Comic Steve Rannazzisi says his 9/11 lie ‘just slipped out ... I’m ashamed of what I did’

Steve Rannazzisi, the comic whose life spun out last month after a lie he’d told about 9/11 was uncovered by a reporter, is trying to explain how the lie came about and apologize again to the people he says were “truly affected.”

The star of FXX’s “The League” told Howard Stern on Tuesday that the lie “just slipped out” in conversation shortly after he and his wife moved to L.A. from New York in late 2001, and then he didn’t know how to fix it.

“It’s as simple as sitting at the Comedy Store,” Rannazzisi said, “and everyone’s like, ‘Hey, you’re from New York. Were you just there? You were around?’ Yeah, I was downtown. ‘You worked there?’ Yeah, I did.”

Once that line was crossed, he said, “You have like 15 seconds, I think, to kind of go, hold on, I’m sorry, that’s not true. And if you pass that 15 seconds ... it becomes a thing where now I have to be the guy who’s very strange and weird and says that I just lied about 9/11.”

(Rannazzisi said he actually was downtown on 9/11, just not in one of the towers, and like many others, had walked home over the Brooklyn Bridge.)

He’s been working with a therapist, he said, and is “starting to figure out more about myself, codependency and wanting people to like me and to make people happy. That’s a big thing.”

In hindsight, he wishes he’d been able to say to himself at the time, take a breath, relax, people are going to like you and understand you when they get to know you, and that he’d simply taken it back.

Even so, over the years, when he was living with the lie and trying to play it down whenever it came up, he and his wife didn’t think it would be any sort of scandal.

“My sister’s a special-ed teacher, my brother’s a Roman Catholic priest, and I tell ... jokes for a living. I don’t know how important I am. Even when this was happening, my wife was like, ‘I don’t even know if anyone’s ever going to notice this. You’re not famous. No one knows really who you are.’”

The story came out after a New York Times reporter who was doing a feature on Rannazzisi, who had a comedy special coming out that week, called him and said hey, call me back. The father of two handed the call off to his publicist, who called him back to say the reporter had different versions of the 9/11 story and was wondering about the truth. And that was it -- busted.

“The relief is that I don’t have to live with the lie anymore,” Rannazzisi said. “But it does come with a lot of baggage and a lot of feelings of embarrassment and being ashamed and going through that process. ... I’m ashamed of what I did. I’m ashamed of telling that lie, that horrible, immature lie, that’s what I’m ashamed of.” Still, he said, he also knows he’s not a liar by nature.

“This is not going to make everybody happy. Nothing I say is going to.”

Rannazzisi said he reached out to the Stern show because he knew the deejay had been on the air during the attacks and had an audience that was very affected, and those were exactly the people he wanted to get right by.

“The guy that writes how I should kill myself and I should get my kids and we should burn alive, in Iowa, behind a computer somewhere -- I apologized, I said I was sorry. That guy I don’t owe any more to. But to the people who were truly affected ... “

Rannazzisi said he intends to get back on the stand-up stage again, eventually, but isn’t sure this episode in his life will make it into his material.

“I’m expecting some people who will heckle,” he told Stern, “... and I’ll deal with that when it comes.”

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