Hey, everybody. Welcome to my guest tonight. I'm Jeff Revilla, your host.
I've got a great guest joining me from Boston. Actor,
writer, podcaster, Deadair Dennis Maler.
He's a podcaster, actor, comedian too. Tells you
what your favorite comics really do from Boston to backstage.
He's got the tea with a side of sass and a tech degree.
He's bold, he's brat, he's allergy free. Deadair
Dennis is the guest to see. So grab a seat, the
spotlight's bright. It's Jeffrey Villa and my guest tonight.
Now, that song picked up on one statistic about you that I always wanted to
ask you about because you. You brag about it on one of your accounts that
you're allergy free since, like, 1980. Is that still a true
statement? You know what? I guess I'm gonna have to spill that
true tea like the. The theme song said. Unfortunately, no, I am
not allergy free anymore. I like. All right, so the allergy free joke came from,
like, wanting to know or, like, being big into, like,
taglines and log lines and, like, marketing stuff like that.
Knowing that when I started doing comedy, one of my first early jokes was that
I'm terminally single because I offer nothing to the gene
pool to women. I am short, I'm fat, I'm bald, I have
glasses. I am all the traits that we as a society have deemed
is ineligible and open market for
people to make fun of. I. But the only thing I have to offer you
ladies for procreation is that your kid will not have hay fever
because of me. All right? I've been out of tree my whole Life. Born in
1981. 1981. One year before
the TV show Cheers. There's a fun fact for you. It was a
fact, but not fun. Anyway, and so I used to use
that tagline, and recently I found out.
I don't know. We haven't really quite considered this an allergy yet.
But I do have as what we're calling right now in the medical
industry a adverse reactions
to opiates. Yeah. So I am. I
live in Boston, but I'm originally from Baltimore, and I am apparently from
Baltimore, an allergic to heroin. That is as
absurd as being from Boston and allergic to racism because it's both their
chief main exports. Well, it shouldn't really limit your
dating pool. I think. I think many women would prefer
somebody who was allergic to heroin and obi. It might be a good one to
pass on. Right? Yeah, that's the thing. Your kid won't be
Lying in the back hour corner, corner of an alley,
turning tricks for drug money because of my gene pool.
And I mean, if they do, they'll probably get hives one time and stop. That's
how. It can't be that addicting. Yeah. No. And honestly,
do you know where this saved my life? Have you seen the TV show, the
Hulu TV show? Dopesick? I have not.
Dopesick stars Batman, Michael Keaton,
and a bunch of other actors who are all very good. I think when the
skarsgard Rosario Dawson, they're all in it. Oh, the.
The. The young girl who plays the, uh, lesbian coal miner daughter
person. She's absolutely fantastic. You'll recognize her from a bunch of stuff, but her name's
escaping me right now. But it's a movie. It's a dramatized
version of the oxy codeine
oxycontin epidemic in the early
2000s, late 90s, early 2000s, particularly in
Appalachia and, like, throughout rural countries. And it's an awesome
show. And it made me realize that right around that same time when Doctors were
pushing OxyContin on people and everybody, I was
given a pill bottle of 30 OxyContins from my
Dennis who pulled out a wisdom tooth. He was like, here, take
these. I took one. I still reeled in pain. I sold them on the streets
for 10 bucks a pop. Made. Made. What's that,
3 grand? 300 bucks? Yeah, I guess it's 300 bucks. Made.
300 bucks. And then was like, all right, cool. Done with it. Never had to
worry about, ever. Which I could have been a part of that opioid
epidemic of the early 2000s. I was right at the right age of that group
where I could have just pun pop it oxycontin for a wisdom tooth and then
become a one who is addicted,
inflicted with the addiction and ruined my entire life. But
luckily, that didn't happen. So thank you, my
adverse opioid reaction, for saving my life.
And to show you how much times have changed, I just had Achilles surgery. I
tore my Achilles tendon. They had to attach it back to my bone.
They gave me seven pills for, like, a major
surgery. You don't even get any
oxycontin anymore. Yeah, no. Well,
Dennis, thank you so much for joining me. We've met before on a. On a
trivia show I hosted. You were right there in the final running of
the three contestants. We had a great time. I was like, this is the perfect
show to reconnect with you and what we want to do
on this show is tell your story, tell your roots. How did you get into
comedy and radio and podcasting and, and see what's in the. What
lurks in your past that kind of cross paths with who you are today.
And we kind of want to find out, you know, who makes, what made you
who you are today. And you know, you mentioned already you're from Baltimore.
How long do you live in Baltimore for? I born and raised in Baltimore
county, right just outside of the city. But like living in the city and
back and forth, you know, just outside of city, an area called Dundalk.
