David Spade’s New Stand-Up Special Stays on Uncontroversial Topics in the Bravest Possible Way
David Spade was a cast member on Saturday Night Live when I was in high school, which as we all know means he imprinted on me in a fundamental way. But he was also a standup comic, and I’m sure I saw his set everywhere he did it, including in his first appearance on The Tonight Show in 1991.
More than 30 years later, Spade is still making jokes about air travel, waving drivers in ahead of him in traffic and the socially conscious celebrities of the day. Spade, in fact, still seems like he’s basically the same guy he was in that set from 1991, and you’re either going to like that or you’re not. Mostly, I did!
As someone who is both a comic and 60, Spade should be right on schedule to start complaining that he can’t say anything anymore. Instead, in his new special David Spade: Dandelion (which drops tomorrow on Prime Video), he’s out here vibing like it’s still the last days of Bush I (complimentary), sticking with uncontroversial topics in the bravest possible way. Material about how much it sucks to fly, for instance, is so universally agreed to be hack that writing new jokes about it feels fresh? And, after all, the airlines are helping give him new angles by using planes with their doors barely attached.
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Spade also isn’t the first comic I’ve ever seen do a bit with a cumbersome microphone cord. He is the first I’ve seen complain about it on Prime Video, one of the richest streaming platforms there is. He suggests that Jeff Bezos bought himself a fifth private jet with the money he saved by consigning Spade to a crappy mic from a Black Friday sale: “It’s throwing out my clavicle and we’re on Joke Four.” (The most 60-year-old gag Spade does is probably using the excess cord to pretend he’s going to play cat’s cradle with a patron in the front row; perhaps in his next special we can look over to Spade’s jacks chunk.)
Spade calls out his own lateness to some subjects and saves the viewer the trouble: “What’s going on with this Johnny Depp trial? Some of these are old.” Going a year further back in time with a chunk about the OceanGate submersible takes him to the other nonsense billionaires spend their money on: going to space. Spade has no interest in going either very deep or very high — “I’m rich. I find things to do on the surface of the planet. I run around, I go to Cheesecake Factory; I find shit to do here” — and uses talk of Mars missions to segue into a segment about E.T., a movie that’s older than the mother of his child. As someone who still fondly remembers the monoculture, I personally could have listened to another half-hour of jokes about the titular extraterrestrial being “literally made of crow’s feet” and why Gertie should have considered poking it with a rake before bringing it into her home.
The special gets its title from the stories in which Spade reveals himself as a dandelion: puffed-up, but ultimately fragile. Jokes about restaurant servers asking, “Is Pepsi okay?” are almost as hoary as anything about commercial air travel, but Spade stating that he can distinguish Diet Coke from Diet Pepsi on smell alone sets us up for a later story about seeing a troubled man in the McDonald’s drive-thru line and opting to go inside instead, only for the man to follow him and demand his Chicken McNuggets. Spade doesn’t want to get hit with the cinder block the man was carrying — he didn’t even want any of the dust on it to waft onto him and dry out his skin. I’ll choose to believe that when Spade calls this guy in the middle of a mental health crisis a “bully,” he’s being ironic.
Spade’s sequel to the River Phoenix bit from his Tonight Show set is a story about attending a charity gala for Haitian earthquake relief and getting harassed by an actual bully: auctioneer Sean Penn. Not wanting tablemate Charlize Theron to think he’s “broke” — “Fifty thousand’s like a penny to me!” — Spade lets himself get bid up, including against himself, for a pair of Paul McCartney tickets; trying to stall, he says he has to “text someone and find out if (they’re) doing Grown-Ups 3.”
The story manages to be about Spade being wealthy enough to drop six figures for charity but “broke” enough for it to be stressful; amazingly, it’s more winning than the story in Nate Bargatze’s latest special in which he describes making his wife cancel a monthly credit card charge for an impetuous charity pledge, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he’s delivering the joke in the middle of an 18,000-seat arena.
Spade does occasionally dip into the kind of material you would expect from someone of his vintage. Summing up Amber Heard’s part in the aforementioned trial against Johnny Depp with “crazy in the head, poops in the bed” wasn’t worth the detour to the topic. A bit about a gender-flipped Brokeback Mountain remake in which Emma Watson and Margot Robbie might do some “scissoring” is almost rescued with an elaborate series of hand gestures, accompanied by sound effects, that ends with Spade claiming he doesn’t know how it works. His closer — about how uncomfortable he was receiving a massage by a man — ends a lot better than I expected it to.
When I say Dandelion walks the line that separates “effortless” and “lazy,” I really do mean it as a compliment. I know Spade isn’t going to be for everyone, but if you liked him in the ‘90s, you still might.
