Unless you regularly watch The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon or HBO Latino’s ongoing Entre Nos stand-up comedy series, then chances are you don’t know who Orlando Leyba is. So let’s fix that, because the comic’s first half-hour special Adorable premieres Friday night exclusively on HBO Latino. And judging by his bubbling demeanor and penchant for everyman humor, you’ll probably be hearing his name more often in the next few years.
Leyba spoke to Uproxx about his The Tonight Show appearance ahead of Adorable‘s premiere, but not before being sidetracked by topics as disparate as Drew Carey’s comedy career, The Price Is Right fandom and watching HGTV’s Property Brothers series in Italian while on vacation in Venice. It’s quite a trip, but then again, so is Leyba.
Orlando Leyba: I wanna call you Drew. I know you’re an Andrew, but you sound like a Drew.
Thanks, man. I’ll take it.
It’s really close to one of my favorite comics, Drew Carey.
Really?
I used to watch his stuff and I’m obsessed with The Price Is Right because it’s such a good show where everybody wins. I’ve gone to The Price Is Right like three times in Los Angeles and I’ve never been picked. The last time I went, me and my buddies all wore shirts that spelled out “Drew.” Black t-shirts with big white lettering. Drew saw it, walked up to us and said, “Oh man, thank you for wearing that. What do you guys do for a living?” We were all stand-ups, and the minute we told him that, he kept coming over to us during every break when they were changing the set. It was the most fantastic thing, and then we went to The Improv that night and who was there? Drew Carey! It was definitely a fanboy moment for me.
Your career is starting to take off. How does it feel?
It feels great to be having a moment. These are just moments in time, and this is definitely a special moment. I’m old enough to recognize it now. I’ll actually take a beat so I can take it in. I mean, I got to go on The Tonight Show to promote the special. I’m grateful, man. The best way I can describe it is, I’m just grateful and truly humbled by it all, and everybody probably thinks I’m just feeding them lines, but I’m really not. I recognize that this doesn’t happen to everybody.
Of course. That’s especially true of going on The Tonight Show, because all these years after Johnny Carson, it can still be a make-or-break platform for comics.
It’s a rite of passage. It was such a great opportunity. Jimmy Fallon came out and he was such a welcoming host. He came into my green room and we talked about the culture of stand-up comedy, its community and how this is all part of the journey. Maybe other comics don’t see it that way anymore, but I definitely 100 percent believe in it. I wanted this to happen to me one day and it happened at such a perfect time. It really just happened naturally.
The booker for The Tonight Show, Michael Cox, put up a great post on his Facebook listing all the places he had seen me before. Big Sky Comedy Festival, Laughing Skull, NBC’s Standup for Diversity showcase and all these places. So that’s how I got the call, “Hey, we’re doing a showcase for The Tonight Show. We know you got your HBO thing, but would you mind coming over to New York ?” And I was like, “No! Are you kidding me?” We gotta reach. My good buddy Phil Palisoul used to say that. In the comedy business, we always have to reach out to our next thing.
I’m always intrigued by the process of turning longer club bits into five-minute blocks for late night. I spoke to Emma Willmann about doing it for The Late Show a while back. What was it like for you?
I told Michael Cox, “You are the Vince Lombardi of coaching a late night set.” I strongly feel this way because there are certain things you have to do when condensing something. You have to try to give everybody a taste, so the main thing Michael told me was, “Take advantage of this opportunity that has been granted to you and give everybody a taste of what to expect when they see you on HBO Latino.” I feel that we grasped that. We got it perfectly, pretty much.
You did one of HBO Latino’s Entre Nos specials earlier this year, but Adorable is your first stand-alone special. How much of the material is brand new, and how much of it are jokes you’ve been wanting to tell on such a scale for much longer?
There are definitely a lot of jokes here that I’ve been holding on to. It’s a journey. You’re doing your sets around town and everything, and out everything you say and do, there are just a few jewels. For example, there’s my HGTV joke. I’m sure there are videos out there from when it I first started doing it, but when you see that finished product it’s like, “He did some polishing on that joke.” I had this discussion the other day with a musician. I feel that in stand-up comedy that we’re the only ones that the only way we can get it right is by taking it to the stage. We can’t just practice at home and hold onto it. We actually gotta go and say it into a mic to a group of strangers, to see if it’s gonna sink or swim.
Music and comedy are the two art forms that relate the most, I feel. That’s why so many people from both camps like Dave Chappelle, and if I hit that status one day, I want to do something similar. I want to go on tour with bands or certain kinds of musicians. But if they’re having a bad gig, they can always go to default mode and just keep playing. “People aren’t into my original stuff, so let me pull out this Bruce Springsteen song!” And the crowd will go crazy. But a comic? We don’t have that default. I can’t go into like a Richard Pryor bit. Only Richard Pryor could do that. I just gotta sink or swim with my material.
I’m glad you brought up the HGTV bit because my wife and I loved it and I couldn’t think of a way to bring that up in conversation. We watch HGTV religiously.
My wife and I were vacationing in Italy and it was my break time. When we travel, we schedule “Orlando break times” in order to keep things balanced. So this one time we went back to our Airbnb in Venice and I noticed they were playing Property Brothers in Italian, so of course I watched the whole episode. She said I couldn’t even understand what they were saying but I was like, “It doesn’t matter! It’s all about how good this show makes me feel.”
Of course. Shows like Property Brothers just make you feel good, while Tiny House Hunters, I believe, is designed to make you hate-watch it. At least, that’s what I do.
That’s how good that network is. They even have their own villains! I was obsessed with Tiny House, Big Living and I tried to get the wife into it, especially living here in California where it’s so expensive. It’s like, “We could just get a plot of land and have this small thing made.” Believe it or not, there’s a lot of tiny homes for sale in Los Angeles because a lot of people did that and there’s no other place where they could have them. There are certain rules or regulations about it now, but some of those tiny homes are amazing, man.
Yeah, but then they show a family of seven trying to move into a 200-square-foot home.
Yeah, that will never happen, but did you see the episode with the family in Hawaii? They were artists and they built a pretty badass one in which the living room wall would fold down and open up to become a deck, so during the day they had this outdoor-indoor living space. I’m all about that life, Drew.
‘Orlando Leyba: Adorable’ airs Friday at 9:30 pm ET/PT on HBO Latino.
