dana gould
written by Ken Carlson
(Sept/Oct 07)
“Louis CK told me a story. John Mayer, he wants to be a stand-up, and asked Louis CK if it would work, ‘Do you think the audience would get over what I am?’ Louis said, ‘That’s the problem. They wouldn’t have an issue at all. You’ll have to deliver.’ It’s one of those things where people say, ‘I want to be a sword fighter.’ Well, then you really have to train.”
Dana Gould isn’t one of those names you hear about a lot at the forefront of the pop culture scene. But you see his work twice a night on The Simpsons. Some know him from Seinfeld and Working, a clever sitcom that was quickly cancelled (there’s no room for thoughtful satire on network TV, sorry). Where you hear about him a lot is among other comics. His influence, particularly in the downtown rooms, is undeniable. Now that he’s back on stage and touring, and working on a new CD, along with a myriad of writing projects, perhaps that will change. On the other hand, perhaps it won’t. Dana’s one of those guys, still boyish and quirky after twenty-five years in 
the business, who has reached a point in his life, not just show biz, where he appears very comfortable with who he is and what he’s accomplished, without making a lot of noise. For many young comics, stand-up provides the pulpit from which to scream, ‘Here I am!’ At this point, after all the stress of working in Hollywood, it seems like more of a comfortable haven where this husband & dad can just have some fun and revisit the craft he’s honed so well and relax.
“I did a college outside of San Francisco. It was kind of a ‘nooner’ in a cafeteria. I was a very angry person at that time, around 25. They didn’t want to hear from me and I didn’t like not being listened to. I sort of snapped. I stormed off and gave them their money back. I said I didn’t deserve the money.”
“In ‘88, I was this angry person, so I was an angry comic. I’d get angry if anybody talked during the show. It was unprofessional, just bad. Kevin Rooney, a great comic I was working with, gave me the best advice I’d ever gotten. The first night I ever worked with him, he said, ‘You know, the audience wants to like you. When you walk out on that stage, they want to like you. But, they want to make sure that you like them first.’ My act got markedly better the very next show. The other advice he gave me that week was this, ‘It’s a show. They don’t care if you’re alternative or punk. It’s a show. So, put on a show.’ I thought, ‘Oh, yeah. They paid to come in and see me.’”
“For material, being angry worked. But for my life and my act it didn’t. There’s a difference between angry material and having an angry act. I was an angry act. When I walked out on stage, people thought I was angry and didn’t want to hang out. Sam Kinnison was very impish, even though he was angry, there was a twinkle in his eye. You have to be careful. Sam Kinnison looked kind of cherubic. Whereas Bill Hicks didn’t. Bill Hicks couldn’t snarl the way Sam did, because he looked too normal. I think I fell into that.”
Certainly Dana has benefitted from a healthy perspective that comes with age and not taking himself too seriously, which in itself can be a rare commodity in stand-up and Hollywood. I saw his act recently at Comix and thought his show had the feel of a one-man show. His set was fairly methodical from the getgo; no crowd work or tired banter about the surroundings or what was going on in the world that day. He punched in, did his job, then got ready for the next audience.
“I don’t write it out word for word. The show definitely does have a beginning, a middle, and an end. I like to hone the stuff down to the point where there’s no space for a spare word. I want it to be as tight as possible. I like it when there’s no air in there at all. There’s a current trend now, where Dave Chappelle did four hours in San Francisco; Christ Tucker did eight hours in LA, Dave did six days in Minneapolis... I’m just the opposite. I’d rather do fifty minutes, have all of it be excellent, and leave. In 1986, I saw Elvis Costello at the Orpheum theatre in Boston. He walked out on the stage, blew the room apart for ninety minutes, never stopped, put down his guitar, and left. That’s what you want to do. Better to do that than Bruce Springsteen playing for four and a half hours. Just fifty line drives and leave. That’s the goal anyway.”
“When I was working on The Simpsons, I’d be in that goddamned writing room from 10 to 7 or 7:30, five days a week. I’d go home and my kids were babies. That was my life. I totally lost track of everything. I didn’t watch The Daily Show. I didn’t know who was funny anymore, what new people were coming up. My life was completely insulated. That’s why I’m so excited about where I am now; starting over and doing things like watching Saturday Night Live again. This cast is amazing. You don’t want to be out of it. As far as being isolated from the audience, I don’t think I’ll have that problem. Even for someone like Robin Williams, you get about five minutes from an audience, then you have to deliver.”