If you're from the area, you know what that means. It is a working class,
mixed multi ethnic neighborhood of Baltimore that
I still go back to. And I will say
I enjoy. I know how other people won't, but it is. It was my
home for the Baltimore was my home for the first 31 years. And that's when
I moved to Boston. I've been to Boston. I've been living in Boston since
apparently I only live in cities with the letter B that begins their names.
Next I'm going to move to Boise and Poughkeepsie.
Yeah, we'll always have you here in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as well. Love to have you
up here. The. I will move the PA in a heartbeat
too. I do love me some PA and that's how you know I'm a true
Mid Atlantic person is because I called it pa, not Pennsylvania. It's only
DC or it's only dc, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware that calls it pa.
When I talk to other people, I was like, oh yeah, Philly, pa. And they're
like, what's that? Do you ever say dmv? Oh, yeah,
yeah. I worked in. So my first job foray into radio
was in D.C. washington, D.C. area. So I also
consider myself a DM, DC, MD, VA, DMV.
When I connect with people from those areas, I'm like, oh, I'm from the DMV
too. I mean I'm b. I like to say Baltimore is part of the dmv,
although it is its own entity of the dmv. Like
Northern Virginia is very much DC territory. Montgomery
county, moco, very much DC territory. Baltimore is not
DC territory, but Baltimore is very DC
adjacent. Like where there are very close brotherly like they're. They're
such brother sisters. They're such brotherly cities that they're basically
Irish twin brothers. Like, that's basically how they are. Like you.
It's really hard to live your life and not in Baltimore and not be
a person that has goes to DC
like you. We went there for concerts, we went there for shows,
plays, whatever, arts and culture. We had it in
Baltimore, but it was there in D.C. too. So for me, growing up, it was
commonplace to be able to leave your. Your neighborhood, leave your city, go to other
places and see things. Whereas that's not the culture here in Boston.
And it's very much been not the culture. And it's very weird. Like when I
first moved here, going on 12, 13 years now,
I would meet people and I'd ask them a question like, hey, which direction does
this train run? How do I get to this place? What? So you know, I
just moved there. And some like, oh, I just moved here too. I'm like, oh,
cool. Where'd you move from? They went Malden across town. I'm like,
I moved 400 miles like you moved four.
How do you not know how any of this works? What's going on? Why is
this so. Yeah, the 31. I left Baltimore.
But before we get into all that leaving, leaving,
bound more. The
foray into entertainment was. I was
born with what Kevin Pollock calls the hey, hey, look at
me disorder, where I just needed the attention. I was a
middle child, the youngest of three boys. I had one
younger sister. Everyone got more attention than me. I was already
small and runty anyway in by societal
society's standards. So I needed a lot of attention.
And one of those outlets was theater was doing plays and
stuff like that. And I was coming up in the 1990s,
1980s and 1990s. I'm going to keep referring to that last
century. Yeah, I'm gonna. Was where
technology was becoming more and more accessible. So video cameras, VHS
quarter stuff, My family, we didn't have any of that stuff, but other people did.
So I was able to. To get
my attention fixed through.
Through these means. And while also being a tech head, I wanted to
know more about those technologies. So as I was growing up
in high school, when they were like, oh, pick a career, pick a career. My
father was a construction worker and a criminal. But the. And
he ran numbers and sold drugs and he
pirated black box cable machines and
stole a whole truck of 7 up one time. Anyway, he
was. Was also construction. So I always enjoyed building.
So building led me into technology
and, and creative arts that way. And plus all at the same time
acting and performing and entertaining and making people laugh. And I grew up in the
comedy boom. So I saw standup comedy on TV every night and then all of
a sudden it disappeared. And then, you know, Came back in the late 90s. But
so I had all these things and I grew up in a world where they
kept telling us late Gen Xers that you can grow up to
be whatever you want. We had a, you know, supportive
group of parents that were like, you can grow up, you come whatever you want.
You want to become an artist? You become an artist. Like that day and age,
it was like, you need to grow up and great depress or boomers and you
need to get a job and be practical and start a family. That
kind of wasn't around when I was growing up. Like, you know, Reality
Bites, the movie starring Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawk had a. And Ben
Siller had a huge profound effect on me and my
ability to want to become someone working in the entertainment industry. And I always
saw the back side of entertainment. I always knew that
entertainment was created by people. I did not. I can't remember when I was
a kid thinking that Captain Kangaroo was
real. Like I knew he was an actor and that somehow
all of this was created by writers. So I knew that creative arts
was a profession that you could take seriously and get into, you know,
VFX background, you know, shows and stuff. You know, Steve, Steve
Savini, the very famous special effects
artist, had a TV show where we teach you how to do homemade DIY
gore effects. And I remember watching that and you know, Fangor magazine told
you how to do blood applications and stuff like that. So I grew up all
the way with that. So as always trying to pick
a profession, trying to be practical. I picked civil engineering
because it. My father, when he was like, don't grow up to be a construction
worker. If you want to do that being an, be an engineer or be an
architect, work with your brain. My father always, who was somebody who worked with his
hands his whole life, really tried to instill of me, be someone that doesn't have
to work with your hands. Work physical. Don't work physical. Work
mental. Get a mental. A job where you are appreciated for your brains
and you're not your, your brawn in your body. And so I was like, oh,
civil engineering, they're the people that make construction happen. Architect
designs it. Civil engineer makes it real. So I went to like
garbage school in high school because I didn't get into the computer
programming program or the computer aided design program.
