steve mazan

Where does time go is the one question that even Alex Trebek, sometimes more condescending know-it-all than Jeopardy! answer man, can’t explain. Not surprising, because we tend to forget that time flies…without layovers and, more important, without a flight plan.

Even those lucky humans with jet packs cannot outrace time. Anyway, comedian Steve Mazan teaches us that urgency, way more than rocket fuel, may be the greatest catalyst of all in the race against time, a lifelong competition that people consider more of a marathon than a sprint, until time catches up to them, typically with disbelief and, worse, without warning.

His inspiring lesson about the power of perseverance culminates in New York City on Sept. 4 with the airing of his appearance on the Late Show With David Letterman. After more than four years of essentially auditioning for the show at comedy venues nationwide and overseas (he has performed for U.S. troops seven times in Iraq and Afghanistan) and through performances on the 20 DVDs he has sent to Letterman’s booker, Eddie Brill, over time, Mazan flew about five hours from California to New York on Aug. 30 to record one five-minute joke at the Ed Sullivan Theater on Aug. 31, fulfilling a dream that began in 2005 after his startling cancer diagnosis.

He missed his original deadline (by more than three years), “but obviously dreams you give extensions to, you make exceptions,” Mazan, a native Chicagoan, says from Los Angeles, his home base now.

Until February or March 2005 (unlike many other cancer patients and survivors, he does not recall his exact D-Day), Mazan, 37 and a comedian for 10 years now, had been climbing steadily toward Mt. Letterman, what he and multitudes of other contemporary comedians consider the summit of success. “I always thought it would happen,” he says confidently, not vainly, “but I wasn’t pursuing it. I was doing my sets, and getting noticed and figured at some point that I’d run into the right people. I wasn’t rushing it or anything.”