Features / Interviews

It doesn’t take much for comedy works to pique Jason Klamm‘s interest. As the host of the Comedy on Vinyl podcast and the author of 2023’s We’re Not Worthy: From In Living Color to Mr. Show, How ’90s Sketch TV Changed the Face of Comedy, Klamm is immersed in mirth and laughs for most of his free time.

But it was not exactly a laughing matter when he discovered Dick Davy.

Davy, a convivial comedian with a soft-spoken Southern drawl, issued two albums on Columbia in the mid-’60s: 1966’s You’re a Long Way from Home, Whitey – recorded by legendary producer John Hammond before a lively crowd at, of all places, Harlem’s Apollo Theater – and 1967’s Stronger Than Dirt. His material was surprising for its left-of-center progressivism: Davy, who sounded like the kind of person who’d have less-than-savory ideas about civil rights at such a fraught time in America’s history, was telling occasionally hyper-specific political jokes skewering backwards attitudes. But, as Klamm would discover, Davy’s backstory was even denser than some of the references to politicians on the records.

Klamm’s journey of discovering Davy has resulted in Presenting…Dick Davy, a new LP of unreleased material from the comedian’s career, available today from Stand Up! Records. He recently took The Second Disc through the surprisingly affecting reasons he made it his mission to tell the story of this seemingly-forgotten showman, what he learned in the process, and how close he is to offering a truly complete picture of the man.

The Davy deep dive began more than a decade ago, when Klamm welcomed Kliph Nesteroff, one of comedy’s leading historians, to record an episode of Comedy on Vinyl. Rather than pick an A-lister to discuss while promoting his book The Comedians, Nesteroff picked Davy’s Columbia albums to showcase. “[Kliph] had written this really great piece for the blog at WFMU about [Davy],” Klamm recently said in an interview. “It was the most extensive thing ever written about the guy…but the one thing is like, I don’t know who he was, really. I don’t know where he is. Is he still alive? Nobody knows jack shit about this guy, to be frank.”

An interview with Davy in Phil Berger’s 1975 tome The Last Laugh: The World of the Stand-Up Comics offered some fascinating insight into the man born Richard Hoffman in New York to a lineage of rabbis – about as far from Arkansas as one could get. But even that interview offered fascinating contradictions. “Berger wrote that, every once in a while, the twang pops up,” Klamm said. “And that is the one great mystery to me still: he’s doing this hillbilly bit, but why would it keep popping up? It’s not like it was part of who he was, that I know of. Nobody can answer that question.”

Puzzled by these and other unanswerable questions, Klamm did what all dedicated researchers do: he chipped and chipped away at Davy’s backstory until he got some answers, which became Presenting…Dick Davy – both its unique, unheard material and his extensive liner notes to the package. Those notes trace Hoffman’s journey as an aspiring folk singer who discovered a knack for banter between songs, and a man with a strong sense of social justice that threaded through his young life: his father was an honorary chairman of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, and Davy participated in the Mississippi Caravan of Music, an organization that collaborated with the Freedom Summer campaign in 1964 to increase Black voter registration. He’d hone these experiences into an act like no other – but walked away from it some time after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., feeling the time for such jokes had passed. He passed away in 2007, but left behind an incredible, unassuming body of work – including this striking material on Presenting…Dick Davy.

It’s material, Klamm says, probably nobody but Davy could have done, for whatever reason. “To make it clear,” he explains, “none of these [jokes] are ‘white people are this way, black people are this way.’ None of that horseshit, none of that garbage. It’s stuff that for the most part, I think, still stands up. Even at its most naive, it’s still pretty good.

“There’s a buffer,” he continues, “and that buffer is the character. That character’s naivete is the reason it still works. None of those jokes work on any assumptions – they work on the exact opposite. Because he based it on that naivete, he used that as a buffer between him and the audience, especially between him and a Black audience for You’re a Long Way from Home, Whitey. They age better. They’re based on discovery. You have two options when you immediately recognize a difference or something new [in life]: you go, ‘Oh, fuck,’ or ‘Oh, interesting.’ His is a very childish, ‘Oh, interesting. Let’s explore this.’ And he goes further with it by asking, ‘Why do we have to be racist?’ Which is so goofy and silly, but it fucking works, you know?”