So I was in construction with a bunch of numb nuts, no brained
morons, one of whom had five kids before high school, graduated
from four different baby mamas, by the way, who went to six different High
schools. One of them, she was bad at math, apparently. So
the. I wanted to do that. And as I was
choosing my colleges for that, I chose the Naval Academy, I chose
University of Maryland, and I choose Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland,
out in Montgomery county, outside of D.C. in that order. Couldn't
get in the Naval Academy. Couldn't get the, the. The. The senator
to write a letter of recommendation for me. Despite being an Eagle Scout,
University of Maryland accepted me and I had a grant for them.
And obviously community college, anybody could go there. So I decided that
I was going to hold my grant off for a year and go to Montgomery.
Montgomery College and do their engineering program.
And then I realized that that caused me to lose my grant. So I didn't
have enough money for college. So I stayed in community college for six years
and never paid for my last semester. So technically I never graduated.
But I have. I've earned three degrees in. And as the day
I was going to register, I drove all
the way down there, got lost. Drove all the way down there, paper map, got
lost. I go to register for my classes and
I'm looking through a program and I'm like, civil engineering is so serious. It's so,
it's so fatal. It's so like,
doesn't feel like the thing that I really want to do. Let me see what
else they have. And I'm looking through the pamphlet and I get to the last
page and it says television program, radio program. And I went, I've done
theater. I did tech theater. I love tech theater.
Operating a camera can't be any different than operating a spotlight.
Fuck it. This is what I'm going to do. So I signed up for the
radio program, the television production program, and the broadcast
journalism programs. I have three associate degrees
in, in those. Those fields that I've, you know,
finished over the six years. And as I was still in
college, I really started pushing more to radio than tv
because radio was difficult for
me. Being in front of a camera, operating the cameras,
operating the audio equipment, all that, all the tech stuff came so
easy to me. But being able to like, run the knobs, play a song,
talk over it, think, read and do all that stuff while talking into the
microphone all at the same time was difficult. So it. I loved it. I
cared for it more. And I started thinking about how radio. I grew up listening
to the radio. You know, WHFS 99.1, the alternative
rock radio station, 98 Rock, the Heritage Baltimore rock station. I listened to those
stations and they were funny, they had comedians on, they had
musicians on. And I realized that radio was the intersection of
everything. I loved it was the intersection of music, right, Because I wanted to be
in a band, right? Who doesn't want to be in the band in the 90s,
right? I wanted to be a comedian, I wanted to be an
entertainer and I wanted to interview people. I loved interviews.
I still love listening to interviews and stuff. And that radio was the
intersection of all that. And it was technical because in radio you work by yourself.
There's nobody else. There's no big crew. I mean, in news radio there's crews, but
like the jocks on the radio that pop open a mic and just start talking,
that's them all day long by themselves. And so as
somebody who was both in front of and behind him, the microphone and cameras,
radio was the thing, man. That was my, my jam.
So as I was going through the radio program, getting good, getting, you know,
working hard at it, my teacher said, hey, I know a guy who
works at a radio station. He's the operations manager. He always asks me every once
in a while. Send him my best students. You're the only
one I got that's good. Why don't you go apply for a job as a
board op? It's an entry level position. I'm pretty sure you can handle it. And
so I did. And that's when I started working for Clear Channel Radio. And
I was third. I was 22. So it had been 2003.
Yeah, that time in the late 80s,
early 90s, radio was king. I don't know if people
today understand, like radio personalities
were local celebrities. They, they did the shows, they did the
morning drives, they were the people. Everybody that was the Internet
was radio. Like all your famous, all your favorite TV
personalities, your presenters and hosts? Almost all of them started
in radio too. Yeah, it was like in my mind, this is my career path.
I go to radio, I get good in radio, I become famous, and then I
move up into farther in entertainment. I become a, I can start being a stand
up comedian because also at the same time, most of the big time radio
jocks in Baltimore were also stand up comedians. And they were the biggest comedians.
So my brain said that this is my career path. And here's the thing, with
this degree in radio and all this, I can still work in entertainment,
I can still open my, I could go work at a recording studio. All the
equipment's mostly the same. The idea is pretty much the same. Mixing and mastering
and leveling all that. It's not, I found out, but in my brain.
I mean I have those skills because I've learned them. But you know, it's
it. I wouldn't able to figure these things out and gotten those
skills if it wasn't for working in radio and just being hungry for
a passion of, hey, bring your band, come into the studio here and let me,
let me record your next single. Because you couldn't get studio recording time. It was
expensive, it was impossible. Nobody had studios at home. There
were hundreds of thousands of dollars to build. You know, nobody could
record in their bedroom. You can record a shitty little demo tape with a four
track cassette player, but you couldn't sell that cassette tape to people.
You know, I was doing Internet radio in the early 2000 when most people
still didn't have computers. Whenever
you're, you're at, you're, you're on the radio, you're meeting new
people, all these other actors, comedians, are crossing your path and
you're building up the skill set of, of entertaining, you know, through words
or painting pictures for people who are listening. Was it
through there? Maybe you started to do remotes, you started
to just, just through meeting people or getting invited to places,
what got you out of the studio and leaning towards
comedy, leaning towards getting on the stage in front of people in real
life, not just in the radio booth. Well,
honestly, the thing that pushed me, I always wanted to be a stand up and
I was holding off for it because I knew too much about the world of
standup comedy. I was in depth in stand
up comedy and interviews with comedians. And I listened and I paid attention. And
I remember someone saying, it takes 10 years to start becoming a successful
comedian. Not at 10 years, you become successful. It don't take, take
no less than 10 years before you start to begin
to become close to becoming successful.
And I knew that in the back of my head and I don't want to
admit this because makes me sound like I
was opportunistic when I was just being strategic.
And maybe I was also being foolish. But I
wanted to build my radio career so I could use that to jump
ahead that 10 years. You know, I thought that
if I'm working in radio, I'm making jokes, I'm writing comedy, I'm doing all this
might as well be on stage, right? It's the same thing, right? If I
build up a following, if I build up a network, if I become,
lack of a better word, celebrity, a known entity, then
that learning curve of becoming a successful comedian
can be cut. And so I put all that, and I
regret that because I should have started stand up the same time I started doing
radio. I regret never being starting a stand. Well and also
when I was 20 it was impossible to find out where stand up comedy was
happening. There was no, no Internet, there was no, like you had to find an
open mic. Where do you find open mics? How do you find them? Right.
Go to comedy clubs and start asking around. I was working at a comic
club as a doorman. So after my years in radio I
did everything. I was an engineer, I was a producer, I did a little bit,
I didn't do as much air work as I wanted to but I was always
doing independent stuff because I grew up independent. I grew up in
a world where if you wanted something done you had to do it. Like
in the theater. At my high school we, I went to arts
magnet art high school because I lived across street but it also became a magnet
art high school and I was very, very big in the theater and improv
programs there. And we had this DIY
attitude all the time of hey, if I'm not acting on
stage I'm now crew helping their production. And so I carried that
way into the tech world as well. I was at home before the
recording. We were joking that I was using Adobe products before Adobe bought
them. I was using an audio editing program called Co Edit and
Sound Blaster Wave Studios to create recordings and I was doing multi track
band recordings with a tape deck and a desktop computer and
my friends girlfriend's grandmother's basement to record their band
to make a single. Like yeah dude, I did
tech stuff. So I Dennis back
then, yeah, this. Is one of the things I keep here on my. It is
a Sony Walkman mini disc player. It sits right here on my desk to remind
me of my roots and where I came from, where I started there. Honestly if
I still kept the real, real machines they would be behind me against the wall
there. But the. So that was the thing is that I
was always independent because I wasn't the best piece of advice.
One of my mentors gave me Al B D he was a, he's
a radio disc jockey in, in D.C. was if you want someone that
can sit you for your job, start doing the job before they give it to
you. Yeah. And so I was like well if I want people to think
I'm a good presenter, that I'm good at interviews, well I need
to start doing interviews. So I did Internet radio show where I brought local
bands on and interviewed them. You know I would go to get press
pass to Comic Con and I take a this
and my friend's shitty camcorder
or flip cam or whatever technology I could get my hands
on for cheap. And I would walk around comic book
conventions doing interviews. And you know how many people back
at the comic con days, the comic book convention days would, I
would show them the cameras, like, all right, do something cool. And they would just
stand still and pose because they're so used to taking photos. None of them were
used to taking video because nobody was carrying video cameras around in their
pockets every day with them. I'm doing this pre iPhone, pre
smartphones. Like, yeah, like if you brought in a
camcorder, it went on your shoulder. And like professional cameras were big and
bulky. Like consumer ones were even bigger and bulkier went on your shoulders,
you know. So you describe in that time as you, you had this
career you were building and you said, you described it as opportunistic, but
I see it as very strategic. Like one you mentioned, comedians
will say 10 years before you, you get some traction, you find your voice,
you're comfortable on stage, but you have to do the
reps to get to that 10 years. And all these things that you're doing, these
are the reps to become in. Well,
in, in my eyes at the time it seemed like I was putting in the
work to, to get to the thing. As a stand up comedian.
