He was Borat before Borat, a household name in the US in the 1980s and one of Ronald Reagan’s favourite comedians. Then the Soviet Union collapsed and his career crumbled. As relations with Russia continue to deteriorate, can Yakov Smirnoff be a star again?

On a chilly, misty December morning in Branson, a small town in southwest Missouri, Yakov Smirnoff sat in his office at the Yakov Smirnoff Theater, waiting for his phone to ring. He was expecting important messages from a TV producer friend, for notes on a pilot in development, and from a group of Chinese acrobats, for reasons that were not yet clear to me, and from his dance instructor, “great guy, very left brain”, who was prepping him to be, he hoped, a contestant on an upcoming season of Dancing with the Stars. He was, for that matter, waiting to hear from Dancing with the Stars.

Behind Smirnoff’s desk was a window with a view of the overcast Ozark mountains and a large, colourless strip mall on the next foothill over. His office was covered with portraits that he had painted of his children, and with framed photos and documents from his journey to America. On the door there was a second world war propaganda poster of Rosie the Riveter, with the slogan “We can do it”. There was not an angle in the space at which the eye did not encounter some likeness – painting, photograph, sculpture – of the Statue of Liberty. Smirnoff used to end his standup routine by singing a love ballad to Lady Liberty.

He was Borat before Borat, can comedian Yakov Smirnoff make a come back? Read more

Most Americans who were culturally sentient in the Reagan years know the name Yakov Smirnoff. He was a standup comedian whose cold war-themed humour, which traded heavily on his personal misadventures as a recent Soviet émigré, made him a star. People born as late as, say, 1980 can muster up an impression of his heavily-accented punchlines and his braying donkey laugh. Those of us who remember Smirnoff from TV instantly detected his affinity with Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Borat” persona, who was a Smirnoff joke taken to its terrifying, logical extreme.

People under 35, however, are generally not familiar with him. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 made his act obsolete almost overnight. When his LA-based career came to a sudden end, Smirnoff found his way to Branson, where he slowly rebuilt his act. The vacationing conservatives who fill Branson’s theatres have become Smirnoff’s meal ticket. But as cold war talk has returned to the US, Smirnoff believes he may have another moment on the national stage. Or so he jokes. When speaking of his bid to land on Dancing with the Stars, Smirnoff told me, “I need Putin to invade one more country, even just a little one, and I’ll be on the show for sure.”

Sacha Baron Cohen’s 'Borat' persona, who was a Smirnoff joke taken to its terrifying, logical extreme

When I visited him in December, he was a week away from wrapping up another season of Dinner with Yakov, his one-man variety show. Reclining in his office as showtime neared, Smirnoff sent his assistant to retrieve his beverage of choice, a bottle of lukewarm water, a taste he acquired in Soviet days.

“I’ll tell you little parable,” he said to me, at the exact moment his phone began to vibrate. He picked it up and fell into a distracted silence. From the way Smirnoff was smiling it seemed that the text he’d received was encouraging. It was from his TV producer friend. He furiously typed a reply with one hand while his other hand firmly grasped the top of his head, as though to secure it from floating away.

“Actually,” he said, when he finally finished typing. “It’s a story about parable.”

Comedians in the Soviet Union were required to register their material annually with the Department of Humour, which was part of the Ministry of Culture. “They got the least funny man in all of Soviet Union and he would review your jokes,” Smirnoff told me, “to make sure that they weren’t too good.” Since sex, politics, and religion were off-limits, “the animal kingdom was really big”, Smirnoff said. But even this could get you in trouble. On one occasion, Smirnoff was summoned to the Department of Humour to explain why he should be allowed to do his ant joke, which tells the tale of an ant who falls in love and marries an elephant. They have an amazing honeymoon, a night of wild passion that is so passionate, in fact, that the elephant collapses and dies in the middle – the ant, however, is even less lucky. He is forced to spend the rest of his living days digging the elephant’s enormous grave.

When the censor accused Smirnoff of masking an anti-communist message in the joke, he denied it. “I told him, ‘No, really, it’s just about this ant. He had a very difficult life!’”

