Paul 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!
