I had never heard of Dan Licata. I watched his standup special to distract myself from the pain of novel coronavirus.
It was really funny. I laughed until my sides hurt. Mind you, they already hurt before I started laughing, so I guess that’s not really impressive.
The concept is simple—a thirty-something burnout tries to “rap” with an auditorium of fifteen-year-old boys using dated jokes about Bam Margera and George Bush—but it works because of how believable Licata feels as an arrested adolescent. I hope it’s an act, but I’m honestly not 100% sure. Over and over, he delivers lines with brash, can’t-fail confidence (“I took my grandma to this all-female Papa Roach cover band, it’s called Mama Roach!”)…only to bomb, because nobody even knows what he’s talking about.
There’s more, of course. Licata tells vivid stories that thrum with surrealistic nonsense, all while remaining tightly integrated with his character. Bizarre asides—”edging, but with piss“, living in a “fifty-floor walk-up” with his mother and her twenty pet pitbulls, and “foot day” at the gym—are interspersed with actual funny lines (“PTSD? I can’t even get these fuckin’ flashbacks in hi-def?” … “They oughta make him change his name to Wario Batali!”) that get unironic laughs. It’s a really dense bit of comedy: both far smarter and far stupider than it appears.
There’s layers to Licata’s act. At one point, he makes a 9/11 joke, realizes that nobody in the audience was alive when that happened, then condescendingly explains 9/11 to them, as though they’re small children (“okay, here’s what you need to know. Osama bin Laden was like Voldemort and Thanos combined!“). He then, in classic Trumpian fashion, centers the tragedy on himself by telling a grandstanding story about how he refused to have sex until OBL was caught (“this was before we had the term ‘volcel’, by the way!”), presenting this as a heroic personal sacrifice. The emotional register is so catastrophically misjudged at every level that it smacks of real genius, just like getting every answer wrong on the SAT is only possible if you could also get them right.
You could contrast For the Boys with Tim Heidecker’s An Evening With Tim Heidecker, which consisted of Heidecker playing an unfunny, obnoxious jerk. The difference is that Heidecker hates his character with a passion, and makes sure you hate him too, while Licata has some fondness for his. When he allows his fictive persona to get a small, momentary win, we smile.
And why shouldn’t we? He seems like he’d be fun to hang with: the living, breathing avatar of “dudes rock”. We all knew a Dan Licata growing up. Most of us wish we were still friends with him, but we’re scared to reach out, because what if he changed since high school? What if the world dulled his shine? What if he became boring? There’s something special—almost religiously so—about the Dan Licatas of the world. They’re the holy fool you normally encounter in mystic Sufi parables, raised on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Beavis and Butthead.
“Listen, guys. If you take anything for my assembly here today, I want it to be this: don’t do the stuff that I did…because I already did it, and you’d be copying me. You should definitely do similar stuff, but put your own spin on it.”
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