Immigrants Put the New in ‘The New York Story’ for Colin Quinn’s Newest Netflix Triumph

New York has changed, man.

Say that, and you might as well have been talking about the past week-and-a-half as you had the past two-and-a-half decades – whether it’s the surprising notion bandied about that the next President of the United States might attempt to spend more time on Fifth Avenue than in the White House, or the once-radial proposition that Times Square could replace prostitutes and X-rated movie houses with a so-called Disneyfication. Goodbye, S&M. Hello, M&M and H&M.

The more essential truth about our Big Apple, our most populated city in these United States of America, is one you don’t even need a ticket to Hamilton on Broadway to acknowledge, although it’s as true as the lyric: “Immigrants: We get the job done.”

Immigrants keep putting the new into New York City. Colin Quinn, a native New Yorker, has seen those changes firsthand, and he weaves the waves of immigrants to great comic effect in his new Netflix special, Colin Quinn: The New York Story.

Until very recently, we alone in the world identified not only uniquely as Americans, but also as hyphenates (I’m not only Irish-American if you look at my name, but also Belgian-Franco-Scots-Welsh-Anglo-American if you ask my mother, and perhaps something else, too, if I took one of those ancestral DNA tests you see advertised on TV now). Our comedians could trade on ethnic or racial stereotypes to great fortune or fame. Look at how well Russell Peters sells out around the world, or how Sebastian Maniscalco is translating his Italian upbringing to bigger and bigger theaters.

Sustained applause greets Quinn, carrying luggage to symbolize his own arrival. He’s having nothing of it.

“I’ll stop the show. That’s enough applause. If you want exuberance, this is a New York show. It’s not supposed to be that. Exuberance is the West Coast. That’s my whole point. Applause is killing this city, you understand me? The West Coast: Enthusiastic, exuberant people. That’s what they’re supposed to be, because it’s paradise on Earth. So they’re happy and enthusiastic, perpetually surprised by everything that goes on. ‘Oh! The mountains! The beach!’ Everything they do they’ve done a hundred times, but it’s the first time. ‘Hey, you wanna go to the store?’ ‘Yeah!’ Midwest: Humble, hardworking, they have the farm, so they got that personality. The South: Very hot, very polite, overly polite. Because, you know, it could get a little violent if you’re not careful. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a concealed carry permit myself, you know.’ New England is they’re always getting hit by a water, little mist from the water. And New York is New York. We’re what everybody says we are. We’re rude, opinionated, pushy, loud, fast-talking, sarcastic, wise-ass. But what people don’t understand is, we, what’s rude to the rest of the country is polite to us, and vice-versa.”

What makes New York New York, though? How did it get this way? That’s the story behind The New York Story.

Quinn’s work in the one-person show oeuvre started with a very personal Broadway banger, 1998’s “An Irish Wake,” examining his own Irish-American heritage in a Park Slope, Brooklyn neighborhood unrecognizable to anyone dodging baby strollers and organic co-ops in 2016. He’d return more than a decade later under the direction of Jerry Seinfeld with Long Story Short, which HBO filmed as an Emmy-nominated special. There he had widened his scope to all of civilization, joking about the rise and fall of various empires over the centuries. A national tour and Netflix special followed for his next act, Unconstitutional, about how the ideas of our Founding Fathers still inspire us. And how he’s come back home to explain how New York is as American as it gets, and always has been.

First came the Native Americans. Right? “You have to take their word for it,” Quinn jokes. They gave us tobacco and lifetimes of smoking.

Everyone since arrived seeking a better life. The American Dream. On the flip side, they escaped a nightmare wherever they lived before. “So you have a city filled with miserable people,” he jokes.

Quinn then leads us chronologically through history as each new culture added its ingredients to the Great American Melting Pot. In his view of his city:

• Dutch laid down terminology (New Amsterdam, The Bronx, Brooklyn, Bushwick, Harlem), even introducing the F-word into our slang.
• British gave us our superiority complex. They renamed New Amsterdam as New York, even though as Quinn jokes, York wasn’t even close to being the favorite or best city in England.
• Germans introduced the delicatessen, and the abrupt rude-politeness paradox that rewards efficiency as an alternate form of courtesy. Exemplified by an accusatory tone, as Quinn jokes you might hear someone ask somewhat rudely: “Where’d you get the ice cream?” “Is it good?”
• Irish brought sarcasm and cynicism, while at the same time using their Catholic faith to instill and dominate civil service, from the FDNY and NYPD to other public agencies.
• Jews initially worked in all of the sweatshops, which Quinn joked made them the easiest earliest union organizers. “We need volunteers to complain about conditions!” They saved those earnings to buy abandoned buildings and invest in culture and performing arts.
• Italians brought volume. Whereas Irish and Jewish families kept secrets, Italians took it outside. “A mini-opera just played out before your eyes,” Quinn noted in the streets among Italian relatives. They also understood the psychology of money as bribery, taking care of someone as payment for favors owed.
• Puerto Ricans sped up the pace of the city.
• Blacks who migrated from the South taught us how to talk back to authority.
• Greeks brought a new wave of rude politeness, illustrated by how they emphasize the turnover of customers in their diners.
• Haitians brought fearlessness, knowing nobody could hit them harder than their fathers.
• Jamaicans made interracial dating socially acceptable. “I don’t know why, folks? Pot? Bob Marley? I just report it.”
• Chinese and Koreans brought work ethics that only made them seem unfriendly.
• Mexicans would do every job that nobody else would do, even other immigrants.
• Dominicans made themselves right at home, which made sense historically since the first trader with Native Americans in the city was a Dominican.
• Russians took sarcasm to new heights.
• Indians showed how they could always get in the last word.
• Arabs took over the taxicabs and bodegas, and transported us to their cultures whenever we stepped in their stores and vehicles.
• Poles settled in Greenpoint, the one neighborhood within spitting distance but not subway proximity to Manhattan, thereby proving the old joke about Polish jokes.

Quinn jokes about how New Yorkers can juxtapose personal prejudices with a systematic fairness, and how, in his eyes, the Internet has robbed us of some of New York’s characteristic attitudes.

He juxtaposes the entire history of the city with his own, returning more than once to how the New York City of 2016 differs from the boroughs he grew up in during the 1970s. The city he remembered had human versions of Yelp — that guy who’d walk into an eatery and demand that only a specific employee could make his sandwich — or the Directions Guy who existed before Google Maps or Waze, shaming you while simultaneously offering you directions. Or even the differences between Mayors Koch and De Blasio. Or how the subway turnstile and the MTA itself could turn any optimistic transplant to the city into a true New Yorker.

New Yorkers may sing along to Frank Sinatra or Alicia Keys, depending upon their age, declaring they can make it here among the concrete jungles, but Quinn reminds us that to make it here, you need to fit in with the city’s distinct pace and attitude.

“That’s the only immigrants who make it here, you’ll see, they have all these qualities. They’re not like, ‘hey, tired, poor,’ they got a shit attitude. That’s how you make it here,” he jokes. “You can’t be nice and last in this city.”

Rather, you have to join in the almost reckless, impulsive and harried pace of the city. “This whole city was an accident,” Quinn declares at the end of his hour.

What do they say, though? If one person’s trash is another’s treasure, then certainly one person’s accident is another person’s greatest city in the world.

[Watch Colin Quinn: The New York Story on Netflix]

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.