Dan Licata on Jackass, Tech Decks, SNL, Joe Pera, and His Brilliant New Special

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I was already familiar with Brooklyn-based comedian Dan Licata's work on the late, great Adult Swim TV show Joe Pera Talks to You, and he has a very funny special out today, Dan Licata: For the Boys, in which he went back to his high school in Buffalo and performed for a group of literal 15-year-old boys. It's a great concept executed very well, and I was excited to talk to him about this and much more:

Tell me about the logistics of filming this special.
I had to reach out to my old high school, and I'm very grateful it's not the same principal that was there when I was a student, because I feel like that would've been an automatic "No" if we had asked her. But it's a new principal, and he was into the concept. His only caveat was, "We don't want our name on this," and I was like, "Okay, I respect that."

Getting a group of boys aged 14-16 in Buffalo, New York is a lot harder than you'd think. It was probably the the most difficult part of this production. We ended up going through this casting agency in Buffalo so they could handle all the paperwork. You're working with minors, so you got to make sure every "i" is dotted and every "t" is crossed. They weren't like these New York stage parents who are like, "Yeah, say whatever you want in front of my kids." It's actual people in Buffal0.

It was funny—they had all the parents in this room that ended up being right next to the auditorium, and we were about to start rolling and my producer was like, "We need to do a soundcheck to make sure that room is completely soundproof." So I got on the mic and was like, "My dad has so much pubes that he has hair that grows on the inside of his dick. He's got to stick a nose hair trimmer up his pee hole." Then he like walked into the room and was like, "We're good." It would've been very funny if I got arrested halfway through, Lenny Bruce-style.

Yeah, I was gonna ask if there was stuff you couldn't say in front of the children for that reason.
There was maybe about six or seven minutes that we deemed obscene. Anything that referred to masturbating, or anything sexual, we shot separately just to take care of that. There's no rule book with this stuff—a lot of it is arbitrary—so we're using our best judgment. I'd written for SNL for a couple years, and standards and practices are at the whim of one person. "I know it when I see it."

Were any parents of kids who were familiar with your work?
Before this, thankfully, I was largely unknown to pretty much everyone there, which I guess worked in my favor.

That's not something you hear anybody in the performing arts say very often. "Thankfully, nobody knew who I was this time around."
It does take a little bit of the stress off. You're not worried about someone cornering you and asking you a bunch of questions when you're trying to get in that space yeah to do your thing. The other nice part about it was that the kids that were there had to be around 15 years old, so I didn't have to worry about all my aunts and cousins coming out. Then it'd be like a talent show-type thing. So it was nice to have that excuse. "Sorry, Aunt Judy, you're not a 15-year-old boy, so unfortunately you can't come." That provides a good buffer.

One thing I really liked about this special is the kids not really being into all of your material by design—seeing their lack of reaction throughout took off the guard rails a bit for people watching at home.
Absolutely. I mean, I kind of knew going in that they weren't going to know who Papa Roach is. That reference is going to go a mile over their heads. They were very polite, but very timid. They're at that awkward stage in their life where they're not super comfortable in their own skin. Over the course of the special, they did kind of warm up and get a little bit more comfortable—but they were very clammed up at the very beginning.

Thankfully, just from doing standup for 12 years, I'm very used to performing for people who aren't really digging what i'm selling. I've got thicker skin in that regard. You think of your big debut comedy special—you want to seem like you're crushing, and I guess I could've done it in Brooklyn for an audience of friends and fans, like a coward. But cutting to those reaction shots, seeing them digesting it and trying to figure it out, adds a whole another layer of hilarity.

Were there any kids in the audience that stood out to you in terms how much they were or weren't receiving the material?
We stipulated that you have to be 14, and there was one kid that had a 12-year-old brother, and the casting director was like, "Look, they're a package deal, I don't know what to tell you. The 12-year-old's gotta watch it." I kept visually gravitating towards him throughout the performance, and he did come up to me afterwards. I feel like it was sort of a "Eureka!" moment for him, where he's definitely never seen a good amount of stand-up in his life and he was like, "I've never seen anything like that." He wasn't facially loving it the whole time, but afterwards...I forget how he phrased it, but it definitely unlocked something in his brain.

A lot of my favorite things, creatively, were things that did scare me a little bit at first. Being nine years old and seeing The Tom Green Show for the first time, I remember physically recoiling, like, "What the hell is this?" And then something something clicked. It really gelled with me.

