Comedian Dave Hill on what makes a man, and how to run away from a hooker
Dave Hill appears June 27 with Janeane Garafalo
1:07 pm Jun. 27, 2012
Upon meeting the comedian Dave Hill, it is hard not to imagine him naked, and I'm pretty sure this is exactly what he wants.
He's titled his first book, a collection of personal essays that came out late last month, Tasteful Nudes … and Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation; several of these essays involve public nudity and encounters with prostitutes; on his website are photographs of him dressed in goofily seductive silk pajamas; then, of course, there are a couple of shots of him stripped nearly naked, shooting come-hither glances from his eyes with the sloppy intensity of a drunk superhero. It is all very tongue-in-cheek and very funny. But still. It's all out there, and even a semi-tastefully-nude Dave Hill is hard to erase from one's memory.
Now Hill is in New York City promoting the book, published by St. Martin's Press last month. There was a recent reading at the Soho bookstore McNally Jackson, and a lunch-hour reading with Janeane Garofalo in Bryant Park today. Tonight he will appear on the Chris Gethard Show, the popular cult comedy talk-show on Manhattan public access television that started as a revue at the Upright Citizens Brigade.
Its release garnered critical acclaim.
"Unlike many comics who string a bunch of jokes together with clunky transitions and call it a book, the NYC-based author actually can write," proclaimed the Gatecrasher column in the Daily News.
But the pretty consistent praise has not kept Hill from being a tad skittish about the overall reception, retaining the anxiety that fuels most of his stories.
"I’m worried people will all of a sudden be like, 'fuck this book.' But it seems like people like it," he told me when we met recently for coffee to talk about the book.
The qualities of good comedians often merge with those of good writers. There's the narcissism, the insecurity, the solitude, the throbbing-nerve sensitivity, especially to injustices real or imagined—all of which also happen to be common traits among teenagers. Could it be that the most finely tuned narrative skill comes from a selfish vestigial adolescent hyperawareness paired with a slightly more adult self-awareness and perspective?
In both his comedy and his writing, Hill masters this kind of arrested-development shtick. A recurring theme is an excessive preoccupation with sex. One of the best blurbs on Tasteful Nudes comes from fellow-comedian Chris Elliot: "Not only did Tasteful Nudes take me on an emotional journey through the seedy underbelly of Dave Hill’s life, but it also introduced me to a whole new slew of colorful and imaginative euphemisms for my pud."
Like the best comedy, it can be unsettling, and it works because it contrasts so perfectly with the aura of unironic sweetness that Hill projects.
For example, when we met, he was wearing a shirt printed with large pink and purple flowers (it went well with the ring he wore, which was decorated with stars and quarter moons) and opted for a chocolate chip cookie instead of something more, well, grown-up. He offered me pieces in regular 10-second intervals. Then there was his iPhone wallpaper choice, set to an image of a nearly too adorable fluffy white kitten.
"I was in Tokyo," he said. "And I was walking on the street and this prostitute kept following me and trying to get me to do some business and so I walked in this pet store to get away from her. And they just had this cat, and I took all these photos. It was like a quick transition out of filth into innocence. I’m sure I could’ve gotten rid of her anyway, but I wanted to look at puppies. It all worked out."
Things have always worked out for Hill—eventually, anyway—which is another one of the book's themes. Though he might cling to self-deprecation as if it were a security blanket—which it probably is—Hill has managed to accomplish most-to-many of the things he dreamed of doing as a kid.
"Things just come along," he said through a bite of cookie.
Hill grew up in Cleveland in an Irish-Catholic family, the second youngest but "emotionally the youngest" of five kids. He played hockey and guitar, and wore "colorful" sweaters in hopes of looking like Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick. That sort of thing got him beat up a lot.
When he graduated from Fordham University in the early '90s, his goals were to be "a globe-trotting rock star," but his first job was working at a homeless shelter where, he said, he got really good at applying ointment to scabies sores and changing adult diapers; his first night as manager, another employee stole three hundred pounds of meat from the kitchen. His managerial duties were lifted.
He worked in New York and in Cleveland for a while as a freelance journalist, publishing pieces in The New York Times and Salon. (Recently, he published a typically funny-sweet piece about Ice-T on The Huffington Post called "Ice Loves Coco So Much It's Actually Kind of Weird." ) He got into comedy on a similarly off-the-cuff suggestion. While writing for a now-defunct SpikeTV show, a producer suggested that he audition for a part.
