Meet Danny Dalah | Comedy Writer, Director & Performer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Danny Dalah and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Danny, what role has risk played in your life or career?
As a society, we don’t have a space for mid-level creatives. We praise Oscar-winning actors such as DiCaprio, and we turn newbie actors who wait tables into the butts of jokes, but there is no mention of anything between these two options. You’re either a super-genius who has already succeeded or a fool for trying to succeed.

By picking a career in comedy, my life and other comedians’ lives are inherently full of risk. While more “stable” careers such as law and medicine offer their own challenges, they do at least provide a clear step-by-step pathway that can be followed like rungs on a ladder. With comedy, there is no ladder, there are no rungs, and you’re jumping across an abyss full of warning signs, hecklers, and disapproving looks from other comedians.

On a large scale, artists do not know if all of this hard work will pay off in terms of external success. For example, I have poured a lot of my savings and hours of my time into not only recording my musical comedy album titled Mr. Self-Sabotage, but also into filming a puppet music video for it. I built a stage out of PVC pipes, created curtains for it out of blue cloth, made marionette puppets, sourced a ton of props, and roped a dozen of my friends/ collaborators into helping me. Throughout this entire time, I did not know if all of this hard work would pay off. There is no textbook titled “How to Be a Comedian” that outlines “Step 27: Shooting a Puppet Music Video about how Everybody Wants to Date My Sister”.That feeling of pouring your heart, soul, and finances into something just for it to potentially die on YouTube with 3 views is really scary.

In a world with so much uncertainty, we have to look to internal success. For example, I can control how much I write in a day. I can sign up at an open mic. I can submit my project to that film festival. In and of themselves, these actions should be celebrated as accomplishments, because the rest is out of our control. I can’t control who will like my writing, or how that audience responds to my material, or if that film festival accepts my project, but I can show up and put my best work out there.

As artists, we can also adopt a science-like approach in managing and mitigating risk. Of course, releasing a musical comedy puppet video titled “Everybody Wants to Date My Sister” is inherently risky, but I first took a small risk, and incrementally, made my way up toward that big risk. For example, I had workshopped my comedy songs at open mics before I performed them at booked stand-up comedy shows. Like a scientist testing a hypothesis, if a joke did not work, then it was removed from my song the next time I performed it. Performing at an open mic in front of five disgruntled comedians is a small risk. Performing at a booked Comedy Store show in front of a 150 person audience is a bigger risk, but the success of the first one made me feel comfortable enough to risk the second one. One risk led to another, and eventually the puppet comedy video was created. With all of that in mind, it can still feel impossible, and I almost didn’t even submit the video to Dan Harmon’s Channel 101 due to fear of failure. My girlfriend convinced me to submit it, and it was ultimately showcased on Channel 101. However, by using this process, we can make this risky career choice slightly more stable and sustainable for our mental health.

Risk-taking is inherent to any artistic endeavor, but taking these risks will pay off, because the only thing worse than not jumping across that abyss is not trying at all for fear of failure. If all else fails, we can always say, “if this joke sucks, then that’s fine. I can write ten more jokes and maybe one of them won’t be suck-ish”, and that permission to fail is a magical tool.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
In my childhood, I was always messing around with a camera. I used stop-motion to animate my Star Wars action figures escaping my room in a Toy Story-like way. Han and Chewie descended down rope, made their way through a shag rug desert, and escaped on a longboard. I also even used Photoshop to make a crude animation of the US Founding Fathers dancing to “I’m Blue (Da Ba Dee)”. At the tail end of high school, I even directed, wrote and produced a forty minute comedy film titled “Death as a Frenchman” that I cringe at today. As I grew older, I followed this passion to USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, where I graduated with a Cinema and Media Studies Major and a Comedy Minor (Yes, that’s a real degree). I also studied comedy at UCB through their Sketch and Improv tracks.

Along my journey, I had written a song called “Tequila” based off a wild experience in Cabo. From there, one comedy song led to another, and the next thing I knew, I was performing musical comedy. That summary is a bit condensed; in high school, I was in a band called Single, Yet Taken, and I had performed live acoustic music for restaurants as well as taught guitar lessons. I even learned how to play flamenco guitar, which has definitely come in handy for a comedy song or two. In college, I enrolled in Judith Shelton’s stand-up comedy class and started workshopping different comedy songs before going on to perform them at open mics around Los Angeles.

At times, those open mics were incredibly depressing. There would be five people in the audience. Four of them would be comedians, who either outright hated musical comedy, were way too concerned with their own set to pay attention to anything you were saying, or who thought they were God himself. The fifth person would be a patron, who just wanted to do computer work until a comedy show started happening around them. After doing the open mic grind for a bit, I ended up getting booked at The Comedy Store, The Ice House, Flappers, The Palm Springs International Comedy Fest, and even the Ventura Comedy Fest. These experiences were rewarding in that I got to connect with other comedians and see how a live audience responded to my material.

