Kliph Nesteroff

Kliph Nesteroff was born and raised in a Russian pacifist community in rural British Columbia. After being permanently expelled from high school for the content of a speech he delivered during a campaign for school president, he moved to Toronto and started performing stand-up comedy. Influenced by the Beat Generation, punk rock music, and his anti-war upbringing, Nesteroff primarily performed in underground bars, punk rock clubs, and alternative comedy venues. He quickly developed a cult following for the combative, insult-comic character Shecky Grey, which landed him on the cover of several Canadian free weeklies. After eight years of stand-up, Nesteroff quit in 2006 with the intention of writing full time. In order to make ends meet, he worked in Vancouver's downtown east side, providing clean syringes and pipes in the crack houses and shooting galleries along East Hastings Street as part of a harm reduction program. Nesteroff worked as an advocate for the homeless, the mentally ill, and the drug addicted, eventually accepting a position in an experimental Vancouver clinic that nursed heroin addicts with life threatening infections back to health. While working night shifts at the clinic, Nesteroff spent much of his time writing about stand-up comics from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, focusing on the mafia-run nightclubs that used to employ comedians. The articles were frequently published by the web-magazine of freeform radio station WFMU. In 2011, Marc Maron began talking about Nesteroff's articles on several episodes of his WTF podcast, eventually extending an invitation to Nesteroff to appear on his program. After a 2012 appearance on WTF with Marc Maron, Nesteroff got a book deal with Grove Press to write the definitive history of 20th Century American stand-up. Released in 2015, The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy became a best-selling book and led to a television career. Nesteroff is a frequent talking head on countless programs and documentary films about comedy.