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At some point during the various interviews he’s given over the years, Smirnoff invariably interrupts himself to say, “I’m not kidding, this really happened.” He’s not speaking figuratively, for example, when he says that he went from painting murals of Stalin to writing jokes for Ronald Reagan – both were actual jobs that he has had. It’s also true that, as a child in Odessa, Ukraine, he’d never seen a balloon float. In a country where even food was scarce, getting hold of helium was virtually impossible. (“We didn’t have bread or milk,” he told me. “The one thing we had plenty of was metaphors.”) So his father, an engineer and amateur inventor, set up a lab to make hydrogen in the family’s living room – which, like the bathroom and kitchen, was shared by the nine families who lived in their communal apartment – and experimented with mixing battery acid and zinc in a bottle while young Yakov held a balloon over the mouth of it. The experiment exploded grandly in his hands, and it was only by sheer luck that neither he nor his father were seriously harmed. The balloon never got off the ground.

Smirnoff and his parents arrived in the US in December 1977, when he was 26 years old. They had managed to leave Ukraine thanks to the proceeds from one his father’s inventions, a gadget, about the size of a ruler, that measured the structural integrity of large blocks of concrete. Smirnoff used to sell the device on the road during his comedy tours, until the KGB ordered him to desist. On their first night at their new home on the Lower East Side of New York City, Smirnoff and his parents slept on the floor of an empty apartment. Since they didn’t have even the $240 for their first month’s rent, the building superintendent, a complete stranger, covered for them.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yakov Smirnoff prepares to go on stage at his theatre in Branson, Missouri. Photograph: Wesley Schaefer/Demotix

After taking a mixology course of which he could barely understand a word, Smirnoff began to work as a bartender. (The idea to change his name from Pokhis to Smirnoff came to him when he encountered Smirnoff brand vodka while tending bar.) In the winter of 1978 Smirnoff got a job as a “bar boy” at Grossinger’s, a “Borscht Belt” hotel in the Catskill mountains, three hours drive north of New York. At Grossinger’s he watched and studied visiting comedians, paying special attention to the comic cadences of American English. When a Grossinger’s connection helped him land a gig as assistant cruise director on a Royal Caribbean ship docked in Miami, Smirnoff got his first opportunity to perform in the US. Even though he could barely speak the language, and his act consisted of little more than mimed punchlines and a Russian folk dance, he was allowed a few minutes on stage. Royal Caribbean did not re-hire him – but he’d proven to himself that he could perform for American audiences.

Smirnoff soon moved to Los Angeles, where he supported himself by working as a carpenter during the day. His English steadily improved and more gigs opened up. After showcasing at Mitzi Shore’s famous Hollywood venue, the Comedy Store, in 1978, he was invited to become a regular. In the early 1980s he began touring around the country and by 1985, Smirnoff had made a big enough name for himself that Miller Lite hired him to do a TV advertisement. The punchline: “In America, there is plenty of light beer and you can always find a party – in Russia, Party always finds you.”

The ad was a huge hit, and began to open doors for him. (It also created a comedic sub-genre known as the “Russian reversal” that lives on today as an online meme.) In November 1985, Johnny Carson booked Smirnoff on the Tonight Show. If Carson liked a comedian’s set, he’d call him over to his desk for a chat – a wave of the genie-wand that instantly transformed a comic into a star. After receiving this honour in his first appearance on the show, Smirnoff went on to become a Tonight Show regular. In 1986, a sitcom called What A Country was developed for him and ran for a season; the same year, Smirnoff appeared in the film Heartburn, which starred Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. At the height of his fame, he was making $100,000 a week as a Las Vegas headliner. In those years, Jerry Seinfeld was opening for him. Smirnoff performed at the 1988 White House Correspondent’s Dinner, a gig given to the major comedian of the moment.

It is not a coincidence that Smirnoff’s rise occurred during Reagan’s tenure. In contrast to his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, Reagan not only grasped the political power of humour, he was himself a professionally trained comedian (the 1951 movie Bedtime for Bonzo, was one of Reagan’s many comedic roles). Reagan’s appeal was also, in part, his ability to create an American narrative that was a comedy, a genre defined by its happy ending. Americans exhausted with Vietnam, Watergate, and energy shortages wanted a return to the upbeat script in which they were the world’s uniquely confident nation.

