Dylan Brody
written by Ken Carlson
“When it became more about entertaining than about art, it lead to sloppy comedy and reprehensible subject matter. They say it, but they don’t really mean it. It’s not about foul language. Fuck foul language! It’s about reinforcement that is sexist, racist, and homophobic, this brand of attack comedy. At times you’ll have comics make racist remarks, Jewish comics make anti-Semitic remarks, under the umbrella of protection ‘I’m a comedian, I’m allowed to say these things but you’re not.’ Just because you can, it’s still a bad, bad idea.”
Belief is a funny thing. Ask Dylan Brody. “I was raised a Jew. For a time I was a practicing Druid. I’m a sporadically studying Daoist. I’ve recently developed a fascination for astrophysics and the Big Bang Theory. In essence, I’m a Jewish Zen Pagan, with a newish yen for Sagan,” is an excerpt from his recently released CD, Brevity, on the opening track, Xenophobia and the Jewish Druid. As you might ascertain from the subject matter, Brody is rarely mistaken for Larry the Cable Guy or Gallagher. He doesn’t wear a moustache. Nor does he believe in the traditional world of stand-up, or at the very least, choose to spread its word. Most consider a move into stand-up as a message that you’re turning your back on the everyday pedestrian 9-to-5 world and rebelliously blazing your own trail. But what happens when you turn your back on that?
“He ain’t no comedian in the typical rat-a-tat set-up/punchline mode,” says Paul Krassner, author and comedian. “He’s a funny story-teller in the tradition of Mark Twain, and his material can’t be stolen because it’s about his own peculiar experiences and observations.”
During our phone conversation from his home in Los Angeles, Brody used the word, “entertaining”, in way that teetered between disdain and disappointment. But isn’t that what people want, entertainment? What’s wrong with crowds coming out to forget their troubles and simply laugh? What’s the big deal with telling a few jokes at the expense of others? They’re just words, right? Can he possibly mean it when he says, “Entertainment is the word performers use for not taking responsibility for their art.” There are moments when Brody seems to take on malcontent role notoriously used in disaster films, the scientist or historian who insists the volcano is going to blow any minute or there are repercussions from building semi-luxury tract homes on old burial grounds. Nobody likes that guy. Nobody wants to hear from that guy. He’s getting in the way of everybody else just trying to make a buck. But, like another restless Brody, Police Chief Martin Brody from JAWS, he has a point. There is a shark in the water. Maybe we should listen to this Brody guy, as many do in his performances, or on the radio, and see what he has to say.
“Dylan Brody is a man who appreciates the beauty of words,” says comedian and writer Rick Overton, “in a time when they are more often used as a substitute for gravel for your driveway. He ‘smiths’ them into a verbal sculpture, serving the eye, the heart and the mind. A fine writer, holding firm the lantern which cuts with surgical skill into the storm of stupid coming our way.”
“Is it Dylan’s relentless perseverance to reveal the truth as well as to untangle the absurdities of life – particularly his own – that generates this unique, insightful, humorous, self-revealing, sensitive, authentic, enlightening, poetic, ironic, delightful, poignant and funny-as-hell storytelling style?” asks comedian Jann Karam. “Or is it simply because he is a woman trapped in a man’s body?”
Dylan Brody is a humorist and story teller. He had a successful career as a comic, playing clubs and appearing on television. Then, like others who grew disenchanted with the business, he decided to do something else.
“The world of comedy has changed,” says Brody. “It didn’t make sense to remain in the club setting. Bill Cosby worked in the long form, using story telling. Bob Newhart was famous for using pauses and taking his time. But in the 80’s and 90’s, with the comedy boom, it became the standard to get a laugh every fifteen seconds. The TV showcases and programs instilled the high pressure aspect of stressing four jokes a minute, the machine gun approach. There is a place for that form. It has validity. But what about more thoughtful material, more thought provoking? Can’t we demand more of an audience?”
“I never got much respect as a comedian,” says Brody. “I appeared on TV (see his A&E clip on YouTube from 1994, a distant time when cigarettes were actually lit and smoked indoors), headlined in clubs. I liked being a comic, but I didn’t see it as a road to success or respect.”
