This last September, I was fortunate enough to put on two wildly different, but undeniably related presentations at the Detroit Public Library’s Popular Library, thanks to the man who runs it, Cully Sommers. First and foremost was something called “The Historicum,” a lengthy talk where my comedy partner, Dan Gomiller, walked around onstage pretending to be his own great-great-grandfather, Darbish Paloof. His only goal was to stop me from premiering our first record in a decade, a phonograph cylinder called “The Inquisitive Florist.” This was the culmination of 30 years of performing as “Dan and Jay’s Comedy Hour,” the last decade of which has been steeped in fake history. After the presentation, the DPL kept up our museum-style exhibit of 200-plus years of comedy history, 30 of which were (mostly) real, and they did so without comment (much to their credit). The other presentation concerned Presenting…Dick Davy; it was all about getting to produce my first vinyl comedy album after making a name in podcasting about vinyl comedy albums for over a decade.
This year, Comedy on Vinyl celebrates its 15th anniversary, even though I rarely do new episodes since I promised Weird Al’s manager that Al’s appearance would be our last regular episode. As you can imagine, vinyl comedy has not left my blood since I released that show in late 2021. Ever since my mom lent me the Smothers Brothers’ Live at the Purple Onion in the late ‘90s, I’ve been hooked. Comedy LPs are cheap, they’re easy to listen to, and thankfully the technology to listen to them still exists. Vinyl comedy has, however, left my shelves to a considerable degree in the last few months, thanks further to Cully Sommers.
During my first in-person meeting with Cully, as he showed me around the Popular Library on the DPL’s third floor, I was struck by the scale of their 50,000-album collection, and I took a gamble. I’ve been trying to sell some of my records, of late, mostly to make space, but equally to appreciate the more precious records in my collection. Among those are the Dick Davy record, Firesign’s Dope Humor of the Seventies (which I helped bring into existence without technically producing), this weird Groucho Marx bootleg called I Never Kissed an Ugly Woman, the two records by an indie group called Dawson and Harrell, and even a few signed records from folks like Carol Channing and my old pal Rusty Warren. I asked Cully how many of theirs were comedy records, expecting him to have the basics on hand. “None, really,” was his answer, which made my next step obvious.
“I have a few hundred, if you think you could use them,” I said, figuring I could chop my collection more than in half, and still come visit my old buddies in downtown Detroit whenever I needed to study them in a controlled environment. He then did the unthinkable – something no one without a massive repository for such things would ever do, in their right mind – he said he’d love to have them. Not only that, he said, but, “we can even put your name on the collection.” This, without even knowing a thing about Dan and Jay’s Comedy Hour, other than “comedy group” and “dumb enough to make a cylinder.”
You see, over the past decade, our comedy group has evolved, or, depending on your perspective, devolved from a couple of kids improvising on audiocassette in 1993, to video in 1994, to making a sketch pilot in 2007, making a couple of improvised feature films together in the ‘10s, and then podcasting together starting in 2014. We started out as a show where we talk about an old sketch, then bullshit for an hour, but eventually something sparked our need to give the show a story. Canonically, Dan is now podcasting from 30 years in the past, H.H. Holmes was one of our group’s oldest benefactors, and we have something called “The Time Box,” which lets past comedy groups and people from other dimensions enter our podcast (many of them sound suspiciously like us).
There’s a 50,000-word fake history of the group on the way to being published (self-published, no shock), but the theme of the book, and of what we’re now realizing is a 3-decades-and-counting piece of performance art, is something we discovered quite by accident. As we – the contemporary Dan and Jay – go back further and further in time, it’s become clear that they/we’re slowly but surely trying to cement our place in comedy history. We’re convincing our great-great-great-grandads to enter comedy, filling in when our progenitors are tired of performing, and filling our archives at every moment – now there’s enough to fill a small museum exhibit. Our characters have become two ineffectual comedians who do what all white men do when they perceive a loss of power – rewrite history. It’s just that our power is a fake time machine, and the Detroit Public Library has decided to cosign the whims of our crasser, mostly-fictional selves.
Mostly-fictional I say, of course, because when Cully Sommers offered to put my name on something at a big library, internally I flipped out. I couldn’t believe it. It was both a great honor and an unnecessary stroke to an already fragile ego, and yet…Comedy on Vinyl is part of my life’s work. It’s the thing that’s enabled the rest of my life’s work since then. It’s part of the reason I’m itching to finish our next sketch album and get it out on vinyl. If art didn’t imitate life, I’m not sure I would have had the perspective to go as hard on the fake film can from the British sex romp Rump Parliament, the fake 1893 cylinder “World’s Columbian Sex Position,” or the bottle of “Gornisht Red-Ribbon Heroin” from another of our group’s fictitious 19th-century sponsors. I got one month to shit all over the comedy history I found so precious via 40 mostly-fake artifacts, and an indefinite period to help comedy nerds study my favorite medium and genre of all time in that single moment. I am, in a word, spoiled. Our next fake museum display will probably reflect that, so the Comedy on Vinyl collection can remain pure. Until I donate our next album, that is.
