The Dry Bar Comedy Podcast · Dry Bar Comedy

Ep. 39 - The First Dry Bar Comedian w/ Tom Clark

·52 min·3 clips

Tom Clark says he worked with gangs in Ciudad Juarez for six months and learned comedy after playing guitar for them.

1. The Dry Bar Comedy Podcast episode centers on Tom Clark and his early Dry Bar special, with Taylor Nielsen and Jordan Macon steering the conversation. 2. Taylor Nielsen and Jordan Macon host the show, while Tom Clark is the guest because he recorded one of Dry Bar’s early specials and has worked in stand-up for nearly 30 years. 3. The episode asks what happens when an experienced comic from Milwaukee and Los Angeles gets brought into Dry Bar’s early, family-friendly system. 4. Clark says Keith Stubbs contacted him after describing Dry Bar as "Netflix for Mormons," and he recorded in 2017 in an undisclosed location in Provo, Utah. 5. He says the Dry Bar team asked what he wanted to eat, which made the shoot feel friendlier than a typical club date. 6. Clark says his set was among the early releases and that the company was still testing Facebook, YouTube, and different versions of the same clip. 7. He says one of his flubs stayed in the subtitles, which he found funny because he expected the edit to remove it. 8. Clark describes his crowd work as an extension of improv, saying he tries to "almost incorporate" audience members into the scene instead of roasting them. 9. He names Second City, Groundlings, and ComedySportz as part of the training that shaped that style. 10. He also says he refereed high school ComedySportz matches around the Los Angeles area, where students sometimes booed him over the competition. 11. Clark says he started in Milwaukee in the late 1980s and explains how ComedySportz grew into a franchise model in multiple cities. 12. He connects that history to Dick Chudnow and the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team, describing how the comedy ecosystem spread from Milwaukee and Madison. 13. Clark says he prefers venues like breweries and wineries because audiences there do not arrive with fixed expectations about crowd work or viral clips. 14. He describes a Napa Valley show where people walked past an open door while he tried to pull them inside, turning the setting into part of the act. 15. Clark says one of his strangest gigs was a 15-year-old’s birthday party by a pool, and another was a show where children were taken off a water slide to watch him perform. 16. He says he once opened for Pauly Shore with a song about a potato, then endured loud booing that drowned out his own voice. 17. The tone stays loose and self-deprecating, with Taylor Nielsen and Jordan Macon trading jokes about black licorice, shorts, and Mormon culture. 18. The format is an interview with frequent digressions into comedy history, audition stories, and audience behavior, and Clark answers with specific examples from his career. 19. Listeners who like stand-up history, improv, and comedy road stories will probably like this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a tightly structured, single-topic interview may skip it.

As heard by us

A loose comedy chat that turns a hard-lived stretch into a plainspoken origin story.

Taylor Nielsen and Jordan Macon keep the Dry Bar Comedy Podcast easygoing, with lunch talk, Dave's Hot Chicken jokes, and the kind of host banter that makes the handoff to Tom Clark feel smooth.

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Why you'd press play

A comic origin story that runs from Ciudad Juarez to the mic, with a rough stretch in between.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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