Asked how the idea for his stage show “How Not to be Famous” bubbled up in his mind, actor Richard Kind responds in the manner of his good friend and golf buddy, “Curb Your Enthusiasm” creator Larry David.
“Nothing bubbled up,” Kind said. “No bubbles.”
The two became friends when Kind became a regular on David’s long-running HBO comedy. Then again, Kind has worked with practically everyone in Hollywood — from Carol Burnett to George Clooney to Homer Simpson — with a list of credits a mile long, stretching back 35 years.
Anyone who watches TV, goes to the movies or ever caught a Sunday matinee on Broadway, should recognize his face. Kind, 68, has appeared in Oscar winners like “Argo,” co-starred in hit shows like “Mad About You” and “Only Murders in the Building,” and voiced characters in Pixar features such as “Cars,” “Toy Story 3” and “Inside Out.”
But most people still don’t know him.
“I can walk down the streets of New York, and one person will stop me and say, ‘You’re a national treasure,’ and another 400 will pass me by,” he joked.
He just might nudge that needle when he brings his new show to San Francisco. “How Not to be Famous: A Conversation with Richard Kind” plays for one night, June 13, at the Curran Theater. In the show, he gets personal, sharing stories, mostly humorous, spanning his life and career.
It’s called a “conversation” because the first half is a moderated dialogue, with the second half devoted to taking questions from the audience. Kind hopes to make the experience cozy and down to earth, like sharing an “open-faced turkey sandwich in a diner,” as he puts it.
No doubt his many credits will come up. He’s played an angst-ridden doctor on “Mad About You,” a ruthless furniture salesman on “The Goldbergs,” and a shlemiel press secretary on the Michael J. Fox comedy series “Spin City.”
As for getting offered the recurring role of Cousin Andy on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” for nearly 20 years, Kind lauds the show’s creator and star.
“I don’t understand how his mind works,” he said of David. “I once asked him if he’s a chess prodigy because he’ll always be three moves ahead of you.”
Aside from TV, Kind starred as Max Bialystock in a Broadway revival of “The Producers” and he is especially proud of his role in the Coen Brothers’ 2009 dark and very Jewish comedy, “A Serious Man,” in which he played the shiftless brother of the film’s main character.
Playing Jewish comes easy to Kind. A native of Trenton, New Jersey, he was brought up in a Reform household and had a bar mitzvah. His jeweler father hoped his son would go into the family business. Instead, Kind got the acting bug before he could legally drive and would frequently take the train into Manhattan, sometimes alone, to catch a Broadway matinee, have an early dinner, then take in a second show.
After graduating from Northwestern University, Kind stayed in Chicago to join the famed Second City improv troupe. That led to his breakthrough gig appearing in Burnett’s short-lived series “Carol & Company.” From there, he landed the role in “Mad About You,” and he’s never looked back.
Except once.
In 2023, he was a guest on the PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. In the episode, Kind learned of relatives he never knew about. His great-grandfather immigrated to America from Ukraine, starting out as a Lower East Side peddler and later founding a successful crayon factory. That forebear was murdered by a business partner in 1933. Kind also discovered distant Polish relatives who were rounded up by the German army, sent to Treblinka and murdered.
The new knowledge further cemented his connection to his roots. “I was not overly Jewish,” he said of his upbringing, “but Judaism plays a part in my morality and how I lead my life.”
As for his acting bucket list, he said he’d love to play Roy Cohn in Tony Kushner’s Tony-winning play “Angels in America,” though he knows revivals of the eight-hour epic are few and far between.
Instead, his latest venture is playing sidekick to comedian John Mulaney on the Netflix celebrity talk show “Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney.” Becoming a 21st-century Ed McMahon is a role he never thought about, Kind said, but he’s having fun.
In fact, he said, that’s the modus operandi of his entire career as a not-famous actor: “There’s not a thing I do that’s not fun.” n