THE ONLY ALBUM THAT HAS EVER BEEN REMIXED

During the pandemic I set out to put together a remix album of my first standup album, something I don't think any comedian had ever done before. I reached out to a bunch of musicians and got 21 of them on board to each remix one track from my album. Because it's not really clear what a remix of a standup track is, I told them they could do whatever they wanted as long as they referenced my original track in some way -- they could sample it, they could use my words as lyrics in a song, they could literally just do the bit themselves, or they could do something weirder than all of that. What I received back from them was the most diverse slew of content you could possibly imagine. There are grime rap songs, sketches, house music, country songs, folk, industrial, instrumental hip hop and so much more. Everybody crushed it.

Over the course of months I collected these 21 tracks into a full-length album and released it through Aspecialthing Records as a double-vinyl package alongside my standup album. It actually came with a supplemental 7-inch and CD-single in order to fit all the remix tracks in the package. I designed and laid out the packaging, made the website for the album, put it on bandcamp, coordinated royalty payments with the artists and got them all tagged (or not tagged) correctly in every store and streaming service. Once it was done I slept for years.

Buy the vinyl, listen to the digital album, or check out the project's website.

ONE RECORD A MONTH

In 2024, I made a pact with myself that I would put out one record a month. I designed all the packaging, matched the right color vinyl with the right the designs, self-distributed a few via CD Baby and put them all on my bandcamp. One was a split release with a band called SMALL, one was a companion to my magazine I'm Scared, and one was shaped like a gun. I collaborated with artists on three of the covers and otherwise made all the art myself. A small-run vinyl plant I love very much called Lock Grooves manufactured most of the releases, but two I had to source from other places. The packaging often came from Lock Grooves as well, but just as often I worked with printing places around the country to get the right thing made. I made the website, I managed sales and eventually put it together into a singles collection and a box set that hasn't been released yet.

Check out the records, check out the website, or listen to the digital versions on bandcamp.

MOSTLY TRAINS

In 2023, my old friend Ismael Loutfi and I decided we should hit the road together. We'd both toured a lot but never together, and we also were both pretty frustrated with comedy in the social media era. We decided we should as old school as humanly possible, and thus, we went on tour by trains. Mostly.

We took a train up to Portland, Maine for a show, and then down to Boston for another. Then down to Portsmouth, NH where we did a show and hitched a ride to the middle of the woods in Vermont for a gig. (This is the "mostly" part.) We took a boat across the river from Burlington to Plattsburgh then caught a train up to Montreal for a show. Then a train to a show in Toronto, then a train to a show in Detroit, then Cincinnati, Chicago, a sleeper car train ride back to the east coast, a Philly show, a Brooklyn show, then sleep. We promoted the hell out of it -- helped immensely by a beautiful photo shoot from Sam Cashell -- and got some great crowds for our crazy tour. I mapped out the route, booked all the shows, booked all the travel and managed the money, and it was so much more work than I could have possibly imagined. What a blast, though. I've put a lot of tours together; they were all a lot of work and they were all a lot of fun but this one stood on its own.

Check out the website!

HOLY FUCK. LIVE COMEDY.

I used to run a weekly show in downtown L.A. with my friends. (See Holy Fuck. Free Comedy. below.) I knew I wanted to end it on a high note and create some sort of document of what we did, so we recorded an album before we said goodbye.

I grew up loving the cheap compilation albums punk record labels like Fat and Epitaph would put out, so we made a comedy version -- and our version -- of that. The result is a $10 double-disc album featuring 44 standup tracks and three original sketches from Eric Andre, Dana Gould, Hasan Minhaj, Natasha Leggero, Rory Scovel, Moshe Kasher, Kyle Kinane, Sean Patton, Beth Stelling, Whitmer Thomas and so many more. Rooftop Comedy released the album, whose director would later leave and start Blonde Medicine Records, and take the album with him to his new label. (His name is Dominic Del Bene and he rocks.) You can buy the digital album from them or listen on Spotify. I'm so proud of it.

AWFUL LEVEL LEAGUE

Kyle Ayers and I refused to let the pandemic stop us from performing, but we also hated Zoom shows. (The comedy community spent 2020 and 2021 lying to themsleves that telling jokes into a webcam to a crowd of 20 where you can't hear laughs and can barely see faces is the same as a live standup show. It drove me insane. I stopped doing them entirely after the first few months.)

Instead, we started a Twitch show called Awful Level League on Kyle's channel that combined two of our favorite things -- 1) Super Smash Bros and 2) punishing our friends. Every week, Kyle and I would build shitty levels in Super Smash Bros' level builder and invite a different comedian on to be subjected to varying types of constantly losing the game in a frustrating way. It was a blast and we built it top-to-bottom. I designed the art and skinned the channel for it, and Kyle managed the stream on his end, skyping in both myself and our guest. We built up a devoted following of people who pop into the chat to talk smack and make fun of the levels with us. We played in a private online room but gave out the login code on the show, so some of the fans would join in the game and play with us. To this day I'll still see some of their usernames pop up here and there in my notifications on Instagram and think, "Oh dude they're from Awful Level League!" It was a cool thing.