Klamm’s journey took him to Davy’s brother, Daniel Neale Hoffman, and eventually his daughter Sharon. When Daniel passed away, Sharon shared the discovery of a trove of memorabilia related to her uncle’s comedy career. “I was so excited to see the photos” of the still-little-known Davy, Klamm said, but suddenly realized the images of the box itself contained something he was shocked to nearly overlook: a pair of acetate pressings. “How did I miss that those records were in there?” he recalled. “My brain just scanned over them the first time I looked…’Wait a minute, you just missed something huge!'”

Working with friend and Firesign Theatre archivist Taylor Jessen, Klamm had the acetates digitized, discovering a 1962 comedy-folk set at The Bitter End – a “Smothers Brothers-type with a Jewish and Southern mix” – and a series of studio-recorded routines that were later massaged into material from his Columbia discography. Later, a Comedy on Vinyl listener, Marc Skobac, hipped Klamm to footage of Davy performing at The Bitter End in the spring of 1968, by then trading in the racially-charged humor for “hippie-adjacent” truth-telling.

While Presenting…Dick Davy offers a fuller picture of the man on either side of his major label work, Klamm is the first to admit that parts of his life and work may be truly unknowable. After leaving comedy behind, Davy continued his day job of teaching, and admitted to Berger that students would sometimes connect their “Mr. Hoffman” to the man preserved on those Columbia LPs. But those who knew him in the educational context have unusually dim memories of who he was. “The weird fucking part is, I’ve gotten ahold of one person he worked with,” Klamm marvels. “She’s like, ‘I remember him. He’d bring his bike to school.’ Anything else? ‘No.’ Nobody has specific memories of the man. [Another person] I spoke with, I asked, ‘Did he ever drop the Southern drawl?’ And they said, ‘I don’t think so.’ So they thought he was from Arkansas! For how long was he fucking with people? It’s bordering on Andy Kaufman stuff…He’s going to continue to be a mystery that I will never solve.”

The album was not without its challenges to assemble, Stand Up! Records founder Dan Schlissel explained, because Davy’s surviving family members may not have known what they had. “His common-law wife knew we were working on this, but didn’t make any provisions for the archives that she had – and then she died,” he said. “Even Dick’s niece didn’t know that she had passed on. There’s a whole scrapbook that this album was based on titled Presenting…Dick Davy; we don’t know if it’s in a landfill or if it’s somewhere, still.”

So what really inspired Klamm to try and peel back the onion? He is forthcoming about a very personal motivation. “After I talked with Kliph, I spent two weeks trying to find Dick Davy, and I couldn’t,” he said. “A few years after that, I found out one of my best friends was missing, and then found out he was murdered. I needed an obsession, because I was trying to find my friend, when we thought he was just missing. Once I knew he was gone, I needed an obsession that will pay off no matter what.”

For his part, Schlissel is excited to release Presenting…Dick Davy as much from a historical perspective as a comedic one, helping put a moment like Dr. King’s assassination in a very visceral context. “Once you start digging into the story, it just becomes neater and neater and neater, and then all of a sudden tragic,” he says. “You don’t really understand the full ramifications of [the assassination] beyond a history book when you’re learning about it. It’s just a point in fact of history. You don’t have context, even for something as epoch-shifting as this. It’s this non-ending bit of fascination: where would we be if Martin Luther King Jr. hadn’t been assassinated? Where would comedy be? Where would we be as a nation compared to where we are now? I think these are all valuable things to mull over in your head.”

Despite the fractured storytelling, he’s also excited for it as a piece of archival curiosity. “We – myself, Jason, Taylor Jessen and [Stand Up! Records in-house designer] Ian Rans managed to get this thing that shouldn’t exist to become a thing,” he says. “We are dealing with two people’s archives that don’t really know each other. Trying to cobble this thing together and tell a massively interesting story – I think it’s so crucially important, like the This American Life of comedy albums.”

The passion that Klamm and the Stand Up! Records team have put into Presenting…Dick Davy is infectious – readers of The Second Disc certainly have an artist who fascinates them the same way Davy enthralls Klamm. And if you’re the kind of enthusiast we are here, that enthusiasm is contagious. Presenting…Dick Davy brings an offbeat truth-teller (the best kind of person a comedian can be!) out of the dustbin of history, offering a clearer picture of a bygone era – and, maybe, a potential path forward to beat back the inanity of inequality: with simple, defiant laughter.

You can order Presenting…Dick Davy on standard or mint-green and black splatter vinyl from Stand Up! Records; it’s also available to stream or download at your preferred digital music service. Klamm will give a presentation about Davy’s career and the material herein at the main branch of the Detroit Public Library on September 24; more info and tickets can be obtained here. Dick Davy’s Facebook page is here.