Don’t call it a comeback. He’s been playing Missouri for years.
But just in case you aren’t among the 5 million people who’ve seen him perform in his own 2,000-seat theater in Branson, Yakov Smirmoff is set to make a return to the national stage and the show that propelled his comedy career to new heights in the mid-to-late 1980s.
Smirnoff, the Soviet-born comedian who rose to fame with his standup act contrasting life in the Soviet Union and the United States is set to guest with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show Tuesday night.
It’ll be Smirnoff’s first visit to The Tonight Show since 1991, when Johnny Carson was still the show’s host. Smirnoff was a regular on the show, appearing at least once a year starting in 1985.
But with the fall of the Soviet Union, Smirnoff’s TV bookings quickly dried up and his stand-up gigs soon followed.
Speaking with The Wall Street Journal in 2002, Smirnoff recalled a night in 1991 when David Letterman read a top ten list of things that would change after the Cold War ended. “No. 1 was: ‘Yakov Smirnoff will be out of work,'” Smirnoff recalled. “I didn’t realize he was giving me my pink slip.”
Later, in conversation with Dan Pasternack and for SiriusXM’s Obsessive Comedy Disorder docuseries, Smirnoff joked he looked for the one place that didn’t know that the Soviet Union had collapsed—and that’s how he ended up in Branson.
Smirnoff credits Johnny Carson with helping to catapult him to national fame. This coming weekend, he’s set to headline this year’s Great American Comedy Festival, which honors Carson’s legacy.