Reagan was a fan of Smirnoff and invited him to perform at various occasions. In Smirnoff, Reagan saw a comedian who could help him punch up his cold war script. From McCarthy to Nixon, anti-Soviet rhetoric relied upon fear-mongering. But Smirnoff’s anti-communism was humane, optimistic and unifying. It spoke not to the menace but to the day-to-day absurdity of Sovietism. In a culture in which most Americans encountered Russians as sneering Hollywood villains with nefarious-looking crewcuts, Smirnoff presented an image of the eastern European everyman who shared the values of regular Americans. He was the greenhorn next door, the kind of guy you continue to cheer for even after he strikes it rich and buys himself a Rolls-Royce – as Smirnoff in fact did.

At the height of his fame, he was making $100,000 a week as a Las Vegas headliner. Jerry Seinfeld was opening for him

From the mid-80s onwards, White House speechwriters began to tap Smirnoff for jokes that the president could insert into Soviet-related speeches, often cleverly introduced as “stories that the Russian people are telling amongst themselves”. When Reagan gave a major address at the Moscow Summit in 1988 he stood under a bust of Lenin and opened with a Smirnoff joke that strongly implied that heaven itself had endowed communist politicians with lazy asses.

Smirnoff says that his role in Reagan politics was something that he didn’t entirely grasp at the time. “As a young comic, I never saw myself as having something big to say about the cold war,” he said. “I just told the jokes that worked. What I wanted, mostly, was to be able to get a nice car.” In 1980s America, of course, a Soviet émigré buying a nice car was itself a major cold war statement.

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Around Christmas 1991, the writers of Late Night with David Letterman presented the American public with a top 10 list of “things that are going to happen now that the Soviet Union has collapsed”. Number one on that list: “Yakov Smirnoff’s career will end”. By the summer of 1992, Smirnoff’s career really did seem to be over. Major contracts were not renewed. The endorsement money, the TV and film roles, the invites to events and talk shows – they all dried up. Smirnoff began to panic. His daughter was still a toddler and he had a boy on the way. He was still making payments on a $2.5m house in Los Angeles. He knew he was in serious trouble when he could no longer draw an audience at small comedy clubs.

Smirnoff’s luck began to change in 1993, when he performed at a Farm Aid concert in Ames, Iowa. After he received an enthusiastic response from the crowd of 40,000 people, he ran into Willie Nelson backstage. Nelson advised him to try Branson. “They’ll eat you up there,” he told Smirnoff. Nelson’s advice was echoed by other people familiar with the country music scene: Branson’s entertainment scene was about to explode, and the town’s conservative sensibility matched his comedy. The joke Smirnoff likes to tell about his move to rural Missouri is that he looked for the one place in America where people hadn’t heard that the cold war had ended.

At his first shows in Branson, he drew fewer than 20 people. But as his audience grew over the years he was able to fill theatres once again. In 1996, after three years of renting spaces from other acts – on the assumption that his stay in Branson would be temporary – he decided to buy his own theatre.

Branson bills itself as the “Bible Belt Vegas”, a destination that offers wholesome entertainment: no gambling or showgirls or comedians with blue material. Branson’s tiny airport, built during the boom years of the 1990s, operates flights to and from Chicago and Houston. Long known as a country music spot, the town expanded its offerings in the 1990s to include theatre and comedy programmes and various sideshow-like venues such as a celebrity wax museum. The sensibility leans heavily towards nostalgia. God and country are served up in heaping portions at theatres with names like God and Country Theatres.

Branson bills itself as the 'Bible Belt Vegas'. There's no gambling or showgirls or comedians with blue material

Branson tour guides like to say that the town has more theatre seats than Vegas and Broadway combined. On off-season weekdays, the Strip, where all the big theatres line up, is full of tour buses full of retirees, and on weekends it is packed with families whose minivans and 4x4 flatbed trucks create a half-hour wait at the drive-through Starbucks. In the centre of town, you will find an almost life-size replica of half of the Titanic. The other half is apparently located somewhere in Tennessee. It has the look of something a tornado might have carried in and discarded haphazardly. Branson isn’t that far from where Dorothy and Toto lived, after all.

