The tips of his cute cherub curls are still California blond, but he’s not wearing the cool white cowboy hat, so chances are you won’t recognize him, with or without his American Express card. His T-shirt isn’t white, it’s navy blue and it’s emblazoned with the words “I Had an Average Time at Adam’s Bar Mitzvah.”

It’s Nick Kroll – not Andy’s Mojo, the guy from September’s  U.S. Open commercials with tennis star Andrew Roddick that made Kroll as famous as Wimbledon.

As Kroll bops down the steps that lead to Danal, the charming French restaurant near Manhattan’s Union Square that’s about the size of the black and white cat that prowls and purrs the place, he flips off his silver iPod earplugs before he even sits down at the bistro table and apologizes. Profusely. And he doesn’t really have to. He’s late, only by a couple of minutes and only because the voiceover he was doing for a Burger King radio commercial took longer than he was told.

OK, if you want to get technical, he wasn’t really late. “I’m a Gemini. The guy you’re talking to now is the late twin,” he jokes. “The other twin was here an hour early.”

If you missed his Mojo spots – Is there anybody out there who didn’t see them? – you’ve probably seen Kroll’s face pop up on the tube in any

And then there’s his first book, “Bar Mitzvah Disco,” that he wrote with Roger Bennett and Jules Shell. It is, perhaps, Kroll’s most tangible punch line; after all, it started out as a joke and turned into a page-turning gag. The three friends cracked up while they were looking through old bar mitzvah photos and decided to post a couple on the Internet. (Andy’s Mojo must really have worked because Kroll, a buff boy next door, says that at 13, when he became a man, “I was like 4 10 with big tortoiseshell glasses. I looked unquestionably dorky, but I always thought I was cool. I think that when most people met me they thought, ‘Who’s the tiny, little Jew?”)

Although their experiences were different – Bennett is from England, Shell is from Ohio and Kroll grew up in Westchester County – they found that they shared universal memories of the experience that ushered them into the world of grown-ups. “Within a week, it got spread all over the Internet, and we had hundreds of thousands of hits,” he says. “And people started e-mailing us – ‘How can we get you our pictures, how can we tell you our stories?’”

There was, for instance, the girl who rode into her bas mitzvah astride a live elephant and the young boy who posed for a portrait draped across the laps of several girls old enough to, well, let’s just say they were too old for him. There were photos of kids leaning on leafy trees and standing by fluffy little dogs. There were tales of smoke machines and money machines and of making out and of coming out to Madonna tunes (don’t ask). There were the memories of Coke and Pepsi and, of course, the limbo. And there were mariachi bands dressed in red ruffled shirts, cakes shaped like rock guitars, live snakes that slithered on tables while guests were on safari and kids who wore California Raisins outfits. Oh, yes, don’t forget religion, just forget the Hebrew as quickly as you publicly pronounce it for the first and last time of your life.

“We realized that the bar mitzvah is a prism through which to view American culture and adolescence, changes in family structure and all these things that are incredibly rich, and yet the photos are still hilarious to look at,” Kroll says.

Soon the trio had enlisted a variety of people – writers  comedians, DJs, magazine editors, TV producers, critics, including Jonathan Safran Foer, AJ Jacobs and Sarah Silverman – who put the experience of as Kroll says, “keeping up with the Kleinbergs,” in perspective.

As for Kroll, “I didn’t have a good time, I didn’t have a fun experience at my bar mitzvah. I was very involved in the planning process with my mom. I felt like a party planner or publicist who spends months and months getting it ready and they think when they get to the party, it’s going to be so much fun, but in reality they are still worried about seating and that the pigs in a blanket are coming out on time. All these things that a 13-year-old doesn’t normally think about. In a way, it’s all part of becoming an adult.”

If Kroll carried the weight of the world on his shoulders during his 200-guest bar mitzvah, it may have been because he chose a world theme. “There were globes on the tables and flags hanging from the ceiling, and everybody got a pocket atlas that told you which table – say Venezuela – to go to.  I was like a mini Kofi Annan minus the oil-for-food scandal.”

Still in all, it was a time he, and the other members of his generation, will never forget. “The ‘us’ now are finally ready to take a look at the ‘us’ then.”