WHAT DAY IS IT

I built up a pretty good amount of followers on twitter -- like 17,000 or so -- which felt good, but in 2017 the app went from making me happy to making me despondently sad every single time I read even a micron of an interaction on it. I wanted to say "FUCK YOU" to it while still letting the world know I had over 15,000 followers, which was an ego thing for sure, and I have no defense for that. In 2019 I deleted all of my tweets and began tweeting "What day is it" every single day. I did this for years. After awhile I programmed an app to do it for me, and so my @davetotheross twitter account tweeted "What day is it" at 12:15pm PST on-the-dot every single day until somewhere in 2024 when that app started demanding I pay for a subscription. (Normally I'd pay in a heart beat, but as a broke comedian I could not find any justification for spending money on a useless bit like this.)

I still think it's so funny. It infuriated a good amount of my followers and caused a few comedians to literally yell at me to my face, which I will never understand. Apparently I needed to "stop fucking with" them. How you could take my nonsense twitter bit so personally is completely beyond me but it does make me even more proud of this needlessly long, dumbass bit.

I have barely any proof that I did this, too. I posted about it a bunch of times but all the posts are gone now, I took screenshots but I can't find them, and I turned the account into the twitter for my podcast. I could've sworn I took a screen video of me scrolling through the account numerous times, but alas, those are gone, too. I found but one archived instagram post of a single screenshot and it's the only evidence I have of my favorite thing I've ever done.

GOOD HEROIN

From 2015 until I moved to New York in 2022, I ran a weekly comedy show with some of my best friends -- Olivia Doud, Matt Ingebretson, Katherine Swope and Shannon Cloud -- at my favorite place on earth, Stories Books & Cafe in Echo Park, Los Angeles. That venue changed my life in that no matter how difficult my life got or how poorly I was treated by jobs and people in general, the people always received me with care and let me know I was loved while expecting nothing from me in return. We are in the first paragraph of my description of this show and I haven't even told you a single thing about the show yet, and that should tell you just how much of a home to me Good Heroin and Stories Books were in L.A.

Stories has a tiny little weird back patio with a stage and we packed it to the gills every single week with the best comedy fans in the world, then once a year took our dog-and-pony-show to a much bigger (but still local) music venue -- namely The Echo, The Echoplex and The Regent -- and sold each of them out to celebrate that year's anniversary of the show. I don't even want to list who we booked. Name a famous comedian and they've done it. We booked and produced comedy for the Echo Park Rising festival years and years in a row, we were featured in the LA Weekly, LA Times, LAist and Five Every Day countless times, and most importantly we had a blast. There is no farewell video or album or short to document the show because it's still going! I moved away and I left it in the caring hands of Katherine Swope, Lindsay Adams and Rob Haze. Go see them and tell them I say hi.

For more info, including flyers, lineups and how to go to the show in LA, check out the show's instagram.

TWO-HEADED BEAST

From 2010 to 2014 I produced a monthly storytelling series in L.A. called Two-Headed Beast, along with my friend and co-host Jake Weisman. I truly cannot believe the caliber of performer we were able to book on the back patio of Stories Books & Cafe for our tiny show. Michelle McNamara told a story once, as did Jesse Michaels from Operation Ivy, author Neal Pollack, Eric Andre, Kumail Nanjiani, Megan Amram, Maria Bamford, Moshe Kasher, Dave Holmes, Beth Stelling, Kyle Kinane, Hasan Minhaj, Margot Leitman, Brian Finkelstein and so many more. Before we retired the show, our good friend Rodolfo Ornelas made this beautiful mini-documentary about it.

HOLY FUCK. FREE COMEDY.

From 2009 to 2013 I ran a weekly standup comedy show in downtown Los Angeles. I started it on my own and by 2011 it'd become such an operation that I'd brought on Jeff Wattenhofer, Matt Ingebretson, Megan Koester and Jessica Ruiz, all friends of mine who continue to make great thigns to this day. It was in a beautiful movie theater and kicked off every week with original sketch videos we -- and some of our favorite comics -- made for the show. Incredible comedians would perform, many of whom are straight-up famous now. When we ended the show in 2013, there was a line so long around the block that hundreds of people couldn't get into the show. Patton Oswalt and Marc Maron performed and we ketp the show going, throwing comedians on stage who were there hanging out, as long as the crowd was able to stay awake. I think we wrapped up at about 1:30am.

At the time it was just what we did and I don't think it sunk in til years later just how special it was. It was like... an amazing feat. We made exclusive video and artwork for the show every single week, booked some of the best comedians in the country, many of whom ended up making exclusive sketches for the show too, and also screened shorts on the big screen from comedians shooting on zero budget at all, including my sketch group WOMEN. We ended up featured in the LA Weekly, the LA Times, LAist, Timeout and a bunch more, and we documented the show for posterity in the form of a two-disc compilation album. (See Holy Fuck. Live Comedy. above.) My dear friend G. Lewis Heslet put together shot the last show in super 8 and cut together this rad little movie.

For more about the show, including links and every flyer we ever made, check out the show's website.