Dan Bialek vs. America: I'm Quitting In Order To Begin

This past Sunday night I was supposed to be at a military base 40 miles outside Tacoma, Washington doing comedy shows for 3,500 Army demolition personnel who ship out to Iraq next week. However, the weather over the weekend conspired against me placing most of that base and good portion of the Interstate 5 freeway under 10 to 15 feet of rain water. This event effectively canceled the first and inaugural stop of the Dan Vs. America comedy tour and cost me about $1,000 in the process.

Since I was stuck here in Los Angeles, I went out on Sunday night and performed at a show in the haunted basement of a Ramada Inn in Koreatown, across the street from a porno book shop. On my way to the show, driving down Sunset Boulevard, I passed the Laugh Factory and read this on its marquee:



Some jagoff had gone and done 7 hours of standup in a row on New Year’s Day, thus “breaking” the endurance record for any audience being willing to sit through 6+ hours too much of mind-numbingly shitty comedy.

Congratulations, Laugh Factory. Congratulations, So-And-So. You are the King and Queen of mediocre, strip-mall-friendly standup comedy. Please don’t go breaking your necks trying to suck your own dicks while congratulating yourselves.

Nobody on the planet needs to be doing 7 hours of comedy at one time. Let alone subject an audience to 420 minutes of their ramblings about eating pistachio nuts off of the tip of their boner or how awesome taking a dump while holding hands with a monkey would be. It’s just pointless and pathetic. I can only imagine what hours four through seven were like.

Hour Four: Comedian pulls out a crumpled piece of notebook paper, begins reciting his 8th grade book report on "The Red Badge of Courage," stops halfway through, admits that it isn’t very good and that he probably deserved the C-.

Hour Five: Comedian brings 8-year-old Asian girl on stage, proceeds to light and then extinguish an entire carton of Pall Mall cigarettes on her bare hands and arms while shrieking, “Your flesh will burn because I cannot feel!”

Hour Six: Comedian stands atop a 3-foot cedar stool, removes his pants and underwear, places entire microphone up his anus, removes it and scrawls, “LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME,” across his bare chest in his own feces and intestinal viscera.

Hour Seven: The show ends, audience leaves pleased that they saw someone “from the teevee” and can’t wait to stand in line tomorrow morning in hopes of getting chosen to be a contestant on The Price Is Right.

The fact that a club owner would let a comedian do that much time and bump probably 10 to 12 other comics in the process is ridiculous. It’s sad and frustrating to see the art form of standup comedy turned into a tantric, circus sideshow endurance competition by megalomaniacal “rock star” comics and the greedy club owners, agents and managers who encourage and enable them.

After doing standup in Los Angeles pretty much every night for the last 5 and a half years, I can honestly say that I’ve had enough of trying to fit myself into the useless machine that is the comedy “industry” and that I want no part or involvement with it whatsoever. Why would I?

A vast majority of the comedy club shows in town are “independently produced” (i.e. “bringer”) shows or theme nights. Instead of going out and finding and developing talented comedians with unique voices and something to offer mankind, these club owners turn over their stages and showrooms almost every night of the week to whatever self-promoting snake oil salesman or woman can get the most asses into seats.

These producers would make great Amway salespeople, but as comedians they’re about as funny as a room temperature corn and diarrhea smoothie.

I’m not saying it’s not a good model for making money, but I do believe that it devalues standup comedy in the eyes of the average live audience member. What would you think if you went to a comedy club on Friday night and paid $15 or $20 to get in, plus paid another $20 to meet the two-drink minimum, plus another $5 for parking just to sit through two-and-a-half hours of awful comedy in order to see your friend from work do 6-minutes at the very end of the show because he or she didn’t bring enough people to fulfill the show producer’s audience requirement? Unfortunately that’s what a lot of people here in Los Angeles and other parts of the country think a live standup comedy show is.

Or it’s a famous jackass trying to push the limits of Ed Hardy t-shirt comedy past the seven-hour mark. Either way, this isn’t what I signed on for when I decided to become a standup comedian. And I’m sick of it.

And with that I’d like to say farewell to performing standup in comedy clubs for at least the next six months.

Beginning this Friday, January 11th at the Catalyst Club in Santa Cruz, California, I will embark on my own independent standup comedy tour and do shows in every type of venue and non-venue known to man - except for standup comedy clubs.**

I’m having my Myspace friends and fans pick the cities and venues that they want me to perform at, booking the places and then driving out to these venues and putting on shows. I’m bringing comedians out on tour with me who are my friends and who I believe are truly funny, not talentless morons who are God awful, but who can get me a seven-minute spot at the Ice House in return.

I’m sick of letting deluded wannabe kingmaker dolts and soulless fuck-their-own-mother’s-eye-socket-to-get-ahead Emerson College comedy executive cuntrags determine my fate as a performer and the direction of the one thing in the universe that I truly love.

And, no, I don’t think I’m Comedy Jesus. And, no, I don’t even think I’m all that funny. And, yes, I got the idea of doing my own independent tour and saying fuck the established comedy club system from a blog that comedian Doug Stanhope wrote a year or two ago that I still have yet to even read in its entirety.

I’m probably not talented enough to pull this thing off. But at least I’m trying. Think about that the next time you’re sitting in the audience or standing on the back wall of your favorite comedy club asking yourself, “Why is the club letting this idiot who keeps running around yelling hackneyed, quasi-inflammatory clichés in a retard voice do so much time? He hasn’t said anything funny in the last hour. I can’t believe I see his face so much on the comedy channel.”

Hopefully I’ll be performing in a gun range in Dallas or a punk rock bar in Florida. Far away from the Tila-Tequila-with-a-dick comedy record breakers and the self proclaimed edgy, race-baiting fucktards who claim to be just saying what everyone else is thinking.

I’ll be documenting all of my triumphs and travails here in this column every two weeks and on my website danvsamerica.com. Like I said in the beginning of this rambling Unabomber manifesto of a comedy blog entry, I’ve already lost $1,000 and had my first series of shows canceled by an act of God. I’m sure things can only get weirder and more fucked up from here.

But I’d rather go broke and be looked upon as failure than as just another comic who tried to fit themselves into a machine that was broken, polluted and being steered by the blind and stupid.


**I’ll still be performing at the Comedy Store here in Hollywood when I’m in town, because it is my home and I don’t consider it a comedy club so much as a direct portal to hell. If you don’t believe me, read Marc Maron’s book The Jerusalem Syndrome. Even if you do believe me, pick up a copy anyway. It’s a great fucking book.

Dan Bialek can be contacted at Myspace.com/DanBialek. To find out more about the Dan vs. America tour, go to DanvsAmerica.com. His column runs every other Tuesday.

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