If the Dave Rubin I knew from stand-up decades ago saw that Patton Oswalt was retweeting him, he would have been pretty psyched. A famous comedian was paying attention to him and his content! It would be like he had arrived as a stand up.

The only problem is Patton wasn’t retweeting a joke or an announcement of a stand-up gig. He was retweeting, and subsequently mocking, Dave’s promise to delete Disney Plus over due to some transgression of wokeness (probably their firing of Gina Carano over her transphobia but I really don’t feel like looking it up at the moment).

Dave had arrived, alright, but he had arrived as a right wing media personality, not a comedian. (Patton was laughing at the fact that he had made the same promise about Disney roughly a year earlier.)

In the early aughts, I spent far too many Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays in Times Square handing out flyers to tourists (“barking”) trying to create an audience for Gladys’s Comedy Room, which was just a room in the back of a restaurant called Hamburger Harry’s.

It wasn’t a glamorous place but it was legit. Comedians like Dave Attel and Zach Galafianakis got their starts there. I saw Judah Friedlander come in to say hello once and Jim Gaffigan would still occasionally come in to do spots. 

I had heard about Galdys’s open mic night on Wednesdays from my first bringer show (the show werhe you get 5 minutes at an established club at an early pre-show, provided you “bring” at least 5 people to pay cover and buy drinks). I walked in to Hamburger Harry’s – a restaurant with faded 80’s decor that seemed to have been operating on the similarly dated idea that hamburgers can be served at a higher quality than the stomped on fare you receive at McDonalds – and made my way to the back room. There at the sign in table was Gladys. You paid five dollars, wrote your name on a slip of paper and waited to be called.

This was one of my first tastes of New York stand up comedy and I assumed that, because it was New York, the stand up that I was seeing was quality. One guy saying a song about where the chorus was, “she got some big fat titties.” Another woman – a white woman clearly trying to force a catchphrase – did an impression of an Asian woman she knew who said, “you so ugly.” (As you can guess given the era, the fact that she was impersonating an Asian person, and the presence of the letter L, she said “ugly” a little different.)

I did notice that there was a clique of comics who seemed to be known and a bit better than everyone else. They at in the back and chatted among themselves. And, frankly, their material was better than the other open mikers. They seemed to have been at it longer and were more polished. Dave Rubin was one of these comics.

There’s one thing that I remember about Dave and it wasn’t his humor. It was how bitter and resentful he was that he wasn’t famous. If you don’t know comics, singling out a stand up for bitterness is like singling out an eighties metal band for using too much hairspray.

He constantly complained about not getting passed (you “pass” when the club owner sees your audition and invites you to do spots in the club – it’s a big deal to a beginning comic) at the major clubs in Manhattan like the Comic Strip, The Comedy Cellar, or Gotham Comedy Club. Even though at this time, many comedians were establishing careers through East Village bar shows. He railed against the banality of Jay Leno, called Steve Martin a hack for his Oscar hosting. He called out SNL for stealing his jokes. He even called out Tom Hanks for doing one of his jokes on a late night show. He may have been joking but I don’t know.

He once told a story on stage about interning at The Daily Show. He said, “everyone says Jon Stewart is so nice but I asked him to look at my tape and he said no. I guess he’s not as nice as everyone says.”

This one time I remember a comic who had come up in Gladys’s room coming back to the open mike. He was a few years ahead of us, passed in a few clubs and either auditioning for or on Last Comic Standing. The comic did his tight five, got some laughs, and after it was over said, “Hey guys, thank you all so much, this is such a nice room and I really appreciate you letting me do some time.” I found it genuine. The comic left the room to go do another spot.

Dave Rubin was up right after him. “Did anyone else find that really self serving?” It was one of the shittiest takes I’ve ever heard in years spent in open mikes.

The coup de grace, though, was when Dave and a few other comics decided that Gladys wasn’t doing enough for them, so they decided to break off and start another club down the street, in the back of another restaurant called Joe Franklin’s. It was an incredibly selfish mood that did very little for anyone involved. (Full disclosure: I performed at Joe Franklin’s many times. Loyalty is one thing, getting spots is another. I wanted the spots.)

This happens with frustrated comedians. They believe that the venue at which they perform isn’t doing enough for them, like getting them agents or inviting industry to see them. It doesn’t matter that that’s not the theater or club owner’s job and never has been. Over the years I’ve found that the people who get agents and meet industry do it on their own by always hustling. (I say that as someone who never made it and never hustled. In fact, I only ever encountered two great comics from that room. One was Melissa Rauch from The Big Bang Theory and Night Court. The other was Yamaneika Saunders, who crushes it at The Comedy Cellar.)

The Joe Franklin’s move was the beginning of the end for Times Square barking. The talent pool was split even further when yet another club – Ha! – moved in. Tourists were sick of three times the amount of people bugging them to come to shows.

I eventually started doing improv and storytelling and rarely if ever crossed paths with those people again.

And then…

I don’t remember the first time I heard of The Rubin Report. It was a youtube channel. I didn’t bother watching, I had no real interest. I thought it would have been a comedic show of some kind, sort of like his own version of The Daily Show.

I was wrong.

As I remember, Dave was never political or perhaps he hid his right leaning attitudes. We had come of age during a resurgence of Bill Hicks and the George W. Bush presidency where every white twenty-something comic was railing against the establishment to a group of twenty-something comics huddled together in a basement somewhere in the Village.

But, apparently in the intervening years, he’s drifted further and further right, now finding himself often in conversation with Ben Shapiro and having a book on Amazon called Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason. He also works for a Tenet Media, a network of “heterodox commentators.” Heterodox, get it? As opposed to orthodox? If there’s anything that is a surer indicator that someone has bought into a rigid ideology more than saying “think for yourself,” I have yet to find it.

Also, funny thing about Tenet Media, they’re Russian propaganda. Dave also recently insinuated that Venezuelan gangs could violate Taylor Swift. In short, he’s kind of a douche.

The case of Dave Rubin is a curious one. I don’t lament the loss of a friend because we weren’t really friends. We barely ever talked. Stand-ups generally don’t engage with each other unless a friendship might prove mutually beneficial. And frankly, who cares if someone takes a turn to the right in their politics? It happens all the time. What I find fascinating is that he was person desperate for fame who finally found an outlet where he could get it.

There is a surprising thing about right wing news outlets that I’ve heard. It’s that they’re very welcoming and polite to their guests. I know a Black woman who works at Fox News. She isn’t a conservative and she likes her job well enough but she let me in on a secret that is so unexpected I have no choice but to believe it. She told me Ann Coulter is a really nice person. At the end of the holiday party, she went around to everyone wishing them happy holidays (whether or not she said, “Merry Christmas” I won’t know) and making sure everyone could get home safe