Hop For Pop
Press Kit
Stand-up · One-Man Show
Tom Nemec
Thirty-five years a stand-up, and at 60 he finally told the story he had been circling the whole time. It took a hurricane to make him admit they had never really been a family.
Based
New York area
Works in
Stand-up · Solo theatre
Known for
A Cat in a Box
Performing since
1990
Interview
41 min · Hop For Pop · 2026
“Everyone in the room is laughing out of recognition. Not laughing because they think it’s okay.”
Tom Nemec — Hop For Pop
Ready-to-use copy
Biography
245 words — lift as-is, no rewriting required
Tom Nemec has been doing stand-up since 1990, when he stopped drinking at twenty-four. He is candid that he was not disciplined about it for a long time — he had 175 different jobs by the time he was forty, and he coasted in comedy the same way, taking whatever work came. The wake-up call was a comic on a Connecticut bill who refused to believe Nemec was only MCing: the man had been doing it three years less and was already featuring.
He had wanted to tell the story of his family his whole career. He tried it in stand-up in the early days, doing bits about his alcoholic father coming home unable to stand and his mother explaining that Daddy was tired from working. He read monologues at New York performance-art open mics in the late nineties. It never became the thing it needed to be.
What finished it was Hurricane Sandy. He had moved out of the city, bought a small house, and was studying early childhood education and reading about childhood trauma. After the storm, nobody in his family called or came, though they lived thirty minutes away, while every other house on the block filled with people bringing coffee and breakfast. A neighbour whose father had never spoken to him because he was gay told Tom his dad had come to collect him. A Cat in a Box, his autobiographical one-man show, came out of that realisation and went to the Edinburgh Fringe.
The part other press kits leave out
What you should know before you book him
Tom Nemec has spent thirty-five years learning the specific craft of making a room laugh at the worst thing that ever happened to you — including a long stretch of getting it wrong, on video, and being able to say exactly why.
Not stand-up, and he insists on the distinction
A Cat in a Box is a one-man play, not a set. His reason is precise: nobody leaves a comedy club saying my childhood was like that, and in theatre they come up and hug you.
Laughter of recognition
The response he is going for is the one he first heard in AA rooms — people laughing at something terrible because they know it, not because it is okay.
It has to be said with a smile
He watched himself lose a room on video and found the cause on his own face: the moment the family material started, his expression changed and the audience went with it.
He waited until he could carry it
His own verdict on the early attempts is that the material made him tight and angry, and he probably should not have been doing it before he was at peace with it.
He is at peace with it now
That is what makes the show performable rather than raw. He is direct that he has grown as a person and as a performer, and works with a director on it.
He enjoys the hard turn
Club owners have told him his ending is dark. He likes that. He describes wanting to kick an audience every once in a while — deliberately, not accidentally.
For press · cleared for use with attribution
Quotable
01
“It took me so many years to get around to telling this story.”02
“People never leave the comedy club and say: wow, I relate to that childhood.”03
“In theatre, they cry. They come up and hug you afterwards.”04
“In AA meetings, people would share these horrible things they’ve been through, and everyone in the room is laughing out of recognition. Not laughing because they think it’s okay.”05
“He said: come on, Tommy, stop acting like a jerk. And I said, no, I’m MCing.”06
“You’ve been doing this nine years already. I’ve only been doing it six, and I’m featuring.”07
“That was a good wake-up call, because I was lazy.”08
“I had 175 different jobs by the time I was 40.”09
“I would talk about my father coming home drunk and falling, and my mother telling us: oh, he’s tired, he was working. And I would think — wow, he worked so hard he can’t even stand up.”10
“Nobody in my family called, even though they lived 30 minutes away.”11
“My neighbour said: my father came and got me. And it’s like — nobody’s coming to get me.”12
“I have been living this lie that we were a family, and I need to tell this story before I die.”13
“I was transitioning into the material about my family, and I lost the audience. I couldn’t understand why.”14
“I watched the video, and when I transitioned into the material about my family, my face went like this. That’s why I lost the audience.”15
“For a long time it was hard to say it with a smile. But I had to keep doing it and keep trying it.”16
“Maybe I shouldn’t have been doing the material until I was emotionally able to handle it.”17
“I was raised like a cat in a box. You put a little cat in a box and you feed it, and when the cat gets older you take it out and it acts crazy — and everyone says, what’s wrong with that cat?”18
“Say you were brought up in a dysfunctional family and people would say: oh, get over it, you had a roof over your head.”
Attribution: Tom Nemec, speaking to Hop For Pop, 2026.
Career
Selected credits
Solo work
- A Cat in a Box — autobiographical one-man show; Edinburgh Fringe 2026
- Performance-art open mics and monologue readings in New York from 1998
Stand-up
- Performing since 1990
- Road work across the United States as MC, feature and headliner
- Threw out every recording of his early comedy
Also
Holds degrees in early childhood education and works as a teacher. Sober since 1990.
This kit was produced by Hop For Pop. The interview and quotes are drawn from Hop For Pop × Tom Nemec, recorded 2026. Tom Nemec and their representatives are free to use any part of this document — the biography, the quotes — for booking, press and promotion, with credit to Hop For Pop for the interview material.
Hop For Pop shines a light on stand-up artists and spreads comedy across the world. Follow at instagram.com/hopforpop.
Message us at instagram.com/hopforpop to get your interview and press kit with us.
See our Instagram post about this interview. Follow Hop For Pop on Instagram at @hopforpop and @thecomicsunseen.