Tell me more about what you thought what you found funny at the age of 15. It is a really pivotal age, I remember the first time my friend showed me Mr. Show when I was 15—I was like, "Oh my God, where has this been all my life?"
There was Jackass, which I covered extensively in the special. I remember seeing Zach Galifianakis' Comedy Central Presents when I was in middle school, and I'd never seen stand-up like that. I was like, "There are no rules." I remember seeing the first episode of Stella and feeling like, "This was made for me. This is my style."

With some of this stuff, when we were around that age, there was also a sense of mystery—or, at least, effort—to discovering new things that broke your brain open. Now it's much more available, much less mysterious.
Yeah, there was Kazaa, Limewire, all that stuff—the early days where you could download some file that would take 16 hours and might give your family computer a virus, but it had this show that you couldn't get anywhere and had to have it. I discovered a lot of music that way. There was also this British show that was the British version of Jackass—Dirty Sanchez.

I remember that.
I was pretty obsessed with that and The Dudesons, which was the Finnish version of Jackass. Anything in that realm, I was trying to get my hands on every second of it that I possibly could. Limewire wasn't quite as cool as, like, the underground VHS trading of the mid-'90s—but I still am nostalgic for those days. There was a sense of discovery.

Tell me a little bit about what kind of music you're into.
I have a pretty wide range—everything from indie rock to death metal. I grew up listening to the first wave of hardcore punk—Circle Jerks, Black Flag, all that stuff. Now I have a lot of friends that are or were part of the post-hardcore indie rock scene in New York. You know the band Tomb Mold?

Yeah, they're great.
I saw them a month or two ago at, like, 3 p.m in Bushwick. They were incredible. That's the perfect time for me to go see a death metal band. I would love more 3 p.m shows.

Let's talk more about Jackass. I feel like, when Jackass Forever came out—which was great—there was this cultural shift where it was like, "Okay, actually Jackass is good." I feel like it's been good the entire time, and people just weren't really understanding what it was before. I'd love to hear you talk about that, because you seem to have a really good understanding of the essence of Jackass.
I think what happened is that the critics that were reviewing Jackass when the first movie came out were too old to to get it. It wasn't for them. Now, the people who are critics grew up on it, get it, and love it. It did feel like Jackass Forever was like seeing old friends again you know. It really did hit at the perfect time. But yeah, I think it was good the whole time. I recently re-watched the entire series—I downloaded the episodes as they aired on MTV, with the original music and all of that.

You know, the first time I ever heard the Smiths was on Jackass. I remember typing "Hang the DJ" into Limewire and getting the shittiest, most corrupted file. I hate to be one of those "You couldn't do that nowadays" types, but Jackass was so raw and unproduced. Its influence is everywhere, really, and it's really hard to replicate.

You could tie something like Impractical Jokers to Jackass pretty easily. Obviously, it's no Jackass.
I've always called it Jackass For Dads.

Tell me more about growing up in Buffalo.
Buffalo is basically a Midwestern city. Everyone loves the Bills, everyone's drinking beer and eating chicken wings. That's really what it is. That suburban mischief is really what I connected to—the CKY videos or whatever. On the weekends, there was nothing to do except drive around in a car. Someone either had a fake ID or looked old enough where this one kinda sketchy gas station would sell beer to you, and you'd just drive around, find an empty parking lot, and try to find a group of other like-minded people to just fuck around with.

Not to name-drop, but, I did go to school with Joe Pera. That's how we met. We do have very much an odd couple-type dynamic, but we grew up together. He was the first person to visit me in the hospital after I broke my legs. I remember waking up from a morphine nap and he was just like, "Oh my god, what happened?" It had that feeling of disappointing your parents. He was clearly very worried for me.

Tell me more about your professional and personal relationship with Joe. I first became aware of you through your work on Joe Pera Talks to You.
It was interesting growing up together. Similarly to when I first saw The Tom Green Show, I didn't know quite what to make of Joe. Then, it was like something clicked. We are different, but we are also similar. We started writing dumb little things together in high school, and then we moved out here after college and started hosting a standup show together.

We both definitely live in the absurd. I know his show is hyper-realistic, but there is absurdity in there. It's kind of annoying to me when people say, "This show doesn't have any jokes in it" or "It's not funny." It's very dense—and, yes, there's some subtle things, but there are also some extremely blatant things as well. It's very obviously a comedy.

