Dave Landau has been arrested more than a dozen times, battled drug addiction, watched his mother struggle with severe mental illness, and somehow lived long enough to become a suburban dad complaining about Teslas.
Naturally, he thinks all of this is hilarious.
‘Being a dad, a husband, and 16 years sober is better.’
Sharia lawyer
The Detroit-born comic mines some remarkably dark territory in his new special, “30 Minutes with Dave Landau,” filmed at the Creek and the Cave in Austin and produced by the legendary Luis J. Gomez.
Landau has long put the drinking and the drugs behind him; these days, he says “being a dad, a husband, and 16 years sober is better” than the life that supplied him with so much of his material.
But sober doesn’t mean wholesome. Over the next half hour, Landau moves from Islamic extremism in Michigan to cocaine washing ashore in Florida, his mother’s bipolar disorder, the emasculating effect of electric cars, and being the “only man who can make a Catholic wake sound like a good time.”
Take his crack about Sharia law and Dearborn, a Detroit suburb where the Muslim population has exploded over the last two decades.
“My wife got pulled over there,” the comedian says. “Not for speeding, just for driving a car.”
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Vape ’em if you got ’em
Some of Landau’s funniest material concerns becoming a middle-aged dad at a time when dads just don’t command the same respect.
“I miss when we drove muscle cars,” Landau says. “I liked when your dad would come home, you’d hear an engine. He’d come inside, smoke a cigarette, maybe crack a beer.”
Today’s dad glides silently home in a Tesla — which Landau compares to “driving a cell phone” — before walking inside and hitting a vape.
“So you just smell lavender” until Dad “cracks a White Claw,” he jokes.
The indignity is complete when the children greet him: “How was work, p***y?”
Looking back on his single years, Landau jokes that he would have loved living in present-day Miami, where packages of cocaine occasionally wash ashore.
That’s also, he suggests, the real explanation for all those sea turtles found with straws stuck in their noses.
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Michael S. Schwartz/Getty Images
Going dark
But that’s just a warm-up for the really dark stuff, like his father being poisoned by chemical exposure while serving in Vietnam and his mother’s severe bipolar disorder and eventual suicide.
Serious bipolar disorder, Landau clarifies. For those who casually describe themselves as bipolar, he has a simple diagnostic question: “You ever wear a wedding dress to your son’s wedding?”
Landau even reaches back three decades to recount a prank in which he and his friends apparently convinced people that an innocent stranger was responsible for one of their buddies ending up pants-less on a pile of garbage.
It’s the kind of story that could seem less funny if you stopped to consider what might have happened to the poor guy afterward.
That’s essentially Landau’s approach to the whole half hour. Addiction, arrests, family tragedy, mental illness: Look too closely at any of these, and “30 Minutes with Dave Landau” could get awfully depressing. Fortunately, Landau’s barrage of laugh lines never gives you that much time to think.
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