Me and my accent

A reader, who is also Russian, emailed me to see what I thought about performing stand-up comedy with an accent. As you probably heard from my recordings, I have an accent and a couple of people suggested I take classes which would enable me to "turn it off and on" as I please. Here is what I think. First, a lot of my comedy is about Russia and being Russian and it sounds a lot more authentic when spoken with a Russian accent. I actually want people to remember me as "that Russian guy." Plus, there is at least a thousand comedians in NYC alone competing with me - it is things like my accent that will separate me from them. I think that as a comedian, you want to be as different as possible. And I think that as a person, you want to turn every negative into a positive.