John Rosenberger was the best of all of us
"He nurtured all us ornery, angry, smelly, difficult strays"
Typically I have a question posed by the readers looking for advice. Sometimes, though, something so profound and so awful happens to you that the script must be flipped.
On Wednesday I learned that my great friend John Rosenberger had died. John was the best of all of us. I have never met a kinder, more sincere person. We met over Zoom as you do in the pandemic. He hosted a Zoom record release that I did with Will Abeles. But our friendship didn’t spark until he reached out about doing a show at Nick’s Bar in Worcester with Allie Rose. The night of the show there was such a terrible storm Bryan O’Donnell and I were very worried there wasn’t even going to be a show. It was a Wednesday before Labor Day weekend, 2021, and we were still kind of roiling with COVID. There were about 30 people in that side room, packed in and laughing. Allie and John crushed and then they drove in an even worst part of the storm to John’s families home in West Stockbridge.
There isn’t some significant portion of that story. We’ve had better crowds, we’ve had better weather, but the company was impeccable. John could hang. Sure, part of it was he knew how to knock a couple back, and cigarette smoking can make one even more social. But it was more than that, he asked about you and he had stories for days. The metaphor I will shove into this is that doing comedy can feel like a storm on a random Wednesday: wind whipping around you, it feels sort of dangerous, you can feel very alone and as you stand in it the world can feel so cruel. But in that cozy bar there was John looking you in the eye and telling you how much fun he had and how impressed he was with Bryan and I and our ability to put on shows.
During a particularly hard time not too long ago, I posted something about how I was having a hard time and John wrote back to me:
I’m sorry I didn’t respond to you earlier but I not only think you’re a pretty good dad but I think you’re a stellar comedian and more importantly you’re a great lynchpin of a great scene. You are an amazing ambassador and the hard work you’ve done to make Worcester a welcoming place for comedians does not go unnoticed. Any time I talk to comedians about Boston I always bring up Worcester and you in particular and anyone who has met you has nothing but the most glowing things to say. You made Allison and I feel very at home and showed us a good time in the middle of a monsoon. You will always be appreciated.
John had the ability to distill you down to your best attributes. He still saw you, with all your flaws, but he knew why he wanted to be around you. John said in that message that whenever I come up people have nice things to say, but that really is him more so than me. Fucking Johnny Rose was loved by everybody. You point at a comedian in NYC and they will tell you that John is the best and they’ll have a story about a specific nice thing he did.
Yesterday as I was numb and doom scrolling on my phone I found solace in the outpouring of posts about him. Everyone had nearly the same thing to say about him. The amount of times it was people saying that John was their first friend when they moved to NY. Or that they would be so anxious going to mics and shows when they first moved and then they would see John’s face and feel at ease about being there. John made an effort. His input was love and his output was love.
The first thing I thought about was his cats. He had Grandpa, his cat in his apartment, but he also kept so many cats in Alphabet City alive. He cared and fed for these tiny nearly defenseless creatures. Us comedians were also his cats. John led a life of herding cats. It is near impossible to do so, and yet he did it. He nurtured all us ornery, angry, smelly, difficult strays. He listened to your album, he watched your special, he read your manuscript, and showed up to your taping. John tended to all us outdoor cats with compassion.
Selfishly I am going to miss him because I’m going to miss having such a big fan in my corner. When I got the call from Joel Walkowski (pre-order your copy of Honolulu Blues now) he said he called me, because “John was your biggest fan and was always talking about you.” I hope he knew that we were all his biggest fan too.
John at Vincent’s after wrestling an inflatable hotdog at George’s Coney Island in 2025.
No plug this week. Heart goes out to Shaun and everyone else in John’s life. Sounds like a man I’d have liked to meet. If you have a memory of John you’d like to share, feel free to do so in the comments. —Bill