Laugh Lines: Conversations With Comedians (51 page)

Corey: Was this your concept, to do an all-nighter kind of thing?

Dave: Mm-hmm.

Corey: Did it develop through your years on the road? Are you normally a night owl?

Dave: Yes, you know you go into different towns and do your set, and you wander around a little bit. I have trouble sleeping anyway. I figured if we incorporated the drinking thing, the club aspect, like different bars: the gay bar, the fetish club or whatever, then the guys working late at night, like the guy working in a sewage treatment plant. I figured that would be a cool thing. I had the basic idea, but Nick McKinney, who is the executive producer of the show, got the flow and made it move in a certain way.

Corey: I’ve seen the show many times and when you’re out and about, how many people are on the crew?

Dave: The people who are on every shoot are the producers and the cameraman, and then we use local folks for like PAs to help move equipment and lights. If we didn’t have that, you wouldn’t see anything.

Corey: Yeah, but there’s only a few people with you when you go to these different places.

Dave: Compared to like a regular type of shoot, it’s bare bones.

Corey: How do you pick the spots you’re going to hit when you pick a particular city?

Dave: When we started out it was just places I was doing stand-up, where I liked the club. I liked the town, like San Francisco and Houston. Then we picked some places we thought would be good, like New Orleans, as a late-night town. This season we’re trying to do big cities but also places like Boise, Idaho, another place I’ve done stand-up and had fun.

Corey: What is there to do late night in Boise?

Dave: People often say that, ‘What’s there to do in Boise?’, but each town kind of has its own night scene. The things that are consistent in every town, there’s usually a strip where there’s bars and dance clubs and after last call, drunk people walking home from those places. We always try to go to that area to see people out on the street. Boise, Idaho, I think is one of our best shows. We went to a gay fetish club. We shot night skeet shooting with the Boise Gun Club, real fun guys. There’s Bogus Mountain there, so we did night skiing.

Corey: Once you pick a city, do you have researchers figure out where to go?

Dave: Yeah, we do. We don’t do anything where you’d have like Tom Green go where we’re not invited. On the street if you don’t want to talk to us, I don’t harangue you, we move on. Unless we’re invited in, we won’t go.

Corey: I would imagine even to take cameras into strip clubs, you have to have permission.

Dave: Yeah, and if there’s people who don’t want to be on camera, well, we have to get a release. For Comedy Central, for legal, you have to get every person to sign a release. People have more than enough chances to say, ‘I don’t want to do this.’

Corey: Because a lot of this is at night and at bars, have you had any interesting run-ins with drunks?

Dave: Yeah. On a whole, people are pretty cool with us in bars. They’ll buy me a drink; I’ll but them a drink. It’s my own money, by the way. We’re buying each other drinks and talking. I’m not much of an interviewer. I’m a little better than those Kid’s World kids. ‘Do you like, um, drinking?’ Then if there’s some really interesting people, we’ll be like, ‘Are you dating?’ or whatever. Then there’s occasionally some angry drunks, and I’ve been there many, many times, so I try and handle it in a cool way. We don’t incite them to be drunk and angry. So we’ll say, ‘Sorry’ and move on to the next couple. The annoying thing with drunks is when people get past tipsy, to drunk to curious. We’ll be doing something in a bar that has nothing to do with other people and they’ll come down and start talking to you. And I’ll be like, ‘I’d like to talk to you, but can you wait for us to say this one thing first?’ I’ll have to say like one word for editing or whatever, and they’ll just come in and ask you a million questions. And you ask them to wait one minute, and they get all upset, like they have an agenda or something.

Corey: Right. Is this a one-night deal in each town?

Dave: No, because of the way things are, like Atlanta it’s a big driving town—or Tempe, Arizona—we usually need more than one night for each place. You’ve got to move all the equipment and crew from place to place, and that takes like 30-40 minutes to set up in each place. We lose a lot of good time. Our show is like drink to last call and then do other stuff. We would lose half the night just getting there. I have to do stand-up, too, so that’s another set up. It’s not all in one night, but it’s all stuff that could happen in one night.

Corey: Are you a pretty patient person with all the set up?

Dave: We really just shoot and scoot as they say. Anything that’s not needed is not there. We’ve got a sound guy, a light guy, the camera and a couple producers; that’s it.

Corey: As you’re moving around all the time; is there even an opportunity for you to get tipsy?

Dave: I do get drunk. The worst thing is it’s a weird drunk. I’ll get drunk from people buying me shots or whatever. Then I’ll have to get sober. So when we eat, I’m pounding the coffee and a cheeseburger. Pound it, get it in.

Corey: You are hitting some late-night eateries as well.

Dave: Yeah, in Chicago, we hit the Weiner Circle. That’s something that’s really happening. If you go there tonight, it will be the same way.

Corey: Is it tougher as you’ve been doing the show and people know it? Do they want to do something wacky to get on it?

Dave: If they’ve seen the show, they know that stuff doesn’t get in. We haven’t seen that many fights. We’ve been like a block away. Wacky and wild, no, people want to talk to us and ask about the show. If the camera is on, and they start talking about the show, they’re not gonna get on. Who wants to see a drunk guy talking about the show he’s on? I guess other shows would do that, like a pat on the back. We don’t do that. We want straight drinking talk.

