Review: Dana Gould
Stand-up and Simpsons writer is so good he’ll make you laugh about AIDS, rape and 9/11
by Glenn Sumi
February 19, 2016
5:12 PM
DANA GOULD at Comedy Bar (945 Bloor West), to Saturday (February 20), Friday 8 and 10 pm, Saturday 9 and 11 pm. $25. empirecomedylive.com. See listing. Rating: NNNNN
If you’ve ever doubted whether stand-up comedy was an art form, you need to see Dana Gould.
As he demonstrated last night at the first of five sets at Comedy Bar, the Massachusetts-born comic raises the act of telling jokes into something that goes beyond mere storytelling and social observation. (Not that those things are easy to do.)
In Gould’s hands, jokes become little symphonies or sonatas. He plays with light and shadow. He toys with audience expectations and sets up challenges to surmount, adding just enough physicality – a raised eyebrow, a puff on an invisible cigar – to illustrate his tales perfectly.
He’s been in comedy for decades, working in various capacities as a TV writer and producer (including for The Simpsons) and actor. That range of experience shows. His jokes draw on pop culture – just listen to his deconstruction of the phallic symbolism in the Fast And The Furious movies – but they’re not tied to it.
He’s just as likely riff on Stephen Hawking’s infidelity (“If the smartest guy in the world can get caught….”) or observe that every woman who has plastic surgery in L.A. looks like Janice, the female bass player from the Muppets band.
Unlike many middle-aged comics, he doesn’t pander to a younger demographic, trying for hipster cred. Gould’s smart and confident enough to let you come to him.
And while he goes to some twisted, far-out places – one joke references time-travelling to kill Hitler and Charles Manson as babies – he gets away with it because of his skill. It also helps that he’s got the sort of likeability and Joe Average looks of Midwestern comics like Fred Willard, Bob Newhart, David Letterman or even a Garrison Keillor.
Three minutes into his set, he declares that he was born on August 24, 1964. He lets that sink in before telling us it was “nine months and two days after Kennedy’s assassination.” Another pause.
And then he proceeds to talk about how twisted his father’s grief processing skills must have been as he proceeds to mimic his dad shucking his clothes and having sex with his mother. It’s an unbelievable bit of theatricalized absurdity, as his dad grunts socially anxious observations about the state of the country with each thrust.
As if to disprove the notion that some things are off limits in a comedy club, Gould then tells us he’s going to deliver jokes about AIDS, rape and 9/11. And then, one by one, he does just that, and they all land. He even manages to tell a Caitlyn Jenner joke that keeps the audience on his side.
Gould knows how to keep us on our toes. At one point, apropos of nothing, he breaks out into a song about a pancake man. That leads to a story about family trips to the pancake house on special Sundays. But there’s nothing sentimental or elegiac about it. Just wait till you see what dark place he takes you.
A few jokes are filler. A routine about having to take a dump while stuck in an elevator seems literally stuck between floors. A clever extended bit about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones is a little too meta to get big laughs.
But Gould knows to end with a bang. He brilliantly stages his joke about the most popular form of plastic surgery as a pitch meeting for investors of this particular invention.
And he gets personal by talking about his divorce, comparing braving the hazardous single’s scene for the first time in 20 years to being a zoo lion who’s suddenly dropped off in the middle of the Serengeti.
One of his best jokes concerns people who peak too early. What excited Neil Armstrong after walking on the moon?
Gould might very well be peaking now. Don’t miss him.
