Talk about luck

Storyteller Dylan Brody gets the chance of a lifetime opening for humorist David Sedaris at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium

By Carl Kozlowski 11/13/2013

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The 3,000 people expected to fill the Pasadena Civic Auditorium Friday night will hear  David Sedaris — one of the most popular humorists of our times — discuss some of his seemingly endless stream of humorous essays and stories. 

But theatergoers will get an added treat as well that night, with Dylan Brody, one of LA’s top professional raconteurs, warming up the audience before Sedaris takes the stage.

Brody has been writing and performing standup comedy and comedic storytelling since he was in college, enjoying a rather successful career with five CDs to his credit, along with three novels, as well as appearances on A&E’s “Comedy on the Road” and Showtime’s “The Green Room with Paul Provenza.” Even after a few decades in show business, Brody was thrilled when Sedaris made the offer to open for his act.

“David and I have been corresponding for five or six years now,” says Brody. “I met him a couple times at readings, and he has advised me via mail and email over the years. I recorded a new piece and posted it at the [National Public Radio show] ‘Snap Judgment’ Web site, and in sending an email to him I said, ‘Check out this piece I wrote.’

“He said, ‘As long as you’re coming to the show, want to come up and do the piece from ‘Snap’?” continues Brody. “And I said, ‘Yes, a thousand times yes.’ His agent told me he never has openers. It’s an enormous honor and it’s literally a fantasy come 

true. Now it’s happened and I’m a little choked up and excited by it.” 

The essay Brody intends to read is called “Not Actual Goats,” which he describes as being about “generational confusion and a conversation with my mother as I’m driving.”  He notes that in recent years, his mother has become his “Gracie Allen, the foil in which I’m the straight man. I’m utterly baffled and she’s utterly delightful.” 

Brody grew up in New York City and started performing stand-up on the city’s thriving comedy scene during the summer between high school and college. Just a year later, he was accepted as a regular performer at the world-famous Improv comedy club there, and continued to perform what he calls “machine-gun, left-leaning political comedy” for the next 15 years.

However, Brody was afflicted with severe depression and dropped out of performing for 10 years as he sought treatment and reshuffled his life after moving to San Francisco. When he felt ready to start performing again, he was invited to tell stories on a show on KYCY, a radio station there.

“I recorded a story of mine that I wanted to get on [the NPR show] ‘This American Life,’ but they rejected it,” recalls Brody, who now lives in Sylmar. “I heard of a man named Steven Page, who basically started the first all-podcasting station in that he aired audio uploads that he liked from surfing online. He got back to me a couple days after uploading my [“This American Life”] story and asked how often I could post.”

After recording 26 weekly stories for Page, Brody started burning his own CDs, filled with his WYCY recordings, and selling them online. When New York City radio station WBAI aired one of the tales, the orders for his CDs soared. He hired a manager who encouraged him to perform in “classier environs.” 

A studio recording of his work was released as “Brevity,” while a live-audience performance was recorded as “True Enough.” The well-established Provenza helped Brody land a deal with Stand Up Records in 2009, which released those two CDs, and a new one each year since then. Once he scored an endorsement blurb from Sedaris for the recordings, Brody’s work became part of the regular airplay rotation on Sirius XM satellite radio’s comedy channels. 

“My creative approach varies from piece to piece, but mainly my wife has accurately noticed that even as events are taking place, I’m internally writing them for greatest impact, whether it’s for comedy, pathos or shock value,” says Brody. “It’s not as much that bizarre things happen to me as everything that happens to me I’m running through my literary filter.”

Brody also notes that he often structures his stories to tell two tales at once. He will start with a present-day story, then reach back to a childhood tale that has a similar point and tell that in full before returning to his adult tale. As such, he notes that he uses multiple events to make a larger point. 

While his highly supportive wife cracked the code for how Brody accesses his creativity, she also is a big influence on the rare tales he refuses to tell. 

“It’s interesting that if my wife asks me not to talk about something, I won’t,” says Brody. “There are certain sexual fetish things that I’ve started to hint at that I won’t discuss fully. Some things, I’m still a little lost in shame over. 

“I will not say on stage anything I disagree with, because I feel that if I am talking to a room full of people, I have to take responsibility for everything I say,” continues Brody. “A lot of people will do jokes that come from a stereotype or disrespect or misogyny or any number of emotional states, and when confronted on them say ‘It’s just a joke, why do you want to censor me?’ I feel if your only defense is, it’s just a joke, then it’s something they shouldn’t be saying.  The things I will not touch and say are anything I don’t believe is true or right.” 