Corey: Where are you from originally?

Dave: I’m from Long Island.

Corey: Have you thought about doing a show with what you used to do all night?

Dave: What, masturbating? I don’t think anyone’s ready for that.

Corey: Is there a lot of stuff you haven’t been able to show?

Dave: Yeah, it’s Comedy Central so there’s standards and practices. It’s not HBO, so we can’t show nudity, but we block it out. There’s definitely things we don’t show, like sick sexual stuff at fetish clubs. We’ll go to the club and say ‘Where can we shoot?’ and the club owner will say, ‘These people don’t want to be on camera,’ so we’ll have to shoot the other way. And like when we went to the Miami swinger’s club, that’s a real club so we couldn’t show people having sex.

Corey: I imagine you’re not shy about these things.

Dave: No, they all blend together. I think it’s cool that they’re going on. People seem friendly and nice; they’re just like anyone else.

Corey: Are you finding material for your act as you’re on the road?

Dave: It’s getting kind of thin there, Corey. Running out of jokes.

Corey: Have you had any embarrassing moments since filming?

Dave: For me?

Corey: Yeah.

Dave: I don’t know. If you’ve seen the show they’ll put in where I mess up and stuff. I’m such a C-level host. I’m not really a host, like a Jules Asner type. I’m more of an Ed Asner. There’s always something like, ‘Oh no I didn’t do that.’

Corey: Is that you singing the theme song?

Dave: Yeah, it is.

Corey: Is there a title to it? Part of it is hard to understand.

Dave: It’s pretty straight ahead. I don’t even remember the words. I didn’t even want a song on the show. Of course it’s a great idea, because everyone loves the song. This guy, Bob Golden, came up with the music. People seem to like it. I don’t really remember all the words.

Corey: Were you more of a night owl before stand-up?

Dave: Yeah, and it would suck when I had day jobs because I would stay up all night and go to work all bleary-eyed and tired. When I started doing stand-up, it was great because it was at night and when I started making a living at it, it was great because I didn’t have to get up in the morning anymore. There were a couple of years there where I didn’t see the sun. The good times.

Corey: When you were growing up, were you into comedy albums?

Dave: Yeah, I really listened to George Carlin and Richard Pryor and as I got older, Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks. There’s not any good ones out there. I’m kinda hoping the Mitch Hedberg stuff will get into the Billboard charts. He really did put out a lot of good product. It would be a really good thing for his family and his fans to see that he’s living on through his material.

Corey: I don’t know when he came through here last if they were recording or not, but he was doing a lot of new stuff. It would be a shame if that stuff wasn’t saved somewhere. His two albums that he did put out were remarkable.

Dave: Yeah, I bet those two are selling like hot cakes, because when it happened it was such a shock, and I think people are trying to get a piece of it, what he left behind.

Corey: How has the atmosphere in the club been the last few years? Do people want to talk more during your set, or how has it been since you’ve become more known?

Dave: Evidently, there’s a group of people who have decided to devote their lives to wooing and shouting shit out. It’s their religion or whatever. The longer you do it, the harder it is to come up with new stuff, and then on top of that, when people know you from a certain thing, they expect it from you. I got some good fans, but there’s always one or two jokers in the crowd that want to be part of the show.

Corey: I noticed that a lot during the Mitch show, because a lot of his stuff was one-liners. People will yell out the line. You just heard it come out of your mouth. Are there bits of yours that people yell out?

Dave: Yeah, a lot of old material off ‘Skanks for the Memories.’ If I do it, they’ll laugh louder because they already know it, which is kind of sad.

Corey: You do a little sound effect, kind of like an exclamation point; do you know what I’m talking about?

Dave: Yeah, I do a lot of sound. People tell me I do a lot of hemming and hawing. A lot of that is just boredom. I get really bored. Sometimes when the crowd sucks, I do that a lot.

Corey: After all this time touring the country, what have you learned from drunk girls?

Dave Attell: Man to man? What have I learned from drunk girls? First of all, girls get super-sarcastic right before they pass out. When they get really sarcastic drunk, you know they’re about to pass out or hit you, I guess.

Corey: Saying sarcastic things to you?

Dave: Yeah, everything you say is like, ‘Oh reeally, you think I’m this,’ then they usually pass out.

Corey: And that tells you what?

Dave: That you should stop buying them drinks because you’re there. You hit pay dirt.

Corey: What would it take for you to quit drinking, stop smoking?

Dave: I definitely want to do one of those, but not on this tour, man. I want to live it up. Nobody gets healthy on tour. You never hear like Stone Temple Pilots, like, ‘That tour—really, look at my abs.’

Corey: Not the time to pick up a health regimen.

Dave: I guess later on after a rehab stint or something.

Corey: I heard you filmed a pilot for Fox. What’s that all about?

Dave: I think it’s all about cancelled. I don’t think it got on. I play a small part, a boss at a car dealership. It’s something totally different, which is what I wanted to do. It was cool. I worked with Brooke Shields. David Schwimmer was the director, and he was really cool to me, and I’m not just Hollywood saying that. He took me aside and said, ‘You can do this. Don’t let these real actors intimidate you.’