Tim Renkow talks about the joys of making people feel awkward, how to spot a pity laugh – and why he had to give bad etiquette lessons to Sopranos shrink Lorraine Bracco
Mon 4 Mar 2019 14.42 GMT
Last modified on Mon 4 Mar 2019 15.44 GMT
It’s hard to watch Jerk, Tim Renkow’s new sitcom, without feeling nervous about meeting him. Renkow has cerebral palsy, and in Jerk we see his character – based on himself – use his disability in all manner of devilish ways: he jumps queues, takes advantage of charity workers and acts as though he has a green light to behave as appallingly as possible at work (“I think I’m on some kind of quota scheme,” he says at one point, pondering why he hasn’t managed to get fired yet. “Probably means they don’t need to hire a transexual.”)
The first episode opens with him noticing an able-bodied customer sneakily using the disabled toilets in a cafe. Renkow gets up, pours a glass of water over his crotch and hovers outside on his walking frame until the customer emerges. You sense he enjoys making people feel awkward for the sheer thrill of it. So am I about to get mercilessly mocked by Renkow, too? Or, to put it more bluntly – is he really as much of an asshole as he appears in his show?
“Oh, no, not me,” he says, flashing a butter-wouldn’t-melt expression when we meet in a pub near his home in south London. He is, of course, lying. “OK, I do use [cerebral palsy] to get away with a lot. Mainly just being lazy. Not so much now, but at school I’d be like, ‘Oh, no, I’m too disabled to do that.’ But I liked it when teachers called me on it and said, ‘No you’re not!’ They’re the ones I’d do well for.”
In the show, Renkow has his mum – played brashly and brilliantly by Lorraine Bracco – to call him out on things. She yells at him to get out of bed and berates him over his lack of employment. The Sopranos star ended up getting advice from Renkow’s real-life mum while they were shooting. “There’s a scene where Lorraine uses my walker to hang her bag on,” says Renkow. “She went up to my mum and said, ‘I can’t believe what kind of person would hang their bag on someone’s walker.’ And my mum said, ‘Oh, I do that all the time.’”
Despite sometimes being used as bag storage, Renkow says he had a happy childhood. He was born in Mexico City but grew up in Chapel Hill, a rare liberal enclave of North Carolina. He went to art school in Memphis, but couldn’t face dealing with potential customers: “I just couldn’t do it without making fun of them,” he says. Luckily, there was a nightclub right next to his dorm, and one night he entered a standup competition there on a whim.
His comedy career has had its ups and downs. In the early days, he knew he was getting what he calls pity laughs. “It’s just a different sound,” he says. “There’s an ‘ah’ sound at the end of the laugh. Hahaha-ah … you can just tell.”
To overcome this, he moved to New York and started making his material darker: “A lot of murder, talking about Vietnam, anti-church stuff … setting fire to babies, urinating on babies. It got too dark so I had to dial some of it back in the end.”
Not too much, though. Jerk is clearly influenced by both The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and often you find yourself spluttering with laughter when you least expect it. When Renkow goes on a series of Tinder dates, he tells one woman he’s not interested as soon as she sits down. “But you liked my picture?” she says, taken aback. “Do I look like I have any control over whether I swipe left or right?” he replies.
Renkow admits he has more freedom to offend than most comics, and he revels in this. In April, he’s performing a show called Tim Renkow Tries to Punch Down.
“The rule in comedy is you can’t make fun of anyone worse off than you,” he says. “Well, I’m disabled, Jewish and Mexican. So I’ve been allowed to make fun of everyone. This show is me trying to find a group of people that I’m not allowed to make fun of.”
Jerk might be about Renkow’s cerebral palsy, but it’s also about immigration. In the show, he is forced to get a job in order to get a visa to remain in the UK, another aspect that mirrors his own struggles living here. “Everyone talks about immigration, but no one talks about the mind-numbing bureaucracy of it. It’s a pain in the ass, and they make it a pain in the ass on purpose. You have to get one form, then go to another place and get another form. Whenever people talk about immigration they talk as if people just moved here and that’s all they did. No, they did so much work to get here.”
Renkow says you can’t avoid getting involved in the politics of disability if you have cerebral palsy – but he feels the most important political statement he can make is simply to get out there and show that he’s no different from anyone else. “That includes flaws,” he says, “because disabled people are kind of seen as holier.”
And the last thing he wants is to be put on a pedestal.
“If someone like me is your hero,” he says, “then you’ve really made mistakes.”
• Jerk is on BBC Three now and airs on BBC One on Mondays at 11pm from 4 March.