Dylan Brody is the opening act for humorist David Sedaris at 8 p.m. Friday at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, 300 E. Green St., Pasadena. Tickets are $42 to $97. Learn more about Brody at dylanbrody.com. 

Oracle of outrage

Comic Jimmy Dore scowls about the world while loving life in Pasadena

By Carl Kozlowski 06/05/2013

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Jiimmy Dore has a lot to say about the state of America, and he uses many different platforms to say it. He’s a nationally headlining club comedian who has regularly performed on the Jimmy Kimmel and Craig Ferguson shows and earned the honor of having two solo one-hour Comedy Central specials. He’s also one of the pundits on Current TV’s “The Young Turks,” as well as the host of his own bitingly hilarious, nationally syndicated radio program, “The Jimmy Dore Show.”

Yet, while the radio show emanates from North Hollywood’s KPFK-FM station each week, Dore is a proud Pasadenan. He enjoys the fact that Pasadena is a cultural hub, but is even more appreciative of its distance from the behind-the-scenes game playing of the show-business scene. That combination helps him maintain the same kind of grounded life he experienced during his boyhood on the blue-collar South Side of Chicago.

“I grew up in what I like to call a very blue-collar neighborhood, very blue. I would say it was a navy-blue-collar neighborhood on the southwest side of Chicago,” Dore recalls. “The people worked hard all day and then went home at night and watched reruns of Archie Bunker and laughed for all the wrong reasons.”

As the youngest of 12 kids in an Irish-Catholic family, Dore learned early on that he needed to fight for attention if he wanted to receive any, even from his parents. For him, being funny was the way to get a response, and eventually having such a large and built-in audience meant he had plenty of practice by the first time he took the stage.

“As soon as I figured out I was replaceable, I knew I had to try comedy,” Dore says. “There was an open mic night near my house at a comedy club called the Comedy Womb — ‘Where Comedians Are Born’ was their motto. I started in the early ’90s, when all you needed was a pulse and suit jacket and you could get a paying comedy gig.”

One thing that quickly helped Dore stand out was the fact that he wasn’t shy about his political views, which are often labeled as strictly progressive. But he’s actually more of a free thinker who demands the truth from our leaders and the institutions of government, with a particular focus on fighting the hypocrisy of the drug war.

Dore is a passionate advocate for ending the war on pot and legalizing medical use of marijuana. He not only was a writer-performer of the smash off-Broadway hit “The Marijuana-Logues,” but he also believes that using medical marijuana saved his sanity and possibly his life, due to its strong role in helping alleviate chronic and debilitating pain caused by problems with vertebrae.

“I describe myself as politically aware, a progressive along the lines of Teddy Roosevelt,” explains Dore. “I see that the real problems facing our country are not left-right, but top-down. The plutocrats against the rest of us, and the plutocrats are on a 30-year winning streak.”

As the Obama administration battles concurrent allegations of at least three different scandals — regarding the terrorist attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi, the targeting of conservative groups by the IRS, and the wiretappings of reporters at the Associated Press and FOX News – Dore believes that the accusations and interrogations are acting as distractions from the bigger problems facing the nation.

“Two of those three could be called ‘the scandals that weren’t,’” he says. “So a political organization applying for tax-exempt status was first given extra scrutiny before actually being granted tax-exempt status. There’s a scandal there somewhere, right?

“Of course, the real scandal is that the true criminals in our country will never be prosecuted: The criminal bankers who raped our economy and pocketed the profits while it crashed,” he continues. “And the people who ordered torture and war crimes and lied our nation into an illegal war … We don’t prosecute those crimes anymore, but we did get Martha Stewart.”  

Thanks to living in a relatively laid-back state like California, Dore doesn’t have to worry much about getting arrested for using medical marijuana. Suffering from problems with his back, he can lapse into having pain so great it threatened to debilitate him a few years ago.

Even though he has the right to be prescribed marijuana, Dore finds the process of receiving it from a clinic to be utterly absurd.

“I can buy liquor at a gas station in the United States but I have to see a doctor and go to a clinic and  be buzzed into a back room in order to buy a joint,” he says, with rising sarcasm. “Are you kidding me? You guys should be embarrassed to be doing this to me. You say, ‘I don’t think you’re sick enough.’ Well, you’re not sick and you can buy Everclear and no one makes you take a test to buy it. You should feel bad that you make a guy jump through hoops to get his drug of choice when you don’t have to.’”

