Rejoice with the risible Paul Reiser in Beverly

The veteran comic actor will bring his stand-up stylings to The Cabot on Oct. 22.

Photo by Dmitry Bocharov

2 minutes to read

This may not have actually happened, but I seem to recall my parents taking me and my brothers (including the younger one) to see the R-rated Eddie Murphy vehicle “Beverly Hills Cop” when I was 8 years old.

This was almost certainly the first time that I saw the face of Paul Reiser, who had a non-lead role in the movie.

My guess is that I first learned his name when the television show “My Two Dads” premiered in 1987. If there was any controversy surrounding a sitcom premised on two men living together to raise the teenage daughter of whom either could have been the father, then I must have been too young to know about it. (Dan Quayle surely would have spoken up if he had been a national figure at the time.)

I was presumably not part of the target audience for “Mad About You,” which first aired two years after the season finale of “My Two Dads.” Therefore, I never watched it a single time while it was on the air for pretty much all of my high school and college years.

Curiously, Reiser has appeared on two more recent series that have piqued my interest.

On “Married,” which ran for two seasons on FX from 2014-2015, he was part of a stellar cast that included Judy Greer, Boston natives Nat Faxon and Jenny Slate, and the incomparable Brett Gelman. Although it is not printable here, he delivered what was probably my favorite line of the program during one of the 10 episodes in which he appeared.

In 2017, he debuted on the second season of the Netflix phenomenon “Stranger Things” as Department of Energy executive Dr. Sam Owens, which Screen Rant’s Cathal Gunning recognized as a particularly clever nod to Reiser’s character of Burke in “Aliens.”

Yet despite my having known who Paul Reiser was for literally almost as long as I can remember, I never thought of him as stand-up comic. However, being one must have figured somewhat prominently in his career, as he was ranked #77 on Comedy Central’s 2004 list of the 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time.

He is currently on a tour that has included his first stand-up shows in more than 20 years and will run through spring 2023. His lone Massachusetts appearance is at The Cabot on Oct. 22.

Not sure if you want to go? Here, watch Reiser’s entire 1991 Showtime special, and then decide: