Dusty Slay gets creative with clean comedy in 'Wet Heat'

UPI

7 days ago

July 29 (UPI) -- Dusty Slay's second full-length Netflix special, Wet Heat, is streaming Tuesday, and the stand-up comedian says it wasn't always clear to him that comedy was the right path.
Slay, 43, told UPI in a recent phone interview that he was a fan of comedy from a young age, but his own aptitude for it came later.
"I was always trying to make people laugh," he said. "But I moved to Charleston, South Carolina, from Alabama when I was 21. And about 2003, I moved with a friend and then we had some problems. So I moved out and got my own place and I didn't have any friends, so I took an improv class. And that's how I got into stand-up -- I took improv, and I did improv for a long time."
He said the idea of doing stand-up professionally didn't enter the equation until around 2011.
"I won a stand-up comedy competition," he recalled. "And I thought, 'Maybe I could do something with this.' So I started to take things a little more serious, and then in early 2012, I quit drinking, and things became very clear to me, and I got very good at comedy -- Well, I got good at comedy much faster. I wouldn't say I got very good right away, but I got much faster."
Sober and clean
Slay said giving up drinking didn't just make him better at comedy, it changed his entire approach.
"Quitting drinking changed my whole life in a positive way. I never think of myself as an alcoholic, but I was most certainly a binge drinker that once I started drinking, it usually ended in some sort of a disaster. Not a tragedy, but I would black out and lose my friends and things like that," he said.
Slay said he was "a bit of a maniac" when he was under the influence.
"So much of my jokes were all about drinking. I would label myself an 'alcoholic' and I thought it was funny. I thought it was funny to drink too much and make bad decisions. But I was really living that lifestyle, so while I was making jokes about it, I was also falling apart in a lot of ways -- while still having fun. It just changed my life, and once I quit drinking, I no longer could make drinking jokes."
Slay said quitting drinking was the first step toward becoming a clean comic -- but it wasn't the last.
"I've always been on the cleaner side, but I had jokes here and there along the way that I would do that I wouldn't do now. ... I did a couple of shows where people asked me to be completely clean, and then when I would go through my set, I would be like, 'Oh, I'm losing some of my best jokes. I'm losing some of my best punchlines,'" he said.
Slay said the final straw was when he got a write-up about a joke he told at a show.
"I was the cleanest person on the lineup, yet I got the worst write-up because of this one joke. So I just said, 'You know what, I'll just be completely clean, but I still want to talk about the things I want to talk about, but I'll just find a new creative way to say that.'"
He said being a clean comic forced him to get more inventive.
"I had to find other words. I couldn't rely on shock," he said.
On the road
Slay said his favorite part of stand-up comedy is taking his act to different cities, but he has to strike a balance between going on the road and being around for his wife and kids.
"I don't like to be gone for longer than a week, because I want to be home with my kids. But that's what comedy is to me. Now, if you live in New York, you live in LA, or maybe even Chicago ... you can get locked into a circuit where you're still getting to do a lot of comedy every night. But if you're not living in those cities, touring is what you have to do, and it is the most fun thing to me."
The comedian, who lives with his family in Nashville, said two of his favorite venues are close to home: Zane's Comedy Club and the Grand Ole Opry.
"I don't think it was until I did the Grand Old Opry that my dad actually took it serious, and by that point I had already done two late night [shows]," he said.
Slay said he was surprised at the reception he received when he first started venturing out of the Southeast.
"I remember the first time I went to Phoenix, I drove from Nashville to Phoenix to do comedy at Stand Up Live. And I thought, 'Man, this is too far out.' They're going to be like, 'Go back to the South.' And it was one of my most fun weekends. I just remember being so excited about how well it went," he said.
Slay said he was shocked to find a similar reception in cities as far away as Portland, Ore., and Seattle.
"I think a lot of it is because Charleston, although it's a very southern city, it is an artistic city and it's a bit of a snobby city with its art. So I had to learn to make artistic people laugh. Then when I started working the road, it was a different thing. I had to learn to make people on the road laugh, which a lot of these cities are not very artistic cities," he said.
"I think I often get labeled as a 'Southern comic' when really a lot of times I do better in more artsy cities," Slay said.
Comedy as music
Wet Heat finds Slay talking quite a bit about one of his favorite subjects: music. He also frequently discusses his favorite artists on his podcast, We're Having a Good Time.
Slay said he finds a lot of common ground between music and stand-up comedy.
"I think that, in a way, our comedy bits are like our own little songs. They're our own little poems. When I do a full comedy special, I almost think about it like how someone would put out an album -- at least the older albums, where an album would be complete. You might have some themes from an earlier song that come back in a later song, and it ties the whole thing together," he said.
He said his approach to putting together a special is inspired, in part, by the ways he analyzed Pink Floyd albums as a teenager.
"We're very much in a phase of comedy where everybody wants clips, we all want our likes and we all want to go viral with a clip. But when I think about a special, I like to have a full-on, complete special that feels like I'm going in and out of little songs," he said.
Dusty Slay: Wet Heat is streaming now on Netflix.