Jonn Stepp: Comedy Renaissance Man
Six months have passed since Vegas comedian Jonn Stepp died "naturally" of Cardiomyopathy, as determined by February autopsy results. Here is his long-overdue obituary.
On November 26, local comedian Jonn Stepp was visiting family in Wellington, Florida, over the Thanksgiving holiday. The morning he and his wife, Laysi, were scheduled to depart, he began gasping for air. “I woke up and saw that his color was a little off,” Laysi recalls. “I asked him if he was okay, and I just saw him take his last breath right in front of me. I ran and called 911 and did CPR, but he never came back.”
Stepp was 38 years old.
Born an only child in Ashtabula, Ohio, Stepp grew up in West Palm Beach, Florida. He began his career as a model/actor at age 10 before studying stage acting through his teenage years. Stepp won the annual Laff Lines stand-up competition in Palm Beach Gardens after graduating high school; it was the first time he had ever stepped on a comedy-club stage.
After working as the in-house emcee and stage manager of Giggles Comedy Club in Daytona Beach, Stepp became a road comic, serving as a middle act before eventually headlining clubs across the country. He moved to Las Vegas in July of 1995, where he performed weekly with his best friend Ron Mohl at the now-defunct Bourbon Street casino as a two-person comedy/music team.
“A lot of it was making fun of himself, but unlike a lot of comedians, that’s how he really was offstage,” Mohl recalls. “I played the naïve guy, and he wasn’t he straight man per say, but the more serious, ‘You idiot’ kind of guy. We played off of each other really well; I would be the Abbott to his Costello. But he never wanted to see himself as a straight man.”
The pair also performed at the Debbie Reynolds Hotel and Casino and at the Riviera for then-Entertainment Director Steve Schirripa. When performing stand-up on his own, Stepp was known for making up characters and performing dead-on impersonations. “He could do any cartoon character you can think of,” says Mohl.
Stepp was director of both the Mirthquake improv troupe and the Fitzgeralds Hotel and Casino’s Sin City Players. He had appeared on Comedy Central’s Travel Sick and Comic Remix, was the head writer/performer for NBC’s Laugh Attack! and had written several commercial, radio and television-pilot scripts. A karaoke enthusiast, Stepp had recently completed a film script in which he and Vegas-based entertainer S. Frank Stringham portrayed “two idiot brothers who perform karaoke songs at functions like funerals, weddings, bar mitzvahs, etc…. only changing the words of the karaoke songs to fit the occasion.”
“Jonn Stepp is (I’m having a hard time saying “was” as of yet) a talented, funny, and quick-witted individual who blessed the lives of those around him with smiles and laughter,” Stringham posted in a blog entry dated November 27. “He could make people laugh in any situation with the use of his humor, his celebrity impressions, and his big heart! He was a funny stand-up comedian, an improv aficionado, a music lover, a great husband, a dedicated father, and a faithful friend… He put his whole heart into everything that he did.”
Stepp, who exercised regularly, had no history of lung ailments or drug use. An autopsy report will be released sometime in January, says Laysi Stepp. “The emergency team did a great job. They tried to bring him back, but he never responded. He was sick with a cold, but nothing was out of the ordinary.”
“He always wanted to do standup, and then write. He was also a cartoonist,” says Mohl. “He was kind of a Renaissance guy, where he would do a little bit of everything really well…. He always stayed on course. Some might see that as strong-headed, but he had a set of goals in a chaotic world of distractions.”
Stepp is survived by his wife and a 7-year-old daughter from a previous marriage.