Amy Schumer named her son after him. Bert Kreischer called him the “GOAT.”
Next week, acclaimed comedian Dave Attell cracks up the Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races in Charles Town, West Virginia, on Saturday, May 4.
“When someone says you’re the ‘GOAT’ and you kind of look goatish, like I do have a goat quality, I am a Capricorn, that is our sign, the goat,” Attell said before sharing his personal list of the greatest standup comedians of all time.
“There’s a lot of great ones: [Dave] Chappelle, [Bill] Burr, there’s never been so many giants walking the earth,” he said. “Mitch [Hedberg] was Mount Rushmore for joke writing. … Richard Jeni … Sam Kinison, Bill Hicks. … My Mount Rushmore is more of a Supreme Court, I’m gonna take seven or eight: Greg Giraldo and Patrice [O’Neal], there’s a big bench, Gilbert [Gottfried], Bob Saget.”
You’ll get a taste of his all-time standup comedy greatness if you show up next week to Hollywood Casino.
“I’m working on new stuff all the time,” Attell said. “Most of my stuff is just quick one-liners, I’m not a storyteller … it’s really about the jokes for me and always has been. The whole idea of like two or three jokes a minutes is kind of out of style, but that’s how I wanted to roll with it, I wanted to hit them and keep hitting them hard. Topics wise, it runs the gamut, I’m not very political, I’m not very confessional … I’m just classic, I’m just trying to do jokes.”
You can also watch his new Netflix special “Hot Cross Buns,” which premiered in March.
“Fans out there, thank you for watching, it was kind of a cool thing to be back on Netflix, great feedback,” Attell said. “These comedy specials are usually about an hour, so I wanted mine short. Everyone’s attention span is pretty small now with TikTok, so I definitely wanted to keep it on the shorter side, so that’s why it’s 40 minutes. … Even I, as a comic, have trouble watching specials. I usually have to take a pee break in the middle, maybe get a sandwich.”
The title comes from him playing “Hot Cross Buns” on a recorder, like in grade school.
“It was actually too short, I had it at 37 minutes and Netflix said you’ve got to bring it up a couple minutes to 40,” Attell said. “The special was done in San Francisco, so we went down to Fisherman’s Wharf and I played the recorder and there were seals there, we thought it would just be kind of a fun goof, but it turns out that was the biggest thing that people loved in the special. … When I don’t play the recorder, I play the cigarette.”
Born in Queens, New York, in 1965, Attell grew up on Long Island and started doing open-mic nights after graduating from New York University. His big break was VH1’s “Stand-Up Spotlight” in 1988, followed by an appearance on “The Late Show with David Letterman” in 1993, and working on “Saturday Night Live” from 1993 to 1994.
After a series of successful HBO specials, Attell became a household name by hosting “Insomniac” on Comedy Central from 2001 to 2004 where he would hilariously interview folks at bars around various nightclubs.
“We never really knew what was going to happen,” Attell said. “We would plan on going to a place and that might be closed or we might hope to be part of an event and that was rained out, so it always kept me thinking, kept me loose and kept me on my feet. … When you watch reality TV, a lot of it is scripted, but this was not scripted. … It was toward the beginning of the travel show phenomenon because there were a lot of travel shows after that.”
I guess you could say that his travel-show stardom is ironic because his seminal comedy album “Skanks for the Memories” (2003) saw him admit, “I hate traveling, mostly because my dad used to beat me with a globe.”
Hear our full conversation on the podcast below:
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