When the stand-up comic Keith Robinson was 10 years old growing up in Philadelphia, his father was stabbed to death in a bar. Sitting in the restaurant above the Comedy Cellar in New York on a recent weekday afternoon, Robinson explained what happened dispassionately, adding that the killer died soon after.
“He got shot accidentally on purpose,” he told me, flashing a mischievous grin and saying nothing more.
This is the kind of story that Robinson, 60, likes to tell, one with prickly uncomfortable humor and some tough-guy swagger. But Robinson is currently at the center of a different kind of dramatic narrative, less HBO, more Lifetime channel: He had two strokes in four years, robbing him temporarily of speech and mobility; then, against the odds, he recovered enough to return to the stage.
Robinson has been a fixture at the Cellar for three decades, as much a part of the fabled club as the microphone and the hummus. A comedy Zelig, he did standup on “Star Search” in the 1980s; was a regular on the Comedy Central show “Tough Crowd,” inspired by the table at the Cellar where Robinson, Colin Quinn and others hung out and bickered; and even wrote on the aborted third season of “Chappelle’s Show.” He has been a mentor to many comics, especially stand-ups from Philadelphia, most famously Kevin Hart who produced Robinson’s last special a decade ago.
When Amy Schumer heard Robinson’s difficulty speaking after his second stroke, in 2020, “I thought he was completely done,” she told me by phone. Now she is the executive producer of his new special, “Different Strokes” (Netflix), a jarringly unsentimental take on his health crisis that tells what could be a feel-good story with cranky irreverence.
Onstage, Robinson says that facing death taught him this lesson: “If there’s someone you wanted to punch, punch them now.”
He walks slowly but speaks rapidly, sometimes slurring his words. His right arm is bent at an angle, but when I ask if it’s immobile, he slowly adjusts it, motioning, with limited range, like a boxer getting ready to shadowbox. Ever cheerful, he told me that he was thinking of a specific person in that joke about punching someone — adding that his lack of action still bothers him. “When you think too much,” he said, “you can’t be a gangster.”
It’s become common for comedians to turn tragedy into jokes. But Robinson isn’t looking for tears or applause. And nothing annoys him more than pity. When he dropped his cane during the taping (Schumer walked onstage to retrieve it for him), he poked fun at the crowd for making sounds of sympathy.
“I don’t like ‘aww,’” he told me, referring to the audience’s expression of concern. “I just want laughs. ‘Aww’ irks me. ‘Aww’ irks my spirit.”
Robinson isn’t just blustering. He is concerned enough about getting cheap approval that he makes jokes intended to alienate, he said. If an audience member doesn’t laugh, he points his cane at them and says: “You don’t like Black handicapped people?” One time a woman responded by bursting into tears. The club comped her ticket.
With the changes to his movement and speech, Robinson’s standup has a new gravity and pace. After considerable speech therapy, he can tell jokes but must work harder to be understood. “Everything has to be more precise now,” he said, comparing his shift to that of an athletic quarterback who can get out of trouble by becoming a pocket passer. “Everything counts. I can’t depend on movement.”
Wanda Sykes, an old friend from before they moved to New York at the same time, took him on tour with her when he was first returning to the stage in 2022. She said by email that his material had become more personal: “He’s opened up.”
Some of his funniest jokes are short, like when he asks God why he let these strokes happen to him. He pauses, flashes a glance that suggested a lifetime of occasional sin and says, “Oh yeah.”
After his second stroke, which was far more debilitating than the first, Robinson briefly thought he would have to quit performing and become a comedy writer. Chris Rock hired him to help with his recent special. But Robinson missed being onstage, hanging out with comics and, most of all, “busting chops,” which, it’s fair to say, is his love language.
Sykes recalled how early in her career she would wear a sweater that Robinson mocked, referring to it as “a comedy cape” that held all her comic powers. “He talked about me so bad that I never wore it again,” Sykes said.
To hear Robinson tell it, losing the social aspect of the life of comedian hurt as much as the physical damage from the strokes. He was put in a Covid ward in the hospital. In the kind of contrarian stance he relishes, he trash-talked nurses during our interview. “Before I got the second stroke, I would applaud for the nurses,” he told me. “After the second, I wanted to throw something at them.”
The most striking thing about Robinson now might be how much two strokes didn’t change him. “Keith is Keith: Hasn’t changed,” said Noam Dworman, owner of the Cellar. “Most people would have been psychologically crushed by what he faced. He’s a performer who has trouble speaking and walking. You see people get depressed when they lose their hair. And he had this grit. Nothing stopped him.”
And yet, there are new worries. A fear of falling, for instance, is persistent, he said. He also displays a new attitude toward mortality. Robinson said that for awhile he just wanted to live longer than his father, who died at 35. Now, post-stroke, he puts it this way. “I used to say I want to live for three more ‘Avengers’ movies,” he said. “Now I’m like, one and a half.”