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The tour buses started to arrive at the Yakov Smirnoff Theater parking lot at about 3.30pm, 45 minutes before showtime. Outside the theatre, a line of picture-takers began to form next to the 20ft puppet version of Smirnoff’s head – outfitted in a massive Russian fur hat – whose arched eyebrows and open-mouthed smile communicated the punched-in-the-gut sensation of hearing a good joke.

On stage that night, with a week left in his season, Smirnoff was introduced by a video of highlights from his life and career. The contrast between the old footage and the man who glided onto the stage at the Yakov Smirnoff Theatre gave a sense of how his persona has evolved over the years. At the height of his fame, in the late 1980s, Smirnoff played the role of the bemused outsider on the make. On stage, he came off like an overeager provincial cousin who arrives at a summer picnic wearing a corduroy suit and tie, his unruly curls aggressively gelled down for the occasion, and a heartbreaking bouquet of carnations extended to his hosts. Now, roughly 30 years later, on stage at his own theatre, Smirnoff was no longer bemused. He had a worldly, circumspect air about him, as if he knew something that you don’t. He had the lean, distilled look, the slim-fit designer outfits of blacks and greys, the elliptical polish of a veteran magician.

Still, there’s some glint of the eternally boyish in Smirnoff. Dinner with Yakov featured standup, singing, a Russian style ringing-in of the new year, a jig in an oversized bear suit, a Q&A with the audience (“have you ever met anyone famous?”), two distinct autograph signing sessions, a two-for-one sale of a book and DVD, a master class on the psychology of romantic love, and a Christmas story that brought tears to the eyes of his audience members. It also included a full chicken dinner – itself worthy of an in-depth profile – with mashed potato, peas and carrots, ham, and some pie-thingy. Smirnoff spared neither cloth napkins nor “real silverware”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The bust of Yakov Smirnoff outside his theatre in Branson. Photograph: Wesley Schaefer/Demotix

Each night, as dinner was served, the house lights would suddenly go on, and caravans of carts, piled high with dinner trays, would materialise in the aisles. From centre stage, Smirnoff gave flight attendant-style instructions for how to finesse the tray tables from our elbow rests. In the midst of this presentation, he proudly touted a device of his own invention: a magnetic tray table – “four separate magnets!” – that would keep the dinner trays firmly in place. He spoke so effusively about his magnetic tray tables that I was certain he was about to offer his audience a chance to buy one of their very own for only $25.99. Instead he climbed down from the stage, walked up the aisles, shook hands, reminisced about the 80s, and helped his staff pass out meals. As the trays made their way down the rows, Smirnoff’s sidekick took the stage and started singing Disney’s Be Our Guest.

Something about the chicken dinner spiel struck me as significant. It reminded me of Andy Kaufman’s old routine, when he took out an entire Carnegie Hall audience for milk and cookies after his show. Perhaps it was the bold literalness with which these comedic acts of food service dramatised the desire – the craven, poignant, doomed desire – of any performer to fully please his audience.

After the show, Smirnoff could be seen sprinting around the lobby, mugging for pictures with fans and signing autographs with one arm, and with his other, waving cheques in the air for staff members, all the while talking to someone on a phone that he was balancing between his shoulder and ear. Aside from performing each night, Smirnoff was also managing the theatre and running a staff of 60 people. The nameplate on his office desk, which reads, Yakov Smirnoff, President, is only a half joke. He is indeed head of a production company of his own, Comrade in America, Inc. (CIA).

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The end of the cold war brought with it more than a loss of Smirnoff’s stage persona and livelihood. It led to an identity crisis, Smirnoff told me. His move to Missouri was almost like a second immigration. In his early years in Branson he used to do a routine – which has been cited in a theatre anthropology doctoral dissertation as an instance of “performing ruralism” or “hickface” – in which he appeared on stage wearing a traditional Cossack ensemble that he peeled off, only to reveal a second costume: the outfit of an American hillbilly. Smirnoff called this his “Red to Redneck” routine. His striptease celebrated the freewheeling ease with which a person can shed old identities and adopt new ones – but lurking behind the humour was an anxiety about the unstable, unsettling nature of identity. Smirnoff’s success on stage had been synonymous with his hard-won real-life identity as a new American – what would happen to this identity when his act was suddenly taken from him?