Although “Bar Mitzvah Disco” was written with 20somethings and 30somethings in mind, Kroll was amazed to find that parents are getting a kick out of it, too. “This book would not have been possible without Jewish mothers of America letting us in,” he says. “They are gatekeepers to the stories, the pictures, they are the ones who watch over those albums more fastidiously than the guards at Buckingham Palace.”

Even though it pokes fun, “Bar Mitzvah Disco” is all in good fun. “A little-known fact about the bar/bat mitzvah is that they oftentimes involve a religious ceremony,” Kroll deadpans. “Our goal is not to chastise the American Jewish community for what it did or what it does. Our goal was to see what this says about us, who we are, who we were and what it says about who we’ll become. You learn more about yourself in the present and who you’ll be in the future by who you were in the past. Especially since a lot of the people in the book are now of the age where they will be planning bar mitzvahs for their kids.”

Although Kroll doesn’t have any children, he’s planning a big bar mitzvah – for the book. “I feel like a proud parent,” he says, adding that he, in the guise of bar mitzvah entertainer Enrique Goldfarb, northern New Jersey’s No. 3 Bar Mitzvah entertainer, is going to take his act on the road. “We want people to throw their own bar mitzvahs, too, and Enrique will fly out to wherever they are. The book was written about Jews, but it’s as much about American culture … it’s about getting back to that seventh-grade slow dance to ‘Lady in Red’ or ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ We all remember that.”

All kidding aside, the acting bug bit Kroll, who is 27, very early. “I was the pharaoh in the second-grade version of the exodus from Egypt-Passover play,” he says and grins.

In was in college – he graduated from Georgetown University with a major in history and a minor in art and Spanish  – that he got caught up in comedy. “I love history because history is about stories,” he says, adding that he always knew he wasn’t going into the family business, the risk-consulting company Kroll Inc. “It’s how we perceive the world now or how we perceive the world then.”

While he was touring around the country after graduation, trying to figure out where he wanted to live, he had his “ah-ha” moment. “I started having dreams when I was asleep at night of hanging out with Mel Brooks and Jon Stewart. And it was after one of those dreams when I woke up and said, ‘I have to give this a shot.’  What it came down to for me was that regret was a much more powerful emotion than rejection in that if I never gave it a shot, then I think I would be kicking myself the rest of my life, and if I found that I wasn’t good enough to do it, then so be it. The idea of never knowing was a much more gnawing emotion.”

He began training at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, the improv school where many “Saturday Night Live” stars, as well as the talent from Conan O’Brien and “The Daily Show,” found their funny bones. “Comedy and writing never felt like work to me,” he says. “It was stuff that I would turn down anything else to do.”

And then he found himself on the stand-up circuit. “My comedy is somewhere between the everyday and the profane and is vaguely subversive,” he says, adding that Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and Jon Stewart are major influences.

When he’s not looking through his bar mitzvah photos, Kroll pictures himself writing and performing in his own TV shows and films. “That’s the end goal,” he says.

Until then, he’s happy playing Andy’s Mojo. “I was always curious to know what it was like to be a blonde, and now I know,” he says, adding that he’s dying to dye it back to black. “I did have more fun, but I don’t think it’s related to the blond hair.”

That Andy’s Mojo, even though short-lived, really allowed Kroll to get around. Among other things, he got to dance across the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn with 200 extras behind him, and he did a gig at the Blue Note with some famous jazz musicians.

“I can’t believe this is my job,” he says. “I’m having just a tad too much fun doing this.”

Suddenly, his cell phone rings. Kroll, not Andy’s Mojo, answers, saying, “Sorry, I have to get this. It may be my mom.”

It’s been a long, late lunch, and early tomorrow Kroll has to get on a plane for Argentina, where he’s shooting a commercial for Verizon.

When it comes time to pay the waitress for the soup and sandwich, Kroll pulls out an American Express card. In the dim light of Danal, it’s impossible to make out the cardholder’s name – Is it Andrew Roddick? Andy’s Mojo? Or Nick Kroll?

It doesn’t matter; Kroll ends up paying the check for his soup and sandwich luncheon special with cash.