Photos by John Johnson

Kevin James, “King of Queens’” working-class hero, is as comfortable in front of TV cameras as he is doing stand-up for a live audience. But all told, he’d probably prefer to be on a golf course with some buddies and a good cigar.

Call it the bounce-back moment - that low point in every successful career, hopefully early on, when you realize there’s nowhere to go but up. John F. Kennedy had the Bay of Pigs. Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty had Ishtar. The New York Mets had their inaugural laugher of a season, racking up 40 wins and 120 losses. And Kevin James had his second night at Manhattan’s East Side Comedy Club.

“My first time went surprisingly well,” James recalls of the open-mic night back in 1989 where he first tried out his stand-up act. “The crowd was laughing, and I thought, ‘This is easy; it’s great!’ My second time, I went up, did the exact same material, and just bombed. I can remember literally feeling the flop sweat running down my back into the crack of my ass. At that moment, you start hearing things that you don’t want to hear, like ice melting in glasses. You see people staring at you with their mouths open. It’s horrible, a horrendous feeling, and there’s no one to turn the mic over to and say, ‘You take it now.’ You just have to die with it. And I did. I died many times with it.”

Much like his beloved Mets, however, who went from worst to first to become world champions in 1969, James refused to be counted out. Recognizing stand-up as a business of ups and downs, and by his own admission, not having a clue what else to do for a living, he ended his three-year tenure at the State University of New York at Cortlandt (“I majored in sports management,” he recalls, “and to this day, I don’t know what that means.”), and embarked on a career as a full-time comic. Today, this native of Stony Brook, Long Island is a bonafide TV star - and appropriately enough, he’s done it portraying a character who represents the same storied borough as his favorite ball club, albeit with a more reliable record of success. James is the star of CBS’s “The King of Queens,” a consistently top-20 rated sitcom which, along with “Everybody Loves Raymond,” helmed by James’s old stand-up buddy Ray Romano, anchors one of the most powerful nights of comedy on network TV. The show, co-starring sexy Leah Remini as James’s brassy wife and comic veteran Jerry Stiller as his cantankerous father-in-law, is now in its fifth season, having wrapped its landmark 100th episode. In the take-no-prisoners landscape of today’s prime-time battlefield, that is a milestone worth celebrating - and while he has departed his East Coast stomping grounds for the more showbiz-friendly climes of Tinseltown, Kevin James remains acutely aware of the fortune that has smiled down upon him.

Much good karma was evident early on, when his father, an insurance agent, and mother, a housewife with a succession of odd jobs, didn’t disown him after he followed his older brother Gary into the trenches of full-time comedy. Gary, who uses the stage name Gary Valentine and now has a recurring role on “King,” was an inspiration for Kevin, himself a comedic late-bloomer.

“I really wasn’t a class clown,” James reveals during a break from the show’s rigorous shooting schedule. “I was funny with my friends, but breaking up the whole classroom just wasn’t me. Then I took a public speaking class in college and managed to make the class laugh a little bit. From there, I tried out for a community theatre play, joined an improv group... it all started opening up. My brother was always a little more outgoing, more wild. He’d been doing stand-up for a year, and I just followed suit.” And if you can imagine a parent’s reaction to one child declaring that he intends to earn a living telling jokes in nightclubs, try to imagine it times two. “Yeah, that was tough,” James says with a chuckle. “When I left college after three years and said, ‘I think I want to be a comic now,’ I don’t think they stopped worrying until last year. They were always supportive, but I’m sure they were biting their knuckles behind the door the whole time.”