You can laugh it up at The Cat

Two Daves and a Willie share the mic on June 5 and 6

By STU CLAMPITT
news@readtherporter.com

June is busting out with belly laughs when comedians Dave Dugan, Dave “The King” Wilson, and Willie Bostic aim to amuse at The Cat in Carmel, 254 Veterans Way, on June 5 and 6. In order to amp audiences about the soon-to-stage stand-up stylings of these comedy kings, The Reporter spoke with Dave Dugan about how he ended up earning a living on laughter.

Dugan credits Carmel High School with planting the first seeds of his success.

“I was very shy as a kid and I credit the Carmel High School (CHS) student radio station for bringing me out of that shell,” Dugan told The Reporter. “Then when I went to four different colleges – which I’m not bragging about because I don’t have a degree from one – but I transferred a lot and I ended up at a school that didn’t have my major, which was radio and TV or telecom depending on where I was.”

Changing his major landed Dugan in a speech class, which he told The Reporter took him back to the most terrifying moments ever in junior high school.

“IUPUI is where I was going at the time, and I had the same nervousness and same introversion coming back,” Dugan said. “Then one time – on accident or on purpose – I started throwing in a little humor. When people were laughing, I thought, ‘Yeah. This is the way I can be in front of people and feel comfortable.’ To this day if I had to do a speech with no humor that is just straightforward, I’d be just as nervous as I ever was.”

Dugan called that first experience on the radio at CHS instrumental in his development.

“I would call the most pivotal point of my life the high school radio station because it was something I always wanted to do,” Dugan said. “In fact, when I was maybe nine or 10 years old, we had this closet under our staircase and so I created my own radio station down there. Now that I think about it, it sounds like a bad afterschool special.”

Dugan said that was how an introverted kid who wanted his voice to be heard and wanted to share music he loved found a way to do both.

“I did it, not just by myself, but with a couple friends,” Dugan said. “It was with rubberbands on walkie talkies with the switch always on, playing music. We wondered, ‘How far did it carry? Probably the other end of the neighborhood?’ Or so we thought. We let up on that talk button and heard a whole bunch of truck drivers cussing at us. I guess we were clogging up their frequency.”

Dugan went from being a kid who listened to the morning shows where people would, in his words, “make with the funny,” to a high schooler on the CHS station, to working at a college radio station.

“I loved comedy but I didn’t think at that point I was ever gonna be a stand-up comedian,” Dugan said. “But when the first club opened in town, I took a shot and realized that radio paid off more than I thought. Everything doesn’t transfer from radio to stage, but at least I had a head start on some of the material.”

Dugan is known both for being funny and keeping it clean, but that was not always the case. In the 1980s and ‘90s, when he was working clubs in Los Angeles, he didn’t have any self-imposed rules about language. For him, it evolved naturally as he learned to master his craft. Now there is a greater appreciation for being funny without profanity.

“Definitely in the last 10 years I’ve seen a real appreciation that I don’t think was nearly that universal before,” Dugan said. “I hear that so often from doing shows. Whether it’s a fundraiser, a corporate event, or even some of these shows at places like The Cat. People say they enjoyed it so much, and then they say, ‘You didn’t use any language. It was really clean.’ I think there was a burnout factor. Maybe people that had watched comedy were so exposed to a lot of language that, for some, really crossed the line, so they welcomed clean comedy into their lives.”

According to Dugan, if a bit is funny when it’s clean, then it really is funny.

“If you’re doing a bit and it’s got a lot of foul or inappropriate language you might be getting laughs, but if you took that language out of it and it wasn’t funny anymore, then you’d realize it was never really funny to begin with,” Dugan said.

You can get some good, clean laughs from Dugan and two other stand-up comedians at The Cat, 254 Veterans Way, Carmel, on June 5 and 6.

Get your tickets for the comedy show at tinyurl.com/TheCatUpcomingShows.

See everything coming up at The Cat online at thecat.biz/whats-on-stage-1.