Las Vegas Weekly

July 1, 2010 · 2:24 PM

Shakespeare, dancing, comedy all in a day’s work for David Alan Grier

By Robin Leach

David Alan Grier.

Photo: Courtesy

Audiences know him as the outrageously irreverent contestant from Dancing With the Stars. His face gave away every one of his inner feelings when the judges handed out their votes.

Audiences know him from four years of memorable characters on the Emmy Award-winning In Living Color. But people might not know that he trained in Shakespeare at Yale University and earned an MFA from the School of Drama. That was long before Comedy Central named him one of the 100 Greatest Stand-Up Comics of All Time.

Having just completed a Broadway run in David Mamet’s acclaimed play Race, David Alan Grier now brings his comedic brilliance to Mandalay Bay Theater tomorrow. We chatted candidly and comfortably before he left L.A.

Robin Leach: Is playing Las Vegas different than playing in any other city? Do you tailor the comedy for a Las Vegas audience?

David Alan Grier: It’s different in one sense. You’re not playing for a hometown crowd. If I go anywhere else, if I go to Detroit, New York, Miami, your audience is going to be comprised of people who are in and around that city. Vegas is a resort and destination city, meaning you have people from all over the country, and to entertain themselves, they come to see me and all kinds of other people like me. So in that sense of no local references, it is different than playing anywhere else. That doesn’t make it difficult for me because I don’t do that kind of act. Most of the stuff that I talk about can be shared.

RL: Comedy is like art. It can be modern, it can be historical, it can be classical, and art is different for one painter and the next. Is comedy the same way, and if it is a field of many forms, what is the form you think you take to best?

DAG: I do agree that comedy takes many forms, from a guy like Frank Caliendo, who does an act that is really about impressions and impersonating people, to another kind of comic like Carrot Top, who has a bag full of props. I don’t do any of that. I tell jokes and stories. It’s a version of my life on relationships, religion, politics and sports, and everything that is happening now. Recently, I went out with some friends, three of us were comics who had performed that night. There was a woman there who asked me rather innocently, “So was everything that you guys talked about onstage true?” We all burst out laughing! I said it’s about my life, but is it true? No. Is it a documentary? No. Are a lot of things I talk about exaggerated? Yes, but that’s the style of comedy I use. That’s the style that is more in the vein of a traditional stand-up comic like George Carlin or Richard Pryor.

RL: Is the man who trained in Shakespeare at Yale the same guy who was a little bit humor-ridden on Dancing With the Stars?

DAG: That was the problem. I was overqualified for that position. Frankly, Robin, you’re the only one who has uncovered that. It was like hiring a PhD student to fix your drain. I’m not really cut out for the reality television world. It was fun; it was fun to be on the show and dance, and some of the hardest work I have ever done. But was I glad it was over? Oh, yeah!

RL: Your face is a dead giveaway -- sort of reads like an open book.

DAG: We have the Internet now, even things that I tweet, that I blog, people come to their own conclusion, no matter what you write. It’s a new and different world, especially on Dancing With the Stars. Everybody reads everything into something. But for the most part, I had a wonderful time, and I got along really great with my partner Kym Johnson. It was all pretty physical. The hardest work I’ve done is a musical on Broadway. That’s eight shows a week where you have to sing and dance. That to date still is probably the hardest work ever.

But Dancing With the Stars was still pretty hard! I went in there like “anyone could do this.” I had no respect for the show, and the dancers, the discipline, and I knew nothing about Broadway dancing. Yeah, I dance, I took dance classes in college, 800 years ago, and I mean after five minutes, I was absolutely drenched thinking, “Uh, oh!” That was hard work, your nerves are shot, the judges, it was hard.

RL: While studying at the Yale School of Drama, did you ever think you would become one of the greatest stand-ups of all time?

DAG: I never thought I would be in that 100. That was the farthest thing from my mind. I remember the first time I ever performed at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. I couldn’t believe I was actually sitting backstage about to go on and do stand up. Life is amazing, life is strange, life is wonderful. I never could have predicted it, or my career, my career path and the things that I’ve done and been able to do -- never in a million years.

RL: Did you come to the conclusion that there was not a lot of money in the Shakespearean business, but there was more in comedy?

DAG: Yes, very quickly! I remember I was on In Living Color, and Damon Wayans comes to me and says, “Yeah, I just played, I don’t know, Ho Ho’s Comedy Hut in New Hampshire,” and I was, like, why would you prostitute yourself like that? I thought people told smart-aleck jokes to get on television. He said, “Well, I just made about $25,000 in two days.” And it was like a week later I was doing stand-up. However, I’ve continued to do the stagecraft. I mix it in when I have the time, when I can schedule it into my whole performance schedule. It’s very simple; it’s something I love.

RL: Does one help the other? Comedy helps the acting, and acting helps the comedy?

DAG: Yeah, absolutely. I remember one time when I was in college, I saw Richard Pryor in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was doing this skit where he pretends to be a drunk. He pulls this bottle out of his back pocket and takes a sip from it. Where we were sitting, it looked real, but I snuck all the way down to the front just to verify if he had mimed it or if it was real. He had mimed it. That’s all acting. To this day, I remember being totally mesmerized by it.

RL: Are you looking forward to Vegas this weekend?

DAG: Oh, yeah! The food gets better and better. It never used to be good food and great wine! I remember I did a show in 1984; we stayed downtown and ate nothing but shrimp cocktail, burgers and fries. There was no Nobu. Now I do what everybody else does when they come to Vegas. I love shopping in Vegas because the clothes are bigger because everybody who comes to visit is overweight. So elsewhere you get a 34 waist, but in Vegas bad boy is a 38, and everybody feels good. For years, I would buy these shirts in Vegas that were size large. Then I would go back to L.A. and try to buy the same shirt, and they would say, “Sir, that is an XXL, not a large.”

“We’re going to have a great show and a great weekend in Las Vegas. Where better to spend the Fourth of July holiday?”

Robin Leach has been a journalist for more than 50 years and has spent the past decade giving readers the inside scoop on Las Vegas, the world’s premier platinum playground.

Follow Robin Leach on Twitter at Twitter.com/Robin_Leach.

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Follow VDLX Editor Don Chareunsy on Twitter at Twitter.com/VDLXEditorDon.

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