What felt opportunistic, what felt like it was, is I
should have been doing stand up to get better at stand up instead of saying
I'm going to get good and famous so I can just
jump into stand up comedy. That wasn't the exact thought
process, but that's not, not the thought process at
the time, if that makes any sense. As a die hard
stand up comedian, I felt that I
could skip the line by becoming famous and to
get famous I got to do all these other things. And so I have never
seen myself as just one thing. Like I'm a multi
hyphenate. I, I love doing everything, I want to be part of everything. I
always call myself an entertainer because dude, you need somebody to host an event,
I'll do it. You need somebody to do stand up comedy event, I'll do it.
You need somebody to write on a TV show, I'll do it. Whether I'm good
at these things, that still remains to be seen. But
I want to do all these things. I want to be a
part, I want to make movies, I want to make TV shows, I want to
make art, I want to create content for
people, I want to be a. I hate saying content creator, but that's really the
closest title to what I do is I want to just
create entertainment for people, even if I'm not the main focus. I love
being a part of the creation process. That's why I could produce radio shows and
not be the main focus of it. Because I was so enamored and
loved just the creation of creating entertainment for people. Whether that
entertainment was music based, news based, political based,
where it was narrative,
fiction, like all these things of creation always fascinated me
and I always wanted to be a part of all of them. I always saw
one of these skill sets is adjacent to another one, you know, like a
stand up comedian. Not that different from acting. You know,
they're. They're not the same. Not every comedian can be an actor and not every
actor can be a comedian, but there is a crossover of skill sets
that makes one relative to the other. You know,
writing, I'm a stand up comedian. I have to write my jokes. I
should in theory, be a
storyteller. I could do story things. I. A lot of my comedy
bases around writing narratively about
situations and that it follows a linear
path of events. You know, Same thing with my tourism.
When I do tours around Boston as a, you know, goofy, dressed up
character, ukulele playing punk rocker named UK Lee,
my history bits are very narrative. And I look
at how do I make this. Instead of here's a bunch of facts about something
that happened, here's how I. How do I make this dramatic? How do I make
this a story? How do I enthrall you
for five minutes while driving around the city of Boston to tell you a story
about these scrappy, young
scared farmers who took
arms after working throughout the middle of the night by
moonlight to stop the British army from sailing from the
harbor into the Charles river to attack the city of Cambridge.
And even though their valiant efforts should
have been rewarded, it was all for naught because they ran out
of ammunition. Despite winning twice against the British,
they unfortunately failed and the British won.
So, you know, how do I, you know, figure out. I got to figure out
how to tell that story in an interesting, fun way because I want people
to not look out the window and go, hey, that's a big tall building. I
want them to go. Is that how
the Battle of Bunker Hill actually happened? How
so? Yeah, you even approach your tours, you know, like a performance, like a
puzzle you're trying to put together to make it the most entertaining. And.
And that kind of comes from all those roots where you're going into trade
shows, and you're interviewing and trying to put that puzzle together. How do I tell
this story? And you go to Boston, you're doing these
tours. You're. At this point, I'm assuming you're finding more and more stages
and you're getting up more and more often. I get
up less now because I know if you can hear my voice. But this
is my moneymaker. It's always been my moneymaker. By the way, my biggest fear is
losing the ability to speak. I don't know what to do with
my life if I don't know how to speak. I don't. I've been getting a
lot of. I'm in the process of learning sign language because I have an obsessive
compulsive disorder that is not fixed by medication, where sometimes when I say the
letters of things like vhs, I just. My hand signs it. And it's
become one of the things that has been integral to my tour and
gonna learn. I want to learn sign language so I can do my entire tour
of Boston in sign language. I also can't
keep still. I can't keep my head still, hand still. My mother's half Italian, so
my hands move. So if I could put them to give you. Spies doing sign
language. Well, by the way, that was the biggest
problem in radio was I would honestly, I would move around the
studio and I would grab the mic and move around. And now that I can't
move around because I'm sitting, then because of the zoom days, I keep hitting the
microphone. You have this natural
DIY mentality. Like, I grew up in skateboarding and punk rock in the 80s and
90s. So, like, that's in my veins. Like, that's all I see is
I don't need a corporation to give me a structure to be a
good consumer. I can kind of figure out this out. And that's kind of what
led me to podcasting and sounds like that's what led you to independent
media. And. And that's what happened is why I started doing. So I
guess the long. The short version of the long story I've been telling is the
reason why I finally got on stage is because I was working at a radio
station. I was not feeling creatively used. I
was. My creativity wasn't not being bolstered. It was.
I had nothing. The station
was no more me.
You know, I, like, I needed a bit more outlet. So I took. And
they're not gonna. I realized that they're not gonna give me what I
want. They are not gonna give me the chance to be as creative and
free as I want to be. So what had happened was I just
finally decided to start doing stand up MLK Day.
