Essay 4842

From The New York Times…

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Catching a Break and Throwing Down With Imus

By ROBIN FINN

A MIDCAREER comedian in the touchy process of resigning himself to not making the comedy A-list in this lifetime, Tony Powell was minding his own business, teaching high school in Coney Island and picking up the odd stand-up comedy gig, when he received the glad tidings. Seductive tidings, that is.

Don Imus, the resurgent and — if his promise to ban racist and misogynistic rhetoric from his personal airspace is sincere — reformed talk-radio host, wanted Mr. Powell, 45, to submit an audition tape for a possible role on Mr. Imus’s new morning show on WABC-AM and RFD-TV. A tape of a routine Mr. Powell performed at the Muddy Cup, a Staten Island hangout not far from the town house he shares with his wife and son, would have to do. It did. Mr. Imus was smitten.

Maybe it was the joke about the White House incumbent — “I just feel like the president of the United States should be smarter than me, and I don’t think that’s true” — that did the trick. Or maybe it was the fact that Mr. Powell is a black comic with regional street cred (from open mike nights on Long Island to the voice of “Mr. Chill” for Miller Genuine Draft beer). Better yet, he is a guy with a serious gift of gab (credit the debate team) and a degree in rhetoric and communication from the University of Virginia (he intended to be a speechwriter), with a résumé that features appearances on “The Chris Rock Show,” NBC’s “Showtime at the Apollo” and a stint as the studio warm-up act for Bill Cosby. His back story includes four years of teaching at-risk teens in the New York City school system and a father who was a special education teacher and now scouts for the Washington Wizards of the N.B.A.

Translation: Beyond possessing a sense of humor, he must love sports and kids, just like Mr. Imus! How would he like to take on the role of sportscaster on the ballyhooed return-of-Imus broadcast, starting Dec. 3? Initially he was wary. Not because he was worried that Imus detractors like the Rev. Al Sharpton would accuse him of collaborating with the enemy; he had to feel certain he couldn’t accuse himself of the same thing.

“I am not window-dressing, I am not a puppet on a string, I don’t dance for anybody, and I am not Don Imus’s lawn jockey,” says Mr. Powell, a New England prep-school survivor (he won a scholarship to Choate Rosemary Hall, the first place anyone directed the n-word his way with venom) who describes himself “as a sort of Zelig.” His politics are, he says, “left of center, but I’m not so far to the left where the next step forward makes me a Nazi and I’ve gone full circle.”

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