His road to stardom wasn’t always Smoove.
When J.B. Smoove got the call in 2006 that he landed “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” he had just left a “horrible” standup gig outside of Pittsburgh where he stayed in the “worst” motel he had ever seen.
“To the point where I laid down in my clothes and my coat, that’s how dirty it was,” Smoove, 56, who is performing at Town Hall in Midtown on Nov. 11 as part of the New York Comedy Festival, “I said, ‘Something’s gotta be coming.’”
The comic, whose real name is Jerry Angelo Brooks, joined the series in its sixth season, and showrunner Larry David immediately sensed their chemistry.
“Even our first week working together, he said, ‘It feels as though we’ve been working together for years,’” he explained.
When he joined the cast, he didn’t know any of the actors personally, even though some worked in the standup and comedy worlds. However, he quickly came to the realization that they were all such close friends that he couldn’t discern if their on-set fighting was real.
“I’ve literally been on set and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, they’re gonna kill each other.’ One day, Larry even threatened to call 911, that’s how bad it was,” he said, laughing.
The Mount Vernon native chalked it up to fate that he had taken his first and only improv class in 1992, at the Improv in Hell’s Kitchen, which shuttered a week later.
“It was like somehow I was supposed to get that little tool … under my belt,” he said of how the class foreshadowed “Curb.” “Fifteen years later, I’m going for an audition for … an improv show.”
Before joining the HBO show in 2007, he worked as a writer on “Saturday Night Live” for three seasons — after losing a cast position to Kenan Thompson and Finesse Mitchell.
The SNL writing gig was like “trying out for the cheerleading team each week. … They’ll pick the sketches they want and they’ll post them in the hallway on a wall.”
At the time, he was living in Jersey City with his wife, singer Shahidah Omar, commuting to Manhattan every day.
“There were times where you’re writing your sketches and the sun would come up at 5 or 6 in the morning,” he recalled. “You’d get in the car service, go home, take a three-hour nap, get up, run back to the PATH train.”
The multi-talented performer, who won an Emmy Award in 2021 for his role on the TV series “Mapleworth Murders,” has come a long way from his humble beginnings.
Growing up in the projects, he credits the Boys and Girls Club of Mount Vernon, where he now serves on the board of directors with fellow alum Denzel Washington, for helping to shape him.
“Coming from a small city of Mount Vernon, a city that has its troubles like any other city, that was a place we could go,” he said. “It was a shelter for us.”
From a young age, he knew he loved to make people laugh. “My grandma used to call me, “Happy Jack,” he said. “In all my photos, I had the biggest smile in the world. There’s this one particular photo of me, you would think the corners of my mouth would touch my ear.”
That innate ability to entertain continued at Mount Vernon High School, where he said he “got lucky” with some “really funny, funny friends.”
“I was a good student, but I was a hallway clown … in between classes, on the way to classes, man, we would walk fast and pull stuff in front of our next class,” he explained.
Smoove, who now splits his time between L.A. and Brooklyn, is currently filming Season 12 of “Curb,” and has witnessed moments from the show playing out in real life.
“I’ve seen people chat and cut,” he said. “They’ll walk to the front of the line and talk to someone … and all the sudden, they’re in the front of the line.”
He’s also had some “Curb” encounters that were too close for comfort.
“Or you go to a bathroom … there’s 10 urinals wide open and someone gets in the urinal right next to you,” he said. “All these damn urinals, why did they come next to me?”
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