“On SNL, the generation that’s there now, is the group that grew up watching Comedy Central. My group of people like Cross, Janeane, they watched Comedy Central like we watched SCTV. We watched the mainstream television too, but we knew where the good stuff was.”
“Writing for The Simpsons was different than writing for anything else. You really have to murder your ego. When you’re a comic and used to being King Shit of turd mountain; you’re everything and people clap for you. Then you go into a room with other writers and you have to get rid of all that. No one cares. Nobody's impressed. It’s really hard. You have to learn to write for characters. You can come up with a great joke, but if it’s not for the character, it doesn’t work. It takes a while. With The Simpsons specifically, there’s sort of a theory with their jokes; their math of the jokes on that show. It’s different from any other show I’ve worked on. It took me a good nine months to figure it out, which is average. To really understand the different voices of the characters and understand how the jokes work. The classic example is in the movie, where Homer’s thumb is right over the nail. He lines it up with his hammer. Then he hits himself in the eye. That’s the perfect link. It’s not the joke you think it’s going to be. The joke you think it’s going to be is the setup to the joke we’re coming to. That takes a while to learn.”
“I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I kind of have a feel what’s going to work ahead of time. I know that if something sucks, I have enough things that I can go to that I feel are pretty safe. But, you never know what’s going to work. I did a joke tonight where I said the smartest people in the world are the ones who came up with Starbuck’s. Why can’t they go to work on global warming? That joke took three months to get to a point where I could deliver the concept to the audience because it’s an arcane concept. It’s very tricky. You don’t want to have to explain the setup to the joke. It should be very simple. I just had to keep doing it and whittling it and whittling it. I knew there was something there. I just had to smash it into shape to get to the joke.”
“What Dana Gould can do that very few other comedians can do is he can take dark and personal subject matter and somehow make it both provocative and silly. He always challenges the audience's very idea of what they think is funny. He's a wordsmith and conjures images that shock the body with laughter.”
“As a comedian, to watch him is to watch someone that is a master at getting their point of view across. He's someone that makes you understand how HE sees it. He takes people on an amazing journey through his brain and you come out bruised but tickled.”
– Baron Vaughn, comedian
“I started when I was 17. Walls appear, when you get laughs from jokes, but have no idea who you are on stage. At 17, I didn’t know who I was on stage or off. You don’t know who the fuck you are at 17! It took me a long time to figure out what I was on stage. I went through a couple of personas. As I did off stage. Those were the walls I hit. What kind of stories should I tell? What kind of jokes should I do? I didn’t really have any clue. When I would break through those walls and find something valuable, I had so much technical skill, that I was able to develop a lot faster. I had the technical ability, but I didn’t have the esoteric awareness of what I was supposed to be doing.”
“Then, two things happened. I moved to LA in ‘89. I got the same two spots every week at the Improv, Wednesday at 11:10, Friday at 10:35. They were both just dead zones. To the point where it was like seven people, maybe three people. It got to the point where there was no reason to do my act. I would not use the mic. It was ridiculous. I wasn’t going to pretend. So, I threw my act away and started fucking around. I stopped making my bits so precious, those precious little nuggets. I learned to talk to the people, got more comfortable being a presence on stage instead of having five bits that killed. That really freed me up on stage. Around ‘92, the alternative scene started in LA. You had Janeane Garafalo, me, Collin Quinn, Ben Stiller, Bob Odenkirk. That was really the original group. That was the main group I remember performing at Big & Tall Books. The rule was you couldn’t do your act. You just went up there and did some stuff. It forced me to just take stories and make them funny.”
“Then I heard Albert Brooks’ album, A Star is Bought. Unlike George Carlin, where every album was specifically written, like chapters in a book, A Star... is just Albert telling stories; opening for Richie Havens, other things that just happened to him He found the bits in them and went from there. That’s what I did on the alternative scene. Then I would do stories there, find the bits, solidify them, and that would become a bit. That’s what I do know. That’s how it sort of gelled.”
To see where Dana is performing and samples of his work, visit DanaGould.com