"I was always acting like such an idiot around the office, they were like, 'Maybe you should audition for one of the things.' And that’s kind of how it was first, like maybe I could be a performer or whatever … . I think I’m a good example of this: the move-to-New-York-and-see-what-happens."
One of the things that happened was his friends' and coworkers' encouragement of him to get on stage.
"A friend was doing a comedy show, and it went well, so I tried it, and I was lucky early on in that I didn’t have horrible experiences that were really daunting. I had good experiences early on, so it was like, 'oh, OK. I’ll do it again.' And I didn’t have any goals, like career goals. I was like, 'I’ll show up next week if you want.' So I’d actually done television really before I had performed live. I did it sort of backwards. I was terrified at first to do it but I thought ... you know, I get really shy and socially anxious, so I thought it would be good to make myself do that. 'Cause if nothing else it’ll be easier to go to someone’s house for dinner or something."
Since then Hill's showed up on shows on MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, and the Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim." On the performing front, Hill also plays guitar in a couple of his friends' bands and in his own "hot rock band," Valley Lodge, with whom he recently toured Japan. While there, in addition to being followed by prostitutes and taking photos of kittens, he became obsessed with the technology of Japanese toilets.
"The thing I like about performing is it’s, you know, the only time when I’m like fully out of my head and really just doing that and not thinking, 'Oh shit did I pay the rent?' I mean even with music, you can be like 'This is the guitar solo section,' [and] then you’re like, 'Oh, forgot to pick my laundry up.' But with comedy that doesn’t happen. To me, anyway. I really like that aspect of it."
There's a video of Hill playing guitar at the Bell House on the night of his book-release party—at which Kristen Schaal, Janeane Garofolo, and John Hodgman all feted the comedian—and he's kind of great, and clearly taken with the support. Writing a book, it turns out, was a more permanent goal for Hill than his comedy.
"I don’t have like 'I definitely want to do this, I definitely want to do that,' but writing a book was one of the few things where I was like, I definitely want to do that at some point, and then I just got really sidetracked with comedy and music and then I was like, 'Oh, maybe they’re gonna stop making books. I better get on that,' you know? There was part of me that just really wanted it, wanted a hardcover book like this. Something to show my parents. I think if no one wanted to do it, I would’ve been really bummed about it. But then it worked out fine."
If Hill can forget about paying the rent and picking up the laundry while telling jokes on stage, writing a book required a different level of attention, which often had him bumming out. It turns out that even though writing and comedy are a lot alike, the former is a little less fun.
"I kind of had to relearn how to write because I started as a journalist. Then when I was doing comedy full time, I stopped doing all that stuff and I only wrote for myself, like stuff that I was going to say on stage, whether it be a story or jokes or whatever. When it came time to do the book, I was like, 'Oh it’s a book. I’m a grown man writing a book.' I got really stiff and then St. Martin's was like 'Well, we read this and this and this other thing you did, and we’ve seen you perform and do this, it seems like you’re reining it in for these essays, for the first couple,' or whatever. And then they’re like, ‘Just go nuts, do whatever you want.' So then I went way in the other [direction], like total stream-of-consciousness rambling and then they’re like, 'All right, you need to calm down.'"
One of his biggest fans and supporters has been Ira Glass, host of "This American Life," where Hill is a semi-regular. A few of the stories in the book actually started out as "This American Life" stories. The two hosted an "in conversation" event at McNally Jackson just after Hill's book came out (the event was billed on Hill's website as a "Reading/Signing/Q&A/Makeout Party"), and it was clear that Ira was tickled pink to be talking to Hill (who was actually wearing a pink suit).
"I'm Dave.… I wrote this book, and I'm going to read the fuck out of it," he told the crowd. But after this small boldness, Hill seemed to genuinely become a bit bashful, faltering and brushing his "mom hair" between comforting remarks from Glass, who even took over and continued reading a particularly important paragraph when Hill's cut of the piece seemed to Glass to stop just short of what made the story important.
"I need to bring you to all of these," Hill said to Glass, looking grateful and relieved.
"This is my normal job," Glass responded in that bemused tone likely so familiar to most of the audience.
"I know, that's how we met," Hill said. Glass laughed the hardest of anyone in the room, and there were a lot of people there. When it came time to take questions from the audience, somebody asked where Hill had gotten his socks, which were blue and covered in flowers.
"My good friend Ira Glass gave them to me for my birthday," Hill said. "They're really good at giving gifts, him and the Mrs."