These days, Smirnoff’s show is less troubled by these questions. Over the past decades, he’s come to realise that comedy isn’t necessarily an end itself but rather a means to an end. Smirnoff often speaks of wanting to “deliver a message to the world”, and has cultivated a missionary zeal for teaching people about love and relationships. (He is very careful with his diet because he wants “to live a long time, so that I can get my message out”.) In Dinner he wasn’t so much telling jokes as talking about them. He wanted to teach his Branson audience why laughter matters.

After his divorce in the 90s Smirnoff began obsessively reading about the psychology of love, which led him to enrol in a master’s programme at the University of Pennsylvania under the tutelage of Martin Seligman, the guru of “positive psychology”. This school of thought emphasises action over open-ended conversation, prescription over description. It has little interest or use for Freud’s tragic view of humanity and believes that happiness is well within reach. It speaks a language of handy acronyms like Perma (positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishments), and is associated with can-do notions of self-help. It is, in short, a most American branch of psychology and, in that way, another step in Smirnoff’s transition from old world to new.

While at Penn, Smirnoff took a Seligman-designed survey called Virtues in Action (Via) that ranks a person’s practical attributes. The results were telling. According to the Via survey, Smirnoff’s main virtue is “inventiveness”, followed by “persistence”. Most intriguingly, “humour” was ranked as his 11th virtue.

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These days, Smirnoff’s Branson fans know him as much for a mural as they do for his comedy. The night after the 9/11 attacks, as the twin towers lay in rubble, Smirnoff began to make a painting of the New York City skyline foregrounded in front of a giant heart blanketed in America’s stars and stripes. The World Trade Center towers had been his view during his citizenship swearing-in ceremony. “It was devastating to see that place crumbling before my eyes,” he said.

As Smirnoff worked on the painting, a vision came to him. “I imagined it hanging over Ground Zero,” he told me. “I could see it and just knew that it had to be there.” He embarked on a quest to make it happen. Smirnoff tells an incredibly complicated story about this project, which seems to have involved every bureaucratic body in New York, and almost every means of persuasion available – including the hiring of lobbyists, offers to pay $100,000 out of pocket, and emotional pleas made in person to hardened building managers and union reps – until finally, somehow, he found himself in Lower Manhattan with a group of union members one night, almost at the year anniversary of the attacks, installing a 200ft version of his painting over the scaffolding of a nearby building. (Smirnoff became emotional when describing the scene of the installation.) His mural dominated the view over the wreckage site and became one of the most recognisable images from that strange time and place. Today, the most popular item sold at the Yakov Smirnoff Theatre gift shop is a magnet of his 9/11 mural.

After the Dinner show, audience members had their chance to buy one of these magnets or an original painting of his or a Smirnoff matryoska doll, or they might wander the theatre lobby, which doubled as a museum of Smirnoff’s career. The lobby walls were covered with letters from the last three Republican presidents, a note Johnny Carson wrote to him in Russian, a traffic light that his father invented, and photos of him with celebrities.

The lobby exhibit isn’t just a diversion: it is an integral part of Smirnoff’s act. Each photo of him with a movie star or president serves as another immigration document, another piece of evidence certifying that this person, whose grandmother used to have him stand alone on bread lines when he was seven years old, indeed belongs among the most powerful people in the world’s most powerful nation. He’s always had a talent for humour but his genius, it turns out, is for self-creation. The people who show up at the Yakov Smirnoff Theater want to see more than a comedian; they want a protagonist in a big American novel.

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The next day, Smirnoff and I ate lunch at the strip mall near his theatre, off Highway 64. As we pulled into the mall’s endless parking lot, en route to Freddie’s diner, Smirnoff was telling me that he wasn’t bitter about his sudden career downturn in the early 1990s.

In addition to watching David Letterman declare his career dead on national television, Smirnoff had to endure other public jibes. In an infamous 1992 sketch on the Ben Stiller Show, Stiller did a send-up of Smirnoff’s plight by portraying him on a club stage, covered in sweat, bombing horribly, eliciting boos and taunts and silence, grasping for jokes and gasping for air until he collapses and curls up into the foetal position. (Stiller later expressed regret for his needless cruelty.)