I went on to an open mic finally and I just started doing stand up
and I haven't stopped doing stand up since. And
so now we're 14, 15 years later of finally doing stand up comedian
comedy regularly and for realsies. And as
a profession, I have a corporate booking email, a corporate
booking that just came in today for later in the year. That's that I looked
at and I was like, oh, I can take two days off from my day
job because this is enough pay. This is, this money they're going to pay me
is worth two and a half days worth of, of
my day job giving tours of Boston. So I can
take, I'm gonna take one day off. I like money. I need it,
my money. You know, if I can figure out how to go to work,
drive three hours to Maine, give the, do this corporate comedy show
and then drive back home another three hours and wake up and go to work
again, I will do that. I'm rich. Yeah,
it's not so much I'm rich, it's I got bills. But
the. So I decided doing stand up and podcasting came
along with it because it's radio, this is audio. I had all this equipment sitting
in my house anyway, like, why am I not utilizing it?
One of the things you mentioned is something I'm fascinated with and it's, it's
comedian stories, road stories, how jokes came about,
how they form things. And I, I almost
like hearing about comedians more often than
I like their routines or, or their material. I think
comedians are so interesting and they teach you so many
lessons about life. Like I learned more things about building a
theater and, and running a podcast from listening to
comedians telling us on podcasts how they do it. And
the one thing I want to go back to, you mentioned your first time open
mic MLK day. One of the things I love to hear about
comedians was how did your first time go? It all, it's either
every comedian has it was the greatest time of my life or
I ate shit for seven minutes. Oh yeah. Oh. If you listen to my
podcast. So what do you really do? My friend Nico Lukoff, there is a
amazingly huge cringe worthy story of my friends open
mic. I'm not going to spoil it for you, but if you go to so
what do you really do on the Big Comedy Network and listen to that conversation
with Nico, you will see you will hear
how somebody thought it was going great and everyone else was like, no, this is
not. But so my first stand up.
So that's, that's a hard thing to say because
I was doing open mics in comedy before losing this
radio position and realizing that I am not an important
member of this radio station that as I wanted to be.
And I was doing, and I was
helping comedian friends of mine write jokes and workshops, stuff like that. So I was,
I worked on a sketch comedy show for a local cable network. And
so I was always doing these things adjacently but never truly
seriously. So I say that I started coming up seriously 15 years
ago or whatever the math is now, but I was doing stand up before all
that. The very first standup routine I did do, and I think this
is the most interesting of them and I'll tell you, probably the
second most interesting one as well is that I was
4th grade, 8 years old or however you are. In 4th
grade, I did my first stand up for the talent competition at school. My
school did not do this talent competition every year. They did like every other year
for some reason. And I wrote a stand up comedy routine. It was mostly
stolen bits from things that I saw on TV because it was the late 80s,
early 90s. So. And you were 10 years old? Yeah, yeah,
eight. 10 years old, whatever it was. Oh, this is. I was 10 years old
when I did that stand up. I tell a joke on tour. The very first
stand, the very first joke I ever wrote was at 8 years old. And it
was who was the most dangerous? President Ronald
Reagan. Pew, pew, pew. It's been
downhill since so, but so I did, in fourth grade, I did the stand
up comed, did the audition for the teachers and everything.
I, I wore like goofy loud clothes, 3D glasses,
a big bright green trucker hat, and I stumbled around
on stage trying to find the microphone. So I took the 3D glasses off.
The first joke was a prop joke that I stole from a comedian which was
also half ass. This comedian, I don't know who this was.
If somebody could find out who did this joke, tell me was, I would love
to give him credit for it. He goes, hey, you know you, when you look
in the back of the magazine and they got the advertisement for the Sea Monks.
I ordered a couple of Sea Monks and hey, tell me, is it supposed to
get this big? And he holds up a big jar and it's just a big
gorilla face inside of the jar. And I made the same thing, but instead of
having a gorilla face and A bottle of water. It's just highlighter.
Painted yellow gorilla face on paper inside of a
jar. And I did it
to the entire school. And I went,
oh, boy, tough crowd. And that's when they all erupted and
laughing. Ah, all right. That's
what this feels like. Okay. And I started telling jokes. I told a
joke from Ronald Reagan that he told in a press conference. I stole
a joke from the president. Former president at the time. I
stole so many jokes. I did impressions and then I started improvising
and making up impressions on the spot because I was feeling the moment.
And that was the bug, dude. Like, I was already a. Hey, hey, look at
me. Let me be in school plays. Let me act, Let me do this. Let
me get in front of the camera. Hey, let me dance and sing. Let me
do karaoke. Let me do all this. And when I did Santa Claus, like, this
is, this is what I need. This is me. This is where I get to,
to be the real me. And still on stage, I'm
the real me. You know, it's, I, it's, this is held back.
You know, everyone says it's on stage. As a comedian, you're, you're self amplified.