Jimmy Dore can be heard on “The Jimmy Dore Show” at 3 p.m. Fridays on 90.7 KPFK-FM and can be seen on “The Young Turks” online on Current TV’s Web site at youtube.com/tytcomedy. His Web site is jimmydorecomedy.com.  

PAUL F. TOMPKINS AND JO KOY: TWO FUNNY MEN, ONE FUNNY ARTICLE

One funny weekend

Top comics Paul F. Tompkins and Jo Koy tape their newest Comedy Central specials at Glendale’s Alex Theatre Friday and Saturday

By Carl Kozlowski 10/06/2011

There are two kinds of comics who tend to make a splash on the national scene: those who figure out how to appeal to everyone in the room, like Jerry Seinfeld or Bill Cosby, and those who might have a smaller audience base but whose fans are utterly passionate about them, like Patton Oswalt or Lewis Black. 

 

This weekend, the Alex Theatre plays host to the latest Comedy Central special tapings of two comics whose careers definitely fall into the latter category: Paul F. Tompkins on Friday and Jo Koy on Saturday. Both men enjoy cult followings and have found their niches in putting highly original spins on jokes about their personal and family lives, though their backgrounds couldn’t be more different. 

 

“The evolution of my standup is that it’s more personal now, and I draw on my own life as the source of my comedy,” explains Tompkins, whose special will be his fourth for the network. “The stories I’ll be telling in this hour will be centering around various jobs I had in show business and out — from day jobs and television and film. That’s the theme of the show.” 

 

A Philadelphia native, Tompkins has plenty of workplace material to choose from, as he — like most performers — bounced around plenty of meaningless jobs while keeping his real focus on climbing the ladder in the comedy world. Asked for a taste of the new stories, he recalled a past gig he had at a rather unusual video store. 

 

“In Philly, I worked in a video store that was all beta, called Beta Only,” he notes wryly. “That was my last job I had before I moved to Los Angeles. Beta was basically over at this time. We didn’t have a whole lot of customers, and it didn’t occur to me until years later that maybe it was a front for money laundering. It was either a front or a really terrible idea.”

 

Since moving to LA in 1994, Tompkins has landed a series of hot gigs, including working as a writer and performer on the legendary HBO comedy series “Mr. Show” and having his own regular segments on the original Craig Kilborn version of “The Daily Show” and HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” in addition to an HBO special. His most recent claim to fame, however, is hosting his own live monthly show at the Largo club in West Hollywood and his own “Pod F. Tompkast.” 

 

Tompkins also made a big move in his offstage life recently, marrying actress Janie Haddad. And, as he faces the pressure of filling the 1,300-seat Alex Theatre — one of his largest venues yet — he’s thankful to have a loving partner fully supporting him.  

 

“I’ve been doing this a long time, so I’m able to make the performance adjustment, as I’ve played all sizes at this point,” says Tompkins. “The biggest fear is getting people in there, and the challenge is shrinking the room. How do I make a place this vast feel like a small nightclub?”

 

For his part, Jo Koy — who was raised in Seattle by his Filipino mom and Caucasian dad, but started his stand-up career while caring for his grandmother in Las Vegas — faces live audiences for 300 shows each year. He has parlayed his wildly successful touring career into being hired as the national ad spokesman for Boost Mobile phones and also has established himself as a favorite panelist on the popular late-night E! Channel talk show “Chelsea Lately.” 

 

Jo Koy built much of his act around stories of him interacting with his mother, who famously calls him “Josep!” instead of his actual birth name of Joseph, and says that his new special will feature a lot of material about his current life as a single dad to an 8-year-old son. 

 

“We’re calling the new special ‘Lights Out,’ because we thought it would be a cool slogan for the tour and the style of comedy I’m doing,” explains Jo Koy, who derived his stage name from Filipino slang for “joker.” “This one’s going to get a lot deeper with my son. He’s 8 now, so there’s a lot more stories about him. I’m going to open up old stories with my mom and really bring those to life. It’s a lot more personal, and I can’t wait.”

 

While his ultimate career goal is to be a movie star, as the son of a career Air Force officer, Jo Koy has a special affinity for performing for US troops. He hasn’t performed in the Iraq or Afghan war zones yet, but he makes a point of visiting veterans’ hospitals along his tour stops and visiting wounded soldiers. 

 

“In Washington, DC, I visited the VA hospital and gave out T-shirts and DVDs to amputees,” says Jo Koy. “I never cried so hard in my life, ‘cause here’s a 20-year-old with his arm missing. When you’re part of a military family, you have respect for a soldier.”