Lucie Pohl: The immigrant guru

The Brooklyn comedian makes the comedy scene more accessible for immigrants

April 4, 2024 Mimi Lamarre

Lucie Pohl performs at St. Marks Comedy Club. Photo: Mimi Lamarre

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Lucie Pohl first translated German to English when her father, Klaus Pohl, was robbed at gunpoint.

“Mom, mom! It’s robbed, not raped!” Pohl, then eight-years-old, said after her mother said “My husband has been raped!” to the 911 officer.

The family had moved to New York a short time before, and the realities of immigrant life were very real for Pohl and the rest of her family. Her father is a German playwright and actor, and her mother is a Romanian theater director and singer.

Today, 31 years later, Pohl integrates these experiences into her sets as a comic.

Take the measly crowd that she surveyed on Wednesday, March 20th at St. Marks Comedy Club. She asked where the group was from. Nigeria, Austria, Maryland, they replied.

“I’m a German — and that normally gets the group going,” she said, before clarifying: “Well, the Aryan group.”

At the age of three, Pohl sat off-stage while her father acted as one of the first German drag queens. It was inspirations like this one that led Pohl to participate in drama groups upon arriving in the U.S.

Believing that the more serious types of acting were her speed, comedy didn’t come until later.

“I was always funny, but I took it for granted,” she told me. “I think, for a long time, I thought I had to be a dramatic actress to be serious.”

Drawn in by free college tuition, she moved back to Germany at the age of 18. While Pohl might have hoped that moving back would feel like coming home, she experienced something that many immigrants know to be true: her old home no longer felt like home.

Instead, she felt like an outsider, particularly as her maternal family’s experience in the Holocaust colored her perception of Germany.

“I felt like an alien there. I felt like an outsider. I didn’t feel German at all,” she told me.

She began voice-acting to pay the bills — including voicing Khloe Kardashian on a german-dubbed “Keeping up with the Kardashians.” (Today, Pohl plays Mercy on the wildly popular game OverWatch).

Shortly thereafter, she dropped out of college and moved back to New York. To pay the bills, she waited tables while keeping comedy projects in the works.

She founded a sketch comedy group, “Rich and Famous on the Inside.” Their first real gig was in Nayak, New York. A local bar had offered to pay for the comedians’ bus fare and for a salad once they arrived.

“We thought we were millionaires,” she laughed. Arriving at the bar, they had a sole audience member — who just happened to be a drunk man who heckled them the whole time.

Pohl didn’t let the experience deter her, though. She started working on a solo comedy show at the age of 29. The show turned into “Hi, Hitler,” a pithy interrogation of her German-Jewish identity that riffs on the fact that, as a young child, she thought that people were saying “hi” rather than “heil.”

She took the show to the Edinburgh Festival, where it thrived, and eventually returned to New York to write another solo act — this one called “Cry me a Liver.”

And then came 2016. Pohl was startled by the anti-immigrant rhetoric spewed by President Donald Trump.

“I sat there watching him give his speeches, and it was the first time that I was really, really scared about my future here, even as someone with a green card,” she told me. “It made me so angry.”

This led her to bring together a group of immigrant comedians into one show — which would then become “Immigrant Jam.”

“The first show was packed, and since then it’s been a huge success and a meeting of the minds for immigrant Americans,” she said.

The show then evolved into a podcast, which has had guests in the likes of Fumi Abe and Che Durena. To many immigrant comics, Pohl has been instrumental in making the New York City comedy scene more accessible.

“She really is the immigrant guru of New York, within her comedy and otherwise,” said Kaneez Surka, a fellow comedian originally from India.

Just before I saw Pohl perform in Manhattan, she had spent two weeks in Brazil, doing two shows in Sao Paulo and two in Rio. It was the thirteenth country that she performed to date.

She is, if nothing else, a citizen of the world — and a very funny one, at that.