The sketch felt less like a sketch and more like an attack ad in a political campaign. Perhaps that was the point. This was 1992, two years before Stiller’s film Reality Bites, which made him into a voice for his discontented Gen X peers. The young American comics of that generation, who’d known nothing but Reagan/Bush, were disgusted by cold war rhetoricians, and they may well have associated Smirnoff with an America whose obsolescence was just fine with them.

But Smirnoff – who, unlike Ben Stiller, did not have a showbiz family to rely on – wasn’t thinking much about geopolitics. He was concerned about his mounting debts, his $8,000-a-month mortgage. And with the country sliding into recession, he was facing ruin at a very inopportune time. “I was just really, really scared,” he told me. “I had two small children. I was terrified about their future.”

At Freddie’s we ordered burgers and fries. From our table we could almost see the Yakov Smirnoff Theater on the next hill, which is well-marked marked by a gigantic sign featuring Smirnoff in Cossack get-up, wearing the expression of someone gleefully hurtling downhill on a rollercoaster – and all of this under the glowing word YAKOV. At night, this sign is luminous and ringed with lights, hovering in the darkness over the valley like an outrageously good idea.

For a moment, we both stared out of the window in silence. Then Smirnoff let me in on a little secret. Every morning, as he prepares for the day, he sings The Impossible Dream, the big number from the musical The Man of La Mancha. In that scene, Don Quixote is keeping an all-night vigil in the courtyard of an inn – which he believes to be a castle – waiting to be knighted by the innkeeper, whom he believes is a noble lord. Aldonza, a peasant girl who thinks Quixote is deluded, demands to know why he behaves in this ridiculous way. Because, replies Quixote, he must follow the quest. And to explain what he means, he sings.

To dream … the impossible dream. To fight … the unbeatable foe. To bear … with unbearable sorrow …

I smiled or maybe even laughed when Smirnoff told me about The Impossible Dream because he grew suddenly very serious and Quixotean and said, “I’m not kidding. I mean it. I sing this song every morning. It’s like a mantra, a prayer.”

He put down his veggie burger for a moment and carefully recited the lines of the song for me. In the middle, he choked up. “You see what I mean?” he said. “It gets me every time.”

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Recently Smirnoff’s thoughts have turned to television, or, as he calls it, ethereally, “Hollywood”. Earlier that day, before our visit to Freddie’s, he and I had made a trip to the Springfield campus of Missouri State University, where he was scouting out locations for a pilot episode of a sitcom he was calling “Yakov”. In the show he would play a psychology professor who specialises in romantic relationships, while struggling to navigate his own. “Yakov” has been in the works for years, having evolved from a reality show that Smirnoff recently developed, then scrapped, and a Broadway show called As Long as We Both Shall Laugh that ran in the early 2000s.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The audience wave glowing wands during a Smirnoff show. Photograph: Wesley Schaefer/Demotix

Smirnoff’s sights are on network TV, not cable. He always goes as broad as possible. That is why, on a night earlier that week, immediately after his usual Dinner show, he had asked the audience to stick around to watch the filming of scenes from the three-camera pilot episode of “Yakov”. Hollywood knows that he can deliver the heartland, he told me, but they want to hear the laughs for themselves.

After the filming, Smirnoff, who had already handed out feedback questionnaires, conducted a focus-group style session with the audience. The last time I saw him that night, he was rushing up the theatre aisle with a big stack of questionnaires under his arm, vowing to stay up late until he read every last one. Overhearing this, Alexander, his 22-year-old son, a stage manager at the Branson theatre and collaborator on the TV pilot, rolled his eyes. “Oh, that’s a great idea,” he said.

Smirnoff’s character in “Yakov”, tentatively named Dr Chekhov, came to him while he taught a course at Missouri State on love and laughter. Like Seinfeld or Louie, shows that feature interludes of the star’s standup routines, Smirnoff imagined episodes of “Yakov” framed with scenes of him riffing on stage – his audience, however, would be students in a classroom. When a university administrator greeted us in front of one of the possible locations for filming, Smirnoff told him that he needed a space that looked like the university classroom scene from the opening of the Da Vinci Code movie. “Oh sure, we can definitely do that,” the administrator said.

