, spending three days “trapped” in an aunt’s house over Christmas, getting mugged … twice, and snoring so loudly during a stage performance of “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” that actor John Mahoney stopped “his performance and walked to the edge of the stage to stare at me until the person next to me whacked me awake.”
He has overcome his physical troubles but is never reluctant to confront some of the troubles they once caused. He also never shies away from them, such as that of “the most dangerous and embarrassing” night he spent “anonymously and without permission … in Chicago’s most notorious homeless shelter.” He also spent time as an inflatable dinosaur and a Santa.
He has the desire to turn his book, his life, into a TV sitcom. He and some LA comedy pals have already made a pilot for a possible TV series. He and former Chicagoan Scott Vinci have created what they call “only faith-based comedy business,” Catholic Laughter, which performs at Catholic churches and related events.
In the meantime, he is working at some clubs near his home and enjoying the favorable reviews the book has been getting — “Thank God Carl managed to stay awake long enough to remember and share these stories,” says comic Paul Rodriguez. “They’ll keep you awake laughing for days to come.”