No, this, it's the oxygen opposite that's free Dennis. This
is, this is the Dennis that has to be palatable for humans.
And this is him holding back so that he's not
a fucking Daffy Duck Looney Tune bouncing around the stage,
bouncing around the room. You hear the stories where, you know, the first time
it was like, I can't believe I got laughs. It was amazing. They come off
with this incredible energy and they get hooked that way. But
you almost hear the opposite story where like, nothing
worked. It was the worst. And that's what happened when I started doing
15 years ago, when I started, like, I'm going to be a real comedian. I
was taking my radio bits on stage with me and they weren't
flying, they weren't working. I ate plates of
dick, as we call it in the industry. Eating dick when you bomb on stage
eating. I ate big plates of dick for two
years. I finally put together a five minute, raunchy,
dirty set that worked in Baltimore. I moved to Boston and it
sank like a. Like the goddamn Titanic. It did not
play. They hated me here and I bombed for another 10 months
straight. And what made Boston mad at me is that it didn't
affect me because I already knew what bombing was and I knew that my
dirty jokes, I didn't like doing them anyway, so I was scrapping all
My plan when I moved to Boston was to scrap all my material
and start all over again. And I did that. And I had to find out
who I was and what my voice was and what was me. And
what bothered them the most is I did it. I bombed with confidence.
I could work a room. I had those chops and ability.
What I didn't have was the material behind it. I'm not charming. I'm not likable.
I'm a big presence. I'm very aggressive. But
in the moment, I can be funny. You know, if. If you
don't immediately start to hate me as soon as I walk in the room. I
am pretty. I can be pretty laughable, charming. I can be quick with a joke.
I'm funny. I was good with crowd work. When there was
a crowd at an open mic, if I was talking to somebody, they got mad,
they're like, hey, stop doing crowd work. Dennis, stop doing crowd work.
Fuck you, Tom. This person's laughing. And that's kind
of what makes, you know, comedians really
get well rounded, is you spent two years in
Baltimore, 10 more months in Boston just eating it.
But you figured that was also a way to get hooked on being on
stage, was, how do I figure this out? And that's what you hear is challenge
after challenge after challenge. You're trying to put this puzzle together and figure
out your voice and figure out how to make people laugh. And you spent two
years, 10 months doing that, and then look at where it's taking you today.
Yeah. And honestly, I've. One of the things that
a friend of mine, Mike Finney Finakos,
Mike Fenoia, an old comedian, sort of a
person I knew who used to do stand up in Baltimore, named Mike, whatever his
last name is now, I don't know. He quit comedy, but he. We
had a very interesting conversation one day, and I've always brought this question to comedians
on my podcast and interviews is he
thinks of himself as a writer. I think of myself as a
performer in that he performs his jokes because he
has the need to write jokes, whereas I have to write jokes because I have
the need to perform jokes. So it's not that I'm not a good
writer. It's not that I don't write. It's not that I'm willing to take people's
work and pass it off as my own. It's just that
for me to go out and have to perform on stage, I need the material.
So I have to create the material because I want to go perform on stage.
Whereas some People, oh, I write and I have this accumulation of writing.
Oh, I guess I'll go on stage and tell people about it, you know. And
I think all comedians come down to one or the other. You're a writer or
performer. Everyone wants to say they're both because they think that one is better
than the other. And they don't ever want to be like, oh, I'm a hack
because I'm a performer. No, it's not that. Not one is better than the other.
It's just what is your natural dispositions. And I put a lot of effort into
writing and the concept of writing and the thought process of writing, because all of
this is writing. The ability to do improv, the ability
to do crowd work. I
always tell people, don't you can't learn to do crowd work. What you need to
learn to do is how to write a joke. Learn joke formula,
learn joke structure. Because once you have joke structure
down packed, everything else falls into place.
All crowd work is all improv is, is
recalling or creating a joke on the moment
using the information available in the situation.
Great example of this was I was doing just after the pandemic
when things started opening back up. I had a job doing
audio, running audio tech for traveling dance company,
doing competitions. And we're sitting back in the green
room between, you know, dance
recital performances for like, you know, 8 to 12 and then
13 to 15 and then 17 and over, right? We're sitting back
there and one of the judges who's a dancer and, you know, she's judging other
teenage girls dancing now. And we're talking. Somebody says something, I make a joke and
I so hope be huge act out. I 45 seconds worth of like a whole
bunch of jokes. And I just sit down and woman goes, oh, my God. How
did you. Where did that come from? And the video tech with
me leads up, goes, he's a stand up.
