Lucie Pohl, The Immigrant Guru

Lucie Pohl first translated German to English when her father, Klaus Pohl, was robbed at gunpoint.

“My husband has been raped!” Sanda Weigl, Pohl’s mother, cried to 911.

“Mom, mom! It’s robbed, not raped!” Pohl, then eight-years-old, told her mother.

The family had moved to New York a short time before, and the realities of immigrant life were very real for Pohl and the rest of her family. Her father is a German playwright and actor, and her mother is a Romanian theater director and singer.

Today, 31 years later, Pohl integrates these experiences into her sets as a comic.

Take the measly crowd that she surveyed on Wednesday, March 20th at St. Marks Comedy Club. She asked where the group was from. Nigeria, Austria, Maryland, they replied.

“I’m a German — and that normally gets the group going,” she said, before clarifying: “Well, the Aryan group.”

At the age of three, Pohl sat off-stage while her father acted as one of the first German drag queens. It was inspirations like this one that led Pohl to participate in drama groups upon arriving in the U.S.

Believing that the more serious types of acting were her speed, comedy didn’t come until later.

“I was always funny, but I took it for granted,” she told me. “I think, for a long time, I thought I had to be a dramatic actress to be serious.”

Drawn in by free college tuition, she moved back to Germany at the age of 18. While Pohl might have hoped that moving back would feel like coming home, she experienced something that many immigrants know to be true: her old home no longer felt like home.

Instead, she felt like an outsider, particularly as her maternal family’s experience in the Holocaust colored her perception of Germany.

“I felt like an alien there. I felt like an outsider. I didn’t feel German at all,” she told me.

She began voice-acting to pay the bills — including voicing Khloe Kardashian…