Kevin Knox, 53, veteran Boston area comedian
By Herald staff | Tuesday, November 17, 2009 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Arts & Culture
Veteran Boston comedian Kevin Knox died yesterday morning at Brigham & Women’s Hospital after a six-year battle with cancer. He was 53.
Known as Knoxie by friends and colleagues, the Tyngsboro native and longtime Winthrop residentbroke into the comedy scene in the late-1970s doing impressions. He soon began formulating a brand of nonstop, energetic standup that eventually earned him annual multi-week appearances in Las Vegas and Atlantic City.
But Knox did most of his performing around Boston, where he worked with and for veteran comic Dick Doherty since the mid-1980s. In recent years Knox either hosted or was the closing act at Doherty’s Beantown Comedy Vault in Remington’s Restaurant every Monday night.
“He was the missing link between the younger crowd and the older crowd of comics around here,” Doherty said yesterday. “He was amazing at being there for young comics, to help them along and give them solid advice.”
“He was extremely animated,” Doherty said. “He never let up. I do a long setup of telling an amusing story that leads to a punchline. He was bang, bang, bang, and didn’t waste a lot of time with setups.”
In an interview with the Herald in August, Knox said, “You can be very esoteric and go way out on the line and be so hip that three quarters of the crowd at the club doesn’t get what you’re talking about. But long story short, I want you to laugh. I want you to come in and have belly laughs. I want people to say, ‘Hey, he’s a knucklehead and he talks about some stupid stuff, but I like him’.”
Knox also spoke of his earliest days at entertaining people, in school, where he would make offhand comments and “people used to live for what I was gonna say to the teacher.
“Some kids took to music, but for me it was comedy,” he said. “The magic of being able to, with just the spoken word, make people just start laughing is a power that, unless you have it, you’ll never understand. It helped me get through everything my whole life.”
Funeral arrangements are pending.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/entertainment/arts_culture/view.bg?articleid=1212547
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