He is best known for his six-and-a-half-year stint as the flamboyant film critic on the Emmy Award-winning The Daily Show and in five half-hour Out at the Movies Oscar specials for Comedy Central. The New York Times declared, “His campy and often catty film reviews are among the funniest things on television.” His TV appearances include 40 episodes of the Game Show Network’s 2006 update of I’ve Got a Secret and such programs as CNN’s Showbiz Tonight, NBC’s Dateline, VH1’s The List with Ashton Kutcher, The E! True Hollywood Story, and Bravo Profiles. Additional credits include Style’s Craft Corner Death Match, Comedy Central’s Win Ben Stein’s Money, and the Fine Living Channel’s A Swell Holiday, playing Santa Claus.
A consummate collector, DeCaro is featured in the often repeated PBS film A Flea Market Documentary. His extensive collection of Batman memorabilia was spotlighted in Cargo magazine and on the website, www.collectorsquest.com.
As a stand-up comedian, DeCaro is a frequent host of Homo Comicus at Gotham Comedy Club in New York City. He has shared his hilarious observations in clubs and cabarets, and has performed before corporate and college audiences.
Acting work includes the radio play version of Charles Busch’s Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, the hilarious Showgirls: The Best Movie Ever Made Ever! at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater (New York and Los Angeles), the Tweed Fractured Classicks take on Rosemary’s Baby at the Angel Orensanz Theater, and, along with Cynthia Nixon and Caroline Rhea, The Drama Dept. Thanksgiving Special at the Lucille Lortel Theater. He and Nixon later teamed with Isaac Mizrahi for that company’s staged reading of the period comedy Personal Appearance. He is also a frequent panelist on “What’s My Line? Live on Stage,” at theatres in both New York and Los Angeles.
A sometime journalist and former fashion editor, DeCaro occasionally writes offbeat DVD reviews for The New York Times. Previously, he wrote the funny-but-chic biweekly column “Style Over Substance” for that esteemed newspaper. From 1993-95, he wrote the groundbreaking New York Newsday column “Frank’s Place,” the first gay humor column to appear in a mainstream daily newspaper. The New York Press named it “Manhattan’s Best Weekly Column” of 1994.
Other writing credits include The New York Times Magazine, Martha Stewart Living, Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek, Vogue, USA Weekend, Metropolitan Home, In Style, Time Out New York, and the Advocate. He also has put words in David Bowie’s mouth as a writer of the Vogue VH1 Fashion Awards 2000, and did the same for Beyoncé at the MTV Video Music Awards 2001.
Born in Manhattan and raised in New Jersey, DeCaro is the author of A Boy Named Phyllis: A Suburban Memoir, a 1996 Viking title which Vanity Fair called “hilarious” and the Advocate said paved the way for David Sedaris’ mega-success. DeCaro’s comic essays are included in Out, Loud, & Laughing, Out in All Directions, How to Live a Sitcom Life, Promotion in the Advertising Environment, and, most recently, The Q Guide to the Golden Girls. His coffee table biography Unmistakably Mackie: The Fashion and Fantasy of Bob Mackie got a B+in Entertainment Weekly.
A graduate of Northwestern University, he lives in New York City and suburban New Jersey with his partner of more than twelve years author Jim Colucci, and their very funny Boston terrier Herman.
Photo by Walter McBride/ Retna Ltd.
