Two Voices of Italian-American Laughter Gone Too Soon
Remembering Mike Marino and Joey Sorice
By Chris M. Forte
The Italian Californian
Within a matter of weeks, the Italian-American community lost two men who spent much of their lives doing something that may seem simple, but is increasingly important: making people laugh, celebrating where they came from, and bringing people together.
Comedian Mike Marino, known to generations of fans as “New Jersey’s Bad Boy of Comedy,” died on September 15, 2026, at the age of 63. Marino had publicly revealed that he was battling Stage 4 brain cancer following surgery earlier in the year.
Then, on October 3, comedian, producer and Los Angeles Italian Festival founder Joey Sorice died suddenly at home from what festival organizers described as an apparent heart attack.
The timing made Sorice’s death especially shocking. The eighth Los Angeles Italian Festival was scheduled to take place the very next day at Hollywood & Highland. Instead, organizers were forced to cancel the celebration its founder had spent years building.
For me, these losses feel personal in a particular way.
I was not a close friend of either man, and I would never pretend otherwise.
I met Joey several times through the Los Angeles Italian Festival. Mike I knew mostly from a greater distance. We attended some of the same Italian-American events over the years, I saw him in passing, and I followed his comedy, appearances and social-media presence.
But anyone who spends enough time in an ethnic or cultural community understands this phenomenon.
You don't necessarily have to know someone intimately for that person to become part of the landscape of your life.
You begin recognizing the same faces at festivals, dinners, parish events, cultural organizations and community gatherings. You see their names on flyers. You follow what they are doing online. Eventually they become familiar members of that larger extended Italian-American family.
That is how I remember Mike Marino and Joey Sorice.
Mike Marino: Unapologetically Italian American
Mike Marino built much of his comedy around something Italian Americans immediately recognized:
family.
A Jersey City native who grew up in New Jersey, Marino originally pursued acting. He trained at institutions including the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Herbert Berghof Studio before developing the stand-up career that eventually made him nationally known.
His television and entertainment work stretched well beyond comedy clubs, but it was his material about New Jersey, Italian families and everyday life that became his signature.
Marino understood the comic potential of the Italian-American household.
The relatives.
The food.
The family arguments.
The accents.
The exaggerated personalities.
The mixture of affection, aggravation and loyalty that anyone raised around a big Italian family immediately recognizes.
He exaggerated it, of course.
That is what comedians do.
But underneath the exaggeration was something authentic.
Italian-American audiences could laugh at Marino because they recognized pieces of themselves in the characters and situations he described.
His enormously popular “If the President Were Italian” routine eventually received more than 12 million views on YouTube, according to the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
That idea evolved into Marino’s memorable “Make America Italian Again” comedy persona and web series.
It worked because Marino wasn't apologizing for being Italian American.
He was celebrating it.
He took something that earlier generations were sometimes pressured to hide—the accents, the food, the oversized personalities, the neighborhood culture—and turned it into something audiences could proudly laugh about.
His career eventually took him around the country and internationally. He performed repeatedly at Montreal's Just for Laughs Comedy Festival and became a familiar performer in theaters, casinos and comedy clubs.
In 2008, Marino was inducted into the New Jersey Comedy Hall of Fame.
In 2015, he received the USO Bob Hope Comedy Award in recognition of his performances for American military personnel.
Those accomplishments tell us something else about Mike Marino.
Behind the “bad boy” image was a performer who clearly understood that comedy could be a service.
Sometimes people simply need to laugh.
And Marino spent decades giving them that opportunity.
Earlier this year, that story took a painful turn.
Marino publicly disclosed that he was battling Stage 4 brain cancer following surgery in January. Yet he continued communicating with his fans and working toward returning to the stage.
On September 15, he died at 63.
The man who spent so much of his life making other people laugh was gone.
Joey Sorice: Creating a Piazza in Hollywood
Joey Sorice's contribution to Italian-American life was somewhat different.
If Mike Marino brought Italian America onto the comedy stage, Joey helped create a place where Italian Americans could actually gather.
That place was the Los Angeles Italian Festival.
And that is where I encountered him.
I met Joey several times at the festival over the years.
Those brief encounters were not enough for me to claim that I knew Joey personally in the way his close friends and family did.
But I did see what he created.
And I saw what that creation meant.
Los Angeles presents a particular challenge for ethnic communities.
Unlike New York, Boston or Philadelphia, Southern California's Italian-American population is spread across an enormous metropolitan region.
Los Angeles once had recognizable Italian neighborhoods and enclaves, but much of that population dispersed generations ago.
That means community often has to be deliberately recreated.
Joey Sorice helped recreate it.
For one day, the Los Angeles Italian Festival transformed part of Hollywood into something resembling an Italian-American piazza.
There was food.
There was music.
There was comedy.
There were vendors.
There were Italian organizations and personalities.
There were people celebrating their ancestry and others simply coming to enjoy the culture.
The festival described itself as continuing the tradition of the Italian street festival—the sights, sounds, smells and flavors of an old-fashioned Italian celebration.
Joey was its founder and producer.
But the festival was only one chapter of a much longer entertainment career.
Sorice came from Short Hills, New Jersey, and described growing up in a large Italian family.