Well, that goes back to what you were saying about watching the Zach Galifianakis special and realizing there were no rules to comedy. A lot of people, unfortunately, really like the rules!
Both Joe and I have rules for our own comedy. I have lore that goes along with my comedy—I'm still in high school, all these things. But one thing that's more of a subconscious rule is that if you can predict the punchline, then that's a bad joke to me. Being at SNL, every week it would be like, "I could've told you how this skit was going to go based on the like first two two lines of dialogue." That's what those audiences want, is just to be spoon-fed this thing. "Alright, here's one spoonful, here's a slightly bigger spoonful of the same exact thing, and now one big, last spoonful of the exact same thing." That's what they take comfort in.

I try to treat the structure of my my jokes more like Lost Highway, the David Lynch movie. Halfway through that movie, it just becomes a different movie—and that is so awesome to me. When I'm writing a bit, any time you can make a hard left turn to sort of keep the audience on their toes...I'm such a big fan of those moments, and when the audience is with you and they get it and appreciate it, that's the ideal.

Another thing I really loved about this special is the segments with you talking to the three kids. There's a risk of interacting with kids in this way, the potential to talk down to them—but it really does feel like you talk to them instead, which provided a really good comedic tension. A lot of adults' instincts when they come into contact with younger people is to be condescending, which is obviously unfair.
Yeah, I did try to treat them as equals. Intellectually, my character is supposed to be technically dumber than they are, so I did try to not talk down to them. We shot all six segments, including a montage, in three hours. I was trying to be as economical as possible with it—I think we got three takes for each segment. We were really cruising through it because of child labor laws, where we're done at 5:30 no matter what.

If I were to film it all again, though, I would even lean into that a little bit more—being like, "Look, even though I'm twice your age, I really look up to you guys. I want to graduate too." [Laughs]

When I was working at VICE in the mid-to-late-2010s, there was this shock amongst the elder millennials on staff that the younger generation had their shit together more. "Why are these kids into clean water and hiking? They should be smoking meth!"
It's cyclical, right? There's the punk movement in the '70s, then 20 years there was grunge, and then 20 years later we had all those bands that were like, "I'm so bored, everything's boring." But in between, you had all these other generations that are a little more forward-thinking and going places.

What did you aspire to when you were 15?
As corny as it is to say, this is the only dream I ever really had. There was no backup plan. Even now, with this special, I financed it myself. I put all my eggs in this basket. We all have those New York crisis moments where we start looking at property in, like, fucking Vermont or whatever. "Maybe I can just be a screenwriting professor at a liberal arts college or something."

Or move to Philly.
Oh yeah, everyone's trying to sell me on Philly. But this was really it for me. I'm very lucky to have had a career, especially during COVID when it was really tough. I have a lot of friends that had some momentum before COVID, and then it messed everything up.

I want to talk to you about the self-financing aspect a little more. I talked to Cole Escola about self-financing their special last year as well. Putting your own money into something provides a different level of ownership. You're not dealing with somebody at Paramount giving you 20 pages of notes, which is a plus.
Initially, we were going to try and sell it. We'd been talking to Peacock long before we shot it, and this woman at Peacock was like, "I love the idea, but we can't offer a ton of money." It seemed like me, my producer, and director would've made peanuts, but we would've made something. Then, the day before I sent it to her, she got let go. This industry is crumbling like a Nature's Valley bar. But I think that was ultimately a good thing. More people will see it now that it's on YouTube—you don't have to create an account or whatever. There's not going to be ads every seven minutes for Flonase.

It is just a product that I can market myself with, and ideally that money that I put into it, hopefully, down the line, comes back—whether it be people buying tickets to see me when I tour, or...you know, I guess it's mostly buying tickets. [Laughs]
I still gotta get the merch game going. I'm trying to get little Tech Decks with my face on it but they're so expensive. I'd have to sell them for $75. I saw this YouTube channel that popped up in my recommendations where this guy rebuilt the warehouse level from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and was just flipping a Tech Deck around it.

You've used the THPS design template while promoting this special, an aesthetic that I've seen you refer to as "Woodstock '99." It's also an aesthetic that seems extremely powerful on the minds of young boys. Why do you think that is?
It's just as simple as, "Your mom and dad would hate this." [Laughs] That might be all there is to it, honestly. Admittedly, I still play the Tony Hawk games almost every day. As it was with Jackass, they formed my musical tastes at a very young age, and just they're just so fun.

Did you play the recent remakes of THPS 1 + 2?
I only own a PlayStation 2. I can hold my games up to you so you know I'm not lying.

[Dan proceeds to show me PS2 copies of various Tony Hawk games, as well as copies of the first two THPS games on PS1.]

I'll cycle through them.