If it’s respect Brody has sought, he has found it in storytelling venues, far away from the bachelorette parties and its expanding array of dick jokes. A change like that forces a performer to find places where his style will be accepted, a much smaller market. It’s a patient world of theatres, salons and coffee houses where the directions actually include “Across the street from the Studio City Public Library Branch”. The arcs of the stories are longer. The crowds are more attentive, presumably less drunk. The riffs extend longer than many Pink Floyd or classic Yes tracks. The finished product is more than the sum of its parts.
“I began doing stand-up at 17,” says Brody. “I tried to write jokes. It’s a specific trick. You have to take the audience by surprise. I always wrote best on the way to a gig. A half hour to show time I always had my best ideas for bits.”
As Brody describes it, he grew tired of the “Double breasted false bravado. I sold a book and came in from the road. On the road, I would tell jokes about homophobia and get applause breaks, then audience members would approach me saying, ‘That show was great. Hey, I’ve got a great fag joke for you.’ It’s the last accepted form of bigotry (directed at homosexuals). It’s not considered discriminating at all.”
“Movies from the 80’s like Fame and Punchline,” says Brody, “Built the myth that if you’re good, you can make it on The Tonight Show. It wasn’t about art, it just meant being funny equaled success. The comedy boom created the search for seven minutes. The key was to create product, not art. People went to clubs. They saw the same thing every week, different comics doing roughly the same material. They’d see the same thing on TV. You could get by on the basic rhythm alone. Everybody started imitating Seinfeld or Andrew Dice Clay. You had cardboard cut-out comics each week.”
When Brody left, he had already been writing regularly; in journals, plays, short stories. He began storytelling on radio. He’d work alone in his room, writing and recording. He started to seed out story telling rooms and using his stand-up skills, hear the laughs, feel the gaps, sense the laughter that shouldn’t be there. He took it in and kept growing. More and more he’s found his way back to traditional stand-up settings where story telling has caught on in what Brody describes as a “backlash”. His stories are secrets, secrets that spotlight his insecurities. They go beyond the middle school kid with the tray in the lunchroom looking for a place to sit. They go into religion, [like his subtle bout with his new judgmental Christian father-in-law where Brody plays the fool (“I’ve always admired Jesus for his immortality and ability to turn into a bat when threatened.”)], and family. They show affection for his quirky and occasionally dysfunctional past, starting with a detailed close-up, fading back for social commentary to make a point, then closing the tale for resolution. While the style is frequently compared to jazz for its free style, it’s more closely aligned with folk. There is little background noise to diffuse the message.
“Listening to him is very much like listening to music - with rhythms and cadences and crescendos,” says comedian and filmmaker Paul Provenza, “and with an emotional tone that emerges, different in each piece he does. There is a brinkmanship in his work as he brings you on a circuitous and mysterious path to allow you to feel as well as hear his stories, and a lesser talent would be afraid of losing you along the way. But his gifts and his confidence -- and also, in no small part, his respect for his audience -- allow him to be courageous in committing to his own voice and style.”
“It was difficult,” says Brody on the transition. “I was a stand-up comic. I had to have that faith that there was an audience for my new act. It makes perfect sense for radio. But in clubs, you have that repetition, The voice speaks, laughs. speaks, laughs, speaks, applause. You pack it with jokes, but what about the silences? It made me nervous.”
“What most sets Dylan apart for me,” says Provenza, “is that he approaches comedy as literature. He respects ‘the laugh’ as something to be cherished and, more importantly, earned. He writes intelligently and thoughtfully. The comedy comes from the ideas and how he crafts his expression of them in a way that is funny in the big picture. Dylan’s comedy is not about jokes, it’s about a way of looking at the world, the way he processes it all, and from a perspective that is both in it and outside it. His love of language, and of the storytelling form is immediately apparent. He savors language and how he can take you on a mysterious journey with each and every sentence. The journey to the end of each sentence can be an experience in itself; the destination well worth it every time. I find everything he does as equally meaningful as it is whimsical; as intelligent and unique as it is immediately relatable and recognizable. With a lot of comedy, the time between the laughter is a liability, something to be avoided. With Dylan, it’s rich with meaning and emotional context.”
“You have to tell yourself, you’re OK,” says Brody. “As a comic, you try to be one of the cool kids. But, I never was. There was a certain level of dishonesty. Now I really expose myself for who I am. I’m not cursing to sound blue collar. I’m not masking my intellect. I’m just a big, goofy, articulate dork.”
To see where Dylan is performing, visit DylanBrody.com.