At the time, I was working in the entertainment industry and through my comedy songs, I would often vent about my frustrations. We were overworked, underpaid, and over-promised under the guise of one day all of our suffering being worth it. In one example, I produced a music video for one of my songs called “Internshit”, which a lot of my peers related to. With another similar song, I followed up with a music video for “Job Interviews Suck”. Natasha Simone, my supportive girlfriend and frequent creative collaborator, directed both of these fun videos. At the core of my material, I often use comedy to critique some nonsense occurring in our society whether that be capitalism, anti-Semitism, or thirsty guys thirsting too hard. Ultimately, these comedy experiences helped me land gigs writing for sketch comedy podcasts, comedy video games, and everything in between. Recently, I wrote for Tic Toc Games.

After performing for a while, I wanted to release a musical comedy album using the material that I had built up. I teamed up with Jake Richter, a music producer and sound designer that I had met while writing comedy for Friendshrimp, a video game about a mantis shrimp that breaks out of an aquarium and destroys everything. Jake and I collaborated for months using different musical instruments to push the bounds of what we could do with musical parody. One song was a rap track along the lines of The Lonely Island that was called “I Peaked in the Third Grade”. For another one of my comedy songs titled “Song for the Anti-Semite” we utilized a Greek bouzouki, an Egyptian goblet drum, and a melodica to create a mix of Mizrahi and almost klezmer sounds.

With previous music videos, I had worked with directors, because I was also performing and I did not want to wear too many hats, but for the album launch video, I decided that I wanted to direct a puppet music video. I picked the song “Everybody Wants to Date My Sister” and had a blast storyboarding it, building a puppet stage out of PVC pipes, making curtains, sourcing puppets, and enlisting the help of friends/ family to create the entire piece. My mom, who is a talented muralist, painted all of the backgrounds. My sister helped create these little angel and devil finger puppets out of gloves. My girlfriend created the curtains, puppeteered the ensemble cast, and produced the video.

On Valentine’s Day of this year, Mr. Self-Sabotage was released and since then it has been written about in The Jewish Journal, Indie Music Discovery, the Beverly Hills Weekly, and even featured on Dan Harmon’s monthly film festival called Channel 101. As I’m currently in the Channel 101 contest, I had released a follow up puppet music video for a song called “Sausage Fest” in February and in March, I will be releasing another puppet comedy song video for that rap track “I Peaked in the Third Grade”.

You can stream Mr. Self-Sabotage on Spotify, Apple Music, and everywhere in between.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
For drinks, I would highly recommend going to Sawtelle and drinking some boba at Volcano Tea House; their strawberry milk tea is awesome. For coffee, Philz Coffee has really unique and interesting flavors such as their mojito or gingersnap coffee flavors. I drink the mojito one all the time. Also, you can check out the Culver Steps while you sip on coffee. Also located in Culver City, Bar Bohemien has some amazing craft cocktails and a really nice scenic view on a rooftop.

In terms of food, I highly recommend Hot Thai Restaurant; they have a delicious pad thai and lunch specials to go along with it. Also, the Farmer’s Market by the grove is an amazing place, but more specifically, I would suggest Pampas Grill for great Brazilian food.

For recreational activities, I would suggest just driving along the PCH until you find somewhere to pull over and doing a beach day. El Matador is a great date spot with all of its caves. It’s not only in Los Angeles, but Dave and Busters is a lot of fun to play different arcade games at. If you are here in September/ October, I would highly suggest going to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios if you are at all a horror fan. Lastly, Cliffs of Id offers some amazing rock-climbing routes if you are into health and fitness.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Natasha Simone, my girlfriend of five years and constant creative collaborator, deserves a lot of recognition in my story. At those open mics and depressing comedy shows, she has always been there supporting me and cheering me on when no one else would. We have also worked together on countless projects. She produced my most recent puppet comedy song video and she was in the trenches with me making endless sausages out of Googley-eyes, rubber bands, styrofoam and red socks. We went shopping for baby clothes that she managed to resize to hand puppets using some sewing sorcery. On top of our survival jobs, we must have been nonstop crafting for weeks to hit our deadline. When pursuing my dreams feels impossible, she reassures me that it is possible.

Website: https://www.dannydalah.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dannydalah/?hl=en

Twitter: https://twitter.com/dannydalah

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DannyDalah/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IVygswMJdU&t=2s

Image Credits
Image #1 (Janis Yue) Image #3 (Matt Francisco)