Dan Vitale

Dan Vitale has lived in Manhattan since 1980, right outside Times Square, where he began to cut his teeth on the New York comedy circuit during one of the grittiest periods in the city’s history. After establishing himself as a stand-up at places like the Improv and the Bitter End, Vitale spent several years being mentored by Lorne Michaels, joining Michaels’s short-lived (and now mostly forgotten) NBC variety show The New Show, which aired toward the end of his five-season hiatus from Saturday Night Live. Linking back with Michaels at SNL, Vitale was also a featured player on the show — where he was only credited in three episodes — alongside the likes of Joan Cusack, Robert Downey Jr. and Randy Quaid.

Vitale is a living link to a lot of things: a specific time in comedy, an inflection point in SNL history, and a bygone New York City. Days before the nation began fully self-quarantining and social distancing, I sat down with Vitale inside his Hell’s Kitchen apartment to discuss, among other things, his love of HBO’s The Deuce, which captures the pre-gentrified Times Square he experienced in the mid-’80s during his stint on SNL’s ill-fated 11th season.