Richard Kind Is Glad He’s Not Super Famous

Fresh Air

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🗓️ 31 December 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

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Summary

Kind is the announcer and host sidekick on the Netflix show ‘Everybody's Live with John Mulaney.’ "I don't know what the hell I'm doing. You must understand — it's anarchy," he says of the show. He spoke with Terry Gross about having ego but no confidence, working with Sondheim, and working in his father's jewelry store as a teen.

Jazz historian Kevin Whitehead has as remembrance of musicians we lost this year.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for NPR, and the following message come from Yarl and Pamela Mohn, thanking the people who make public radio great every day and also those who listen.
0:10.4	This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. Happy New Year's Eve. Today we continue our retrospective featuring some of our favorite interviews from 2025.
0:20.1	Though he's not often cast in leading roles,
0:22.5	you'd likely recognize Richard Kind and his distinctive voice from his appearances in hundreds of
0:27.8	movies and TV shows. Last month, he was celebrated at the New York Comedy Festival Benefit,
0:33.6	appropriately titled Richard Kind Everywhere All at Once.
0:38.2	In the series only murders in the building, he was the neighbor Vince Fish,
0:42.2	a.k.a. Stinkye Joe, with the highly contagious case of Pink Eye.
0:46.8	He played Larry David's cousin in Curb Your Enthusiasm,
0:50.1	co-starred and Mad About You, was in the Michael J. Fox show Spin City, and earlier in his career was a cast member of the Carol Burnett Show, Carolyn Company. In the Cohn Brothers film, a serious man, he was the deeply troubled brother. His youthful ambition was to be in a Stephen Sondheim musical. He's been in two. He started in a production of a funny thing happened on the way to
1:12.0	the forum at the Stephen Sondheim Center for the Performing Arts, and in the musical bounce,
1:17.5	he originated the role of Addison Meisner and got to work with Sondheim. I interviewed Richard
1:23.3	Kind in April. We began our conversation talking about his current role at the time on the Netflix
1:29.0	series Everybody's Live with John Mulaney. Kind was the announcer on the show and also Malaney's
1:34.6	sidekick. Let's start with a clip from an episode of Everybody's Live. John Malaney explains that
1:40.1	Kind got hit on the head with a kiss album, which left him with a traumatic brain injury,
1:45.1	and now Kine thinks he is Gene Simmons.
1:48.2	He's dressed like Simmons, has hero-like Simmons,
1:50.8	and talks like him, too.
1:52.5	After he says something vulgar to Malaney,
1:54.9	Malaney starts to apologize to the audience.
1:57.9	Okay, so normally I'd apologize for such a crack comment. I crave ideas.
	...

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