That's amazing. How did you just, in the moment, come up with that very
unique bit that was
hilarious. It's specific to the moment
and very intricate. How did you. How do you do it? I was like, well,
it's joke structure. That's the thing. Joke is when you do enough comedy. When you
learn structure, you know that A plus B equals C. C is a
laugh. A is the setup, B is the punchline. C is the laugh,
right? D is your tagline. So it's like if you understand how to
get A and how to plug in A and B. All right,
here's the situation. A. You gave me the situation. All right, so that
situation, what is going to elicit a,
a, a, a natural surprising
reaction from the, the person using this information? Well, you
want to use the thing that is the most opposite but still rel relative to
it. So I quickly thought in my brain, in
seconds, you know, because of natural instinct of
writing, I got to the point, went, all right, so what is similar to the
situation we're talking about, but the exact opposite, but related enough to
elicit a surprise reaction to it? Oh, it's this, it's
Gregorian chanting or whatever the joke happened to be. And that's
it. And she goes, oh,
oh, cool. Well, can you make a joke about all the kids who are dense
today? I was like, you as a black one. Want me, a white guy, to
make a joke about a bunch of little girls in skimpy dresses running around the
stage? Yeah, I know a trap when I see one. Goodbye. Goodbye.
Well, you mentioned it a little bit earlier and we both, and I especially
love comedian backstories and your podcast. So what do you
really do? Tell us a little bit about that and where we can find it
as we wrap up here. And you referenced it a little bit. And it's, it's
a great, it's a fun podcast. It's on the Big Comedy Network, which you can
find on YouTube under Big Comedy Network. Search for them. It's
got a bunch of green lettering or, you know, ilovebigcomedy.com
they have a whole series of comedy specials, podcasts,
TV shows. They're producing. Two really awesome people
that are LA, Kentucky bi coastal based
Catherine and Scott. Happy birthday, Catherine. They
are people I met during the pandemic doing Clubhouse and Zoom shows.
Scott is a cruise ship comedian from he.
He was doing comedy in the 80s, you know, when I was a little
kid watching it on tv. And she is his wife and she
is an amazingly talented consultant for companies
and she's been CEO of a bunch of companies and she's great at doing startups
and all this stuff. And she's an actress in herself. So we have like, you
know, talented people in the arts who just want to give a platform to people
and help them grow their art. And so my podcast is
called so what do youo really Do? Where I interview artists and entertainers about their
day jobs, talking about the stuff we have to do during the day to support
what we want to do at night. I've been fortunate to have a lot of
really good, fun, interesting day jobs, radio, acting,
comedy, comedian, and you know, working tech and all these
stuff. Doing interviews. But I've also had shit jobs like
selling cell phones at Best Buy and waiting tables and bartending.
And I realize there are other people in the arts that have interesting
jobs, too, not just working baristas at Starbucks. So that's the things that we
talk about. We talk to musicians that are not just
music teachers, but like scientists in labs with white coats
and chemicals and. And, you know,
comedians who write for TV shows, you know, writers
for the. For late night have been on my podcast. Jim Jefferies,
the very famous Australian comedian, British comedian, American comedian, television show
host and presenter, has been on the podcast because I built a good
reputation of doing good interviews with newspapers and on podcasts.
And he came on the podcast Jessica Kirsten, who's blowing it up right
now as a comedian on TikTok with her clips and stuff. She's a heritage
comedian for a very long time, very funny and talented. And she came on it
and she gave me the best compliment in the world. She was like, wow, you
really are a good interviewer. And that's.
I love hearing that from somebody who can recognize that. And she's amazing and
talented. And I've had also just my friends who have
day jobs, nannying and doing comedy
at night. So those are the people, you know, that it's just like
you, where we're finding out the backstories of these people. We're figuring out what
they have to do to do the things that they
want to do, because we're not all so fortunate to be able
to jump right into the industry that we want to be in
and be able to get paid for it. So some of us have to do
the things that we don't want to have to admit, you know, or some of
us had that practicality. They had that parent that said, no, you're going to go
to college, you're going to become an architect, you know, no, you're going to go
to college and you're gonna become a doctor. And they still got that bug. They
still want to perform, they still want to be that doctor, but they really want
to be on stage in the limelight, too. That's.
So what do you really do? It's on YouTube, the big comedy network, I believe
it's called. DeadairDennis.com reach out. You can find
how to book where you're performing at upcoming events. You'll be traveling again
soon, you said, for about three months on the road. Yep. And if you want
to take a tour of me in Boston.
Ukleeduck.com Uklee Duck on the
socials. DM me. I'll let you know when I am doing one of my
80 minute comedic historic tours of the city of Boston as well.
Awesome. Let's go back to that theme song.
He's a podcaster, actor, comedian, too. Tells you
what your favorite comics really do from Boston to backstage.
He's got the tea with a side of sass and a tech degree.
He's bold, he's brat, he's allergy free. Deadair
Dennis is the guest to see. So grab a seat. The
spotlight's bright is Jeff Revilla. And my guest tonight.
I love that. I also, I would love to say you're the first person to
create a theme song for me, but you're not. But you're my current favorite
theme song, so thank you, Jeff. Well, I'll cut in. You playing the drums in
the backstage.