Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
On Comedy Central's "Insomniac," join stand-up comic Dave Attell on his boozy journey through a late-night world of drunks, strippers, cops, sewage workers and just plain folks.
Dec 4, 2002 | Dave Attell has been doing stand-up comedy for 16 years. He was a writer-performer on "Saturday Night Live" for one season in the mid-'90s, and a correspondent for "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" for another. He has been a guest on "The Late Show With David Letterman" and "Late Night With Conan O'Brien," appeared on "Everybody Loves Raymond" twice and on "Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist" three times (in squiggle-vision). He was once fired from a part on "Spin City." People have tried to build shows around him in the past. People have not succeeded.
"You can say I failed," Attell says cheerfully, speaking of his television days, pre-Comedy Central, over the phone from New York. But you can't really say it now. Attell may self-identify as a "loser" and "a bitter, loner-type drunken guy," but "Insomniac With Dave Attell," which begins its third season on Thursday, Dec. 5, at 10:30 p.m. (following a special "The Best of Insomniac," at 9:30), has stealthily become one of Comedy Central's most popular original series, averaging 1.1 million viewers (for which it was rewarded with a new, improved prime-time slot).
Where other television efforts failed to capitalize on his talents (though widely respected in the world of stand-up, Attell is an admittedly subpar actor), "Insomniac" focuses on what he does best: drinking, smoking, chatting with strangers and staying up all night in strange cities across America.
"It's a hard show to do," he says. "It's hard to give it its own feel, because there are so many shows like it out there. We were definitely not the first one. But we take away the pretense of exotic places and beautiful people and the hottest dance clubs and fine food. We take away all that and put that feel on to just going to your neighborhood bar."
As he describes it, "Insomniac" is basically "'E!'s Wild On' for ugly people," a sort of nocturnal travelogue for which he provides the enthusiastic, smart-mouthed but rarely caustic commentary. It's neither particularly original nor particularly innovative, but the show's seedy charm creeps up on you, thanks entirely to its host's own seedy charm. Attell is a 37-year-old, bald, big-nosed, tubby guy who smokes too much and drinks too much and seems most comfortable in a bar. But he also exudes a weird benevolent energy.
On the show, Attell runs from one exciting place to the next with troll-like wonder. And as the show has become more popular, people seem happier and happier to see him. The college kids watch him on TV, then they go out drinking and suddenly there he is, buying a few rounds and pressing the flesh. One young woman on the street in Albuquerque, N.M., greets him like a long-lost friend. "I can't believe you're here!" she says. He's like the mayor of late night.
"I'm a stand-up comic, that's my real profession," Attell says. "I'm not a host or a TV personality. So I take my mediocrity at that and try and meet regular people and see what happens. A lot of it is just getting what you can get, depending on who you run into on the street. The good thing and the bad thing about the show is that you run into a lot of people -- a lot of college kids have kind of adopted it as kind of a drinking show.
"That kind of hurts us in the bars, because when we first started, I could go into a bar and just hang out and talk to a couple of people. They thought we were like the news or something. Now we go in and it becomes this big college drinking competition. That kind of hurts the whole feel of the show. A lot of it has to do with the fact that in some places all the action is at the college bars or the gay bars and usually there is a big crowd and it gets a little hectic.
"We don't really show it when people are mean drunks or racists. Because that's not what the show is about. It's not about like, 'Ooh, the late-night world: Once you get a few drinks into someone -- they're an asshole!' I mean, we all know that, you know? It's more like a continuous party after my stand-up show, until dawn. To keep the show moving and to show how every town has something to offer and something to see."
Atlanta, for instance, has the Clermont Lounge, where overweight strippers crush beer cans with their breasts. Charleston, W. Va., has late-night monster truck rallies. Boise, Idaho, has target practice at the gun club, Chicago has the Windy City Wrestling School, Tijuana has a cockfighting training center and Boston, of course, has frat parties. One thing Attell actually doesn't seek out is weirdness. The show stays away from exploiting people for laughs, and Attell, who is polite and gregarious, seems to find something interesting in everybody.
"The problem with weird is that because of things like 'Jackass' and 'Fear Factor,' we're running out of weird," he says. "Weird has been exploited, and when I started the show, I knew that I didn't want to play that game. That's not what I'm about. I wanted to show people being normal, late-night drinking and partying. And any kind of alternative lifestyle stuff is appreciated. But I don't see the point in being weird for weird's sake. I had an experience in Portland where this guy said to me, 'If I get naked I'll get on my bike and ride around and you can tape me.' And I said, 'Well, I can't tell you to do that just for the camera -- unless you would normally do that.'"
Each episode kicks off with highlights of his live comedy in a new city (past sessions have visited Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Miami, New Orleans, Kansas City, Boise, Philadelphia, Montreal and his hometown of New York), then follows him as he hits the local bars and after-hours scenes. When even the partiers have gone to bed, Attell checks in with fellow graveyard-shifters and insomniacs: steelworkers, sewage treaters, crime-scene cleaners, dairy farmers, cartoonists, strippers, astronomers and traffic reporters.