His first experiences onstage were musical rather than comedic. He played saxophone in his family's band, which he jokingly described as something resembling an Italian version of The Partridge Family.
His family also had some remarkable connections to the New Jersey entertainment world.
Sorice recalled that actor Joe Pesci, an old friend of his father's from Newark, wrote some songs for the family group. He also remembered spending time in Las Vegas where the act received training from Tommy DeVito, one of the original Four Seasons.
Eventually the music career ended and comedy took over.
Joey and his younger brother developed the comedy team Jimmy & Joey, performing regularly in Southern California and becoming associated with Los Angeles' famous Comedy Store.
Later came The Meatballs of Comedy, an Italian-themed comedy showcase that brought together performers working from the Italian-American experience.
And eventually came the Los Angeles Italian Festival.
When you look at Joey's career as a whole, a theme becomes obvious.
He kept creating places for Italian-American performers and culture to be seen.
A family band.
A comedy duo.
An Italian comedy showcase.
An Italian festival in Hollywood.
Those weren't isolated projects.
They were variations on the same idea:
bring people together and put Italian-American culture on the stage.
More Than Nostalgia
Ethnic festivals and heritage comedy are sometimes dismissed as nostalgia.
Certainly there is nostalgia involved.
Italian-American culture itself carries enormous amounts of inherited memory.
We remember grandparents and great-grandparents.
Sunday dinners.
Parish festivals.
Neighborhood bakeries.
Social clubs.
Old Little Italies.
The immigrant generation.
The old neighborhood characters who seemed to come straight from central casting but were actually real.
Much of that world has disappeared.
But men like Mike Marino and Joey Sorice demonstrate that preserving culture does not necessarily mean freezing it in the past.
Culture survives by adapting.
Marino took stories about Italian-American family life and carried them into comedy clubs, television, YouTube, podcasts and social media.
Sorice took the traditional Italian street festival and recreated it beneath the lights of Hollywood.
That isn't a dead culture.
That is cultural transmission.
Every generation receives something from the generation before it and decides what to carry forward.
Mike and Joey carried something forward.
They simply did it with microphones, punchlines, music, food and festivals.
The Strange Sadness of Familiar Faces Disappearing
Their deaths have also made me think about something that becomes increasingly noticeable as we get older.
Familiar faces begin disappearing.
Some belong to family.
Some belong to close friends.
But others belong to that larger circle we call community.
They are people whose names keep appearing on flyers.
The person you expect to see standing near a festival stage.
The entertainer whose latest video appears in your social-media feed.
The organizer rushing around making sure everything works.
The guy you recognize from across the room even though you may never have sat down and had a long conversation with him.
You don't realize how familiar their presence has become until suddenly it isn't there anymore.
Mike Marino was one of those people for me.
Joey Sorice was another.
Joey's death carries an especially haunting symbolism because the celebration he created was literally hours away.
On Sunday, October 4, people were supposed to gather at Hollywood & Highland for another Los Angeles Italian Festival.
There should have been music.
There should have been food.
There should have been laughter.
Instead, the festival was canceled because the man responsible for creating it had suddenly died.
There is something painfully symbolic about that silence.
I Hope Joey's Festival Returns
I hope the Los Angeles Italian Festival comes back.
Not because Joey Sorice can simply be replaced.
He can't.
Founders bring personalities, relationships and institutional knowledge that cannot simply be transferred to somebody else.
But if there is a way for the festival to continue, I think continuing what Joey built could eventually become one of the greatest memorials to him.
Perhaps someday people will once again gather in Los Angeles beneath Italian flags, eat Italian food, listen to Italian music and hear comedians making jokes about their crazy Italian families.
And perhaps somewhere in that celebration there will be a photograph of Joey Sorice and a simple explanation:
This is the man who started it.
That is how culture survives.
One generation builds something.
The next decides not to let it disappear.
The Show—and the Culture—Must Go On
The Italian-American community is changing.
The old immigrant neighborhoods have largely dispersed.
Most members of the original immigrant generation are now gone.
Their children are aging.
Many cultural organizations struggle to attract younger members.
Festivals struggle for volunteers and funding.
Old institutions disappear quietly every year.
That makes the people who continue creating things even more important.
A festival.
A parish celebration.
A cultural society.
A newspaper.
A website.
A comedy show.
A heritage organization.
Each becomes a small bridge connecting one generation with another.
Joey Sorice built one of those bridges.
Mike Marino built another.
They used different tools, but underneath their work was essentially the same message:
Remember where you came from.
Laugh about it.
Celebrate it.
Share it.
And invite everybody else to the table.
I met Joey Sorice only a handful of times.
I knew Mike Marino mostly from passing encounters, shared events and following his work from a distance.
So this isn't the remembrance of a best friend.
It is something different.
It is the remembrance of two familiar figures from the larger Italian-American community whose presence helped make that community feel alive.
And sometimes you don't realize how important those familiar faces were until they are suddenly missing.
Mike and Joey helped make Italian America a little louder.
A little funnier.
A little more visible.
And a little more joyful.
For that, I will remember them.
Rest in peace, Mike Marino.
Rest in peace, Joey Sorice.
Viva Italia. Viva gli Italiani d'America.
And may the laughter continue.
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