"I'm not the manliest of men," Hill had admitted at the start of the reading. And the most provocative essay in the book is not one of the stories involving nudity or prostitutes (though "feisty cross-dressers" play a significant role). It is one in which Hill contemplates the meaning of "manliness." It was a topic he was eager to get into when we met for coffee and chocolate chip cookies.
"I don’t think it has anything to do with, like, traditional masculinity." he told me. "I clearly don’t care about that. Like I wear floral shirts and velvet and things. I don’t care about being manly in that way. I’ve had these conversations with people trying to figure it out, but I think younger generations, guys in their 20s and 30s, maybe just like up to 32 or something, there’s some shift where I feel like they don’t have your back, really .… They’ll run out of a burning building before they try to get you out. Not everyone. I’m not, like, condemning an entire generation, but I think it’s something I’ve noticed. And not just me, I talk about it with people all the time."
I asked Hill to go into a bit more detail on this issue, one that's clearly more than just a gag for him.
"My manager, who is a woman, blames it on feminism, and I agree. It made it like there’s some shame to masculinity because somehow like masculinity is misogynistic or chauvinistic, but they’re very different things, you know? It’s sort of why I think most bands suck now, because these guys, these younger guys, were all raised—not all of them, there’s definitely exceptions—so that they can’t express their masculinity. Older rock music from the '70s and '60s and '80s, the '90s, some of it, you hear it, and they're men singing. Now you get all these guys, they sing like boys because they’re afraid to be adults. I don’t know how to articulate this, but you don’t hear this music and think 'Oh, these guys are gonna go fuck somebody,' you know what I mean? My next book will be on this."
Here was that self-awareness calibrating the adolescent outlook and vocabulary—all "chicks" and "boners"—to something meaningful. By retaining a few childish qualities, not just a love for kittens and cookies, Hill might also retain enough distance from adulthood to better consider what it means to be a man.
"It does come down to some genuinely manly things, like if some nut like ran over at us, like, I think—I would like to think anyway—that I would have the instinct to make sure you’re OK. I wouldn’t like run out the door but I think a lot of guys—a lot of these younger fellas—wouldn't…."
And even though I had seen his entire series of "Banned Match.com commercials" on funnyordie.com, I didn't doubt such a strangely chivalrous assertion. (A pick-up line in one episode: “I love that moment when you’re squeezing a small animal and you feel its last breath leave its tiny lifeless body.") Luckily, no nuts appeared to test out the offer.
Among his many inadvertent roles is that of good Samaritan. He did a comedy show at Sing Sing and hopes to perform at Rikers Island sometime this summer. He'd like to read at out-of-the-norm venues, his dream performance space being a living room near you. On his website, he posted a request for volunteers to host him, though few of the offers seem to come from New York.
"I guess I keep envisioning that people would have cheese at these events. I don’t really have any demands. I’m allergic to cats. But even then, I would put up with it for the sake of literature."
There's an arc to the narrative of Tasteful Nudes, in which Hill goes from insecure dorky teenager to less insecure dorky grown-up. He worries about letting down his parents and learns that picking up the check when out to dinner with his dad means being a real adult. Much of the book is about navigating the expectations of his parents while trying to write and play guitar. In one essay, his mother sets Hill up on a blind friend-date of sorts with the family priest; she hopes they'll have a good talk about his future. Hill was particularly close to his mom, Bunny, and when she died, he realized that she wasn't criticizing his choices, just worrying for his well-being.
"It's just very simple," he told the crowd at McNally Jackson while talking about that essay. "She didn't give a shit what what I did. We were just sitting around eating cookies."
It's these more serious themes that make the book work as a whole, that anchor the hilarious-in-retrospect failures (like his stint as a pedi-cab driver) of the self-proclaimed "mayor of Boner City." But some things don't ever seem to change. No amount of self-awareness or realization will get rid of a teenager's obsession with nudity: Hill recently started a Tumblr page where readers can send in their own tasteful nudes, "or, you know, just a nice picture."
But there's more to him than shock comedy and goofing on pictures of people in their underwear. He recounts in the essay "On Manliness" a time where he actually took action on a subway ride, saving a guy from being assaulted. He considered it his duty, as a man, but his hopes for karmic reward are practical rather than high-minded. When he gets off the train at the same stop as a "young superfox" who witnessed his actual hero-moment, he fantasizes that she will invite him back to her place.
"The clicking of her high heels echoing through the station like a goddamn mating call. I know, I can’t believe it, either. I also never saw her again."
