Bob Smith

A tall, austere presence on stage, Bob Smith does not bounce around or lean on camp. He stands at the microphone and delivers carefully built jokes. He will read off his elementary school report cards, pointing out how obvious his orientation was to his teachers while his family stayed in denial. He speaks with a wry, low-key detachment. When he mentions that as a kid he was never afraid of the dark, but was afraid of unflattering light, he lets the punchline hang in the air. He never rushes.

In the early nineties, audiences often expected gay performers to fit into loud, animated boxes. Smith refused to play along. As the first openly gay comedian to perform on The Tonight Show and secure an HBO half-hour, he forced the club circuit to realize that queer life could be talked about with the exact same deadpan rhythm as any other subject.

He talks about his childhood in Buffalo, the strangeness of the natural world, and the daily friction of living among straight people. Fellow comics watch him for the writing. He strips his setups down to the studs and refuses to abandon a joke’s structure just to get a faster laugh.

Smith was diagnosed with ALS in 2007, which eventually cost him his voice and mobility. He kept writing, tapping out new material on an iPad with one finger. When doctors first told him he had Lou Gehrig’s disease, his immediate response was to complain that he didn’t even like baseball.