Away from court, this attorney is performing at comedy clubs and opening for Trevor Noah

For years, Vince Sicari led a double life.

Sicari drove from his Bergen law office to comedy clubs and acting auditions in New York City, often ducking into highway gas station bathrooms along the way to change out of his suit to something more casual, Superman-style.

Sicari largely kept his legal career separate from his life in comedy until 2013, when the state Supreme Court ruled he could not remain in his part time job as a municipal judge in South Hackensack while continuing to perform. The ruling and his choice of comedy over the court made national headlines.

Now, nearly a decade later, Sicari, 53, says he has no regrets. A River Edge resident, he is still making jokes onstage and pursuing his acting dreams, opening for Trevor Noah on tour and warming up the crowd at The Daily Show while maintaining his private law practice.

Motivation to moonlight

The Bergen native spent much of his childhood living in Hackensack with his parents and three older siblings above the family's bakery. “People knew me as the kid who grew up above the bakery,” Sicari says. “During the summers, my brothers, who were already working there, would wake me up at 6 a.m. to go on bread deliveries with them. I saw all of Bergen County from the back of a bread van delivering to delis and pizzerias.”

His parents, both Italian immigrants who came here not knowing a word of English, had a rule: the family spoke Italian at home, but not outside the house. “My first language was really Italian,” Sicari says. “English was something I got better with at school.”

When he was a teenager, the family moved to Paramus, where his parents had opened a deli. Sicari, who graduated from Paramus Catholic High School, went on to study accounting at Fordham University and got his law degree from New York Law School, all the while working at the deli on the weekends. “For us, work was just one of those things where you were helping the family,” he says. “We didn’t do the normal go-down-the-shore thing, we all helped out. We were around each other so much — we were a very tightknit group.”

Sicari became interested in law after he impressed a professor with his arguments during a moot court presentation at Fordham. But his passion from a young age was acting. At 13, he told his parents he wanted to be an actor, but they were not supportive. “We were Italian immigrants," Sicari says. "Hollywood for my parents was truly American and almost untouchable, in a way. It was glamour, and we’re kind of hard-working, blue collar people.”

He asked again at 15 and offered to pay for acting lessons through money he earned at the deli; again, they said no. After he graduated from law school, Sicari got up the nerve to take a comedy class that offered an opportunity for stage time at Carolines on Broadway.

His first time on stage came in 1997, at the age of 28. When the MC asked his name, Sicari, who was by now working for a criminal defense firm in Hackensack and was unsure how his boss or family would react to a second career in comedy, gave the name "Vince August," a combination of his first and middle names. “The last thing I wanted to do was let this get out — I thought, let me keep this under my hat for a while,” he says. “It was so important to me, I felt I needed to protect it.”

He began moonlighting as a comic after finishing his work at the office, performing anywhere he could, calling clubs for available spots and signing up for comedy contests. At 32, Sicari took his first acting class, got an agent, and began booking small parts, voice overs and radio spots.

But one night during a performance at Gotham Comedy Club, his double life was exposed when a superior court judge happened to recognize him. After four years of doing stand-up, Sicari finally told his parents and invited them to see his set — mostly self-deprecating jokes about growing up Catholic and Italian. “At that point I knew it was out of the bag, I had to come clean,” he says. “My dad was not impressed. He said: ‘You’re a lawyer — what are you doing?’”

But being honest was a relief, Sicari says. Keeping the two careers separate had been stressful. He had kept his comedy life from his colleagues, and his day job from people in the comedy world, who he worried would think he looked at it as a hobby. He grew tired of rushing into New York for auditions on his lunch break and searching for a place along the highway to change in and out of his two “uniforms,” so he left his job at a firm to open a private practice with more flexible hours.

Two types of performances

In other ways, the duality served him well. Rather than ruminating over whether he got a part or if a show went well, he’d be focused on getting back to his other career. “I was becoming more and more fearless on stage. Whether in front of a crowd or presenting cases to judges, I felt comfortable. Either way, it’s a performance, and you’re trying to sway people,” Sicari says.

He was surprised and humbled, he says, when in 2007 he was approached by the mayor of South Hackensack to become the township’s municipal court judge. “My parents were over the moon,” he says. “To them this was everything in life — a son who was a judge. And they wanted me to give up comedy more than ever.”

Before he was sworn in, Sicari checked with the Administrative Office of the Courts to make sure there wasn't a conflict. He was told it was not a problem, if he didn’t play a judge on television or give legal opinions as part of his act, he says. But a few years later he was told he would have to resign or quit doing comedy.

The issue reached the state Supreme Court, which argued in its 2013 decision that people may have a hard time separating Sicari the judge from his act, and in particular characters he played on an ABC hidden-camera show, What Would You Do?, that showed bystanders' reactions to homophobic, racist and immoral or illegal acts in public.

At that point, he had been doing standup for 15 years and was regularly warming up the Daily Show audience. “I had too much skin in the game to give it up,” he says. “You don’t know if your break is a mile down the road or an inch, but the second you stop moving, you’ll never reach it.”

Sicari’s parents were “crushed,” he says, but a few months later, he talked to his father, “a man of few words,” who told him “Well, now you can’t quit. You have to make it.” Just a month later, his father died. “For me, those words undid everything me and my dad went through,” he says. "I thought, I guess I'm in this thing for good."

After a few years of rebuilding his practice, Sicari is once again juggling comedy and his law career. In 2018, he became the regular warm up comic for The Daily Show, and the next year began opening for Trevor Noah on tour. This summer, he headlined shows in Florida and is in talks with a network for a reality show that would use his improv skills and legal background to discuss current events like celebrity divorces or Britney Spears and her conservatorship with a live audience.

“The one thing I’ve learned is to show up every day and give everything I have, whether I’m doing warm up, a comedy set, or closing a criminal defense case,” he says. “If it turns into something bigger, great, but at worst, I’m walking away giving my best effort.”

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Vince Sicari is an NJ attorney who also opens for Trevor Noah