Smirnoff was in a high spirits that day. As he walked around campus, he got curious looks from people: from older people who recognised him from TV in the 80s, and from college students who seemed confused about why a conspicuously well-dressed bearded foreigner in a trim, black and white barleycorn-patterned tweed pea coat, kept peeking into classrooms and announcing, Yes, yes this one is perfect.”

After narrowing down a few possible spaces and calibrating how much pizza he would need to use to bribe students to show up as extras, Smirnoff slipped into an economics class taught by a professor friend of his. He wanted to work the room for a minute, to gauge how the laughter resonated acoustically in the space. Satisfied with the results, and with only a few minutes left on his parking meter, he did a quick walk-and-talk with another college administrator and laid out some quick casting parameters - “I’ll need a big football player-like guy, and also a little wimpy guy” – all of which were duly noted.

Everything was going perfectly – no, even better than planned – and Smirnoff expressed his gratitude to “the universe”. All he needed to do now was make a quick run to his supplier to pick up some health supplements, make a phone call about moving some of his “laughing Jesus” paintings into a building that he owns, and get back to Branson in time to be on stage, as usual, by 4.15pm.

That night, I skipped the Dinner show, and took a spin around Branson. As I drove on the Strip, past the megachurch, past the dinosaur, military, and toy museums, respectively, I chanced upon a 15ft tall, well-executed plaster rendering of Ronald Reagan’s head. The head lived across the street from some theatres, a steak joint, and a spiralling, four-storey go-kart racetrack, that emitted a constant buzzing sound. Next to the Reagan head was a tourist shop that sold T-shirts with slogans like “Pretty in Pink, Dangerous in Camo” and patriotic Branson gear, available in either the stars and stripes of the United States or the stars and bars of the Confederacy.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The bust of Ronald Reagan in Branson. Photograph: Avi Steinberg

The woman in the T-shirt shop told me that the Reagan head had been installed a few years back, by a guy who had opened up a discount ticket booth in that space – one of many such operations in town. Alas the invisible hand of the market had swept away the ticket business and the stand was dismantled. All that remained was Reagan’s head and the empty lot, full of weeds and puddles from last night’s downpour.

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An hour before he was to go on stage for his final show of 2014 – and, if his TV comeback gained steam, perhaps longer than that – Smirnoff was relaxing in his office, leaning back on a couch, and telling me about paintings he was planning for the future. His assistant ran off to get him a bottle of lukewarm water. Suddenly his phone started humming and his eyes got wide. “It’s the Chinese!” he said, “I have to take this.”

Minutes later, representatives for a troupe of Chinese acrobats stopped by and Smirnoff gave them a warm welcome. They were planning to rent the Yakov Smirnoff Theater for the upcoming season, which would free Smirnoff to pursue his other projects.

“The acrobats are a godsend,” he told me, after they had left. “Now I can go to LA, and, you know, really go for it.”

An hour later, he was on stage again, doing his opening, “Hi, my name is Yakov Smirnoff, and I was born in Russia ...” The glowing wands provided at each theatre seat, which the audience would wave to create a sea of light for Smirnoff’s New Year’s shtick, were, on this night, and for one time only, offered to the audience at a discount of over 50%. It was, after all, the final night of the season.

I left Branson very early the next morning, driving through a thick mountain fog, to catch a 9am flight out of Kansas City. Most of Branson’s shows, and even Branson’s small airport, were now officially closed for the winter. As I made my way out of town, a few show trailers were also packing up to leave. In a few hours, Smirnoff would be awake and singing The Impossible Dream as he prepared to rewrite a strong female lead for the pilot of his TV show. In the afternoon he would be dancing with his instructor. All the while, he would continue to wait for calls from Hollywood, and think up new ways to get his message out. The Tonight Show had just called him for the first time in decades. Jimmy Fallon was toying with a Putin bit. This really could be it, again.

Later, by phone, I asked him about future seasons, whether he’d be back in Branson.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

And what about Dinner with Yakov?

He laughed. “Oh no,” he said. “I’m done serving dinner.”

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• This article was amended on 22 January 2015 to clarify that the experiment in the Smirnoff family’s living room was to produce hydrogen.