Comedian David Dineen-Porter was recently voted “Best Male Stand-Up” in NOW Magazine‘s annual Best of Toronto readers’ poll, surprising many people familiar with his eccentric and outlandish style. Many comedians consider him one of Toronto’s most original talents, but peer recognition doesn’t always translate into popular appeal. That said, Dineen-Porter and Tom Henry, co-hosts and co-producers of the monthly Don’t Get Bored of Us and Leave show at The Ossington, garnered considerable attention in the U.S. at the Bridgetown Comedy Festival this past summer.
We spoke with Dineen-Porter about his and Henry’s upcoming anniversary show, how he’s pranked his co-host and the audience in the past, and what to expect on Tuesday (the only sure bet is cake).
Torontoist: With Laugh Sabbath, you’ve been working as part of a comedy collective for a while. But Don’t Get Bored Of Us And Leave seems like a more personal format. How’d you guys come up with the concept?
David Dineen-Porter: Don’t Get Bored Of Us and Leave started because Tom and I weren’t producing anything. We were performing on other people’s shows, but we wanted to do things that were more involved, more difficult. So we had a conversation right off the bat about what we wanted the show to be like, and what came up a lot was the Rat Pack. You may not get that sense if you come to the show, but I feel like, the show can go off the rails, and other comedians, they’re not just there to perform their own material—they’re doing stuff with us. We make an effort to create something more complex than what you’d see at a show with just stand-up sets.
Tom’s birthday prank being an extreme example. You spent months on that, right?
Yeah. Last year, for Tom’s birthday, I spent months contacting Japanese tourists and students, and we pulled an enormous prank convincing Tom at the show that we were famous in Japan. Especially that I was beloved in Japan, and he was…not. We shot a video that was supposed to be Japanese entertainment TV, and we had a parade of people appearing on the show: two women that were pregnant and begging Tom to come back to them, and people from his life surprising him.
The thing was, Tom was involved in planning a show for that night, but that show never happened. All of the acts that he’d booked weren’t even in the city. So he was texting them as the show was about to begin, asking them, “Where are you?” Sara Hennessey, for instance, who was in Boston, was texting back saying, “I’m almost there…I’m on the streetcar!” And right before the show began, in walk thirty Japanese people, some with luggage, because they were supposedly with a tour group.
So the show is a comedy show, per se, but it’s not like the sort of show you’ll typically see in Toronto.
Tom has a pretty deadpan persona on stage, and I’m imagining how he would react to all that. Were you getting much of a rise out of him?
He was pretty brilliantly playing it in the way the audience would most want him to: he was angry. Which for Tom, is remarkable. He’s a “still waters run deep” kinda guy.
Has The Ossington given you free rein in the back room, so long as nothing’s permanently damaged?
As long as we don’t burn the place down, yeah. We’ve also taken the show on the road, too. Tom and I both separately were booked for the Bridgetown Comedy Festival. And on the application for most comedy festivals, they ask if you’re willing to host (and most comics never want to host). So I said I would, on the condition that it be with Tom, and it be our format. And they said, “Of course! You’re two of the people we most want to come.” And they told us we could book anyone who was appearing at the festival, so we got all the comics on our wishlist: Peter Serafinowicz, Natasha Leggero (Tubbin’ With Tash), Kate Berlant, Doogie Horner. Which surprised us both, because we thought, we’re nobody!
That’s not exactly true. You’ve gotten a lot of online attention for L’Brondelle’s Universe, and there was the recent indie feature Everyday Is Like Sunday. But, getting back to those guests: Were they taking part in the Don’t Get Bored format?
Yeah, Kate Berlant and Peter Serafinowicz especially. He did a Paul McCartney bit that I would say was very much in the vein of Don’t Get Bored. And Kate actually did the show here in Toronto last month, while on tour.
Do you want to talk a bit about what people might expect for the anniversary show on Tuesday, without giving anything away?
Cake! Free cake. A white cake, with white frosting and blue trim. I dunno. I’ve tried to tell people what to expect before, but then what will happen is the show will change the day before, and we’ll do something completely different. We once treated the audience like they’d woken up from a submarine trip where they were sedated, and we were now on an island, and we all had to work together to build a television studio and recreate the show Mad About You. There’s a lot of climbing on people, and singing at them. You can expect chaos.
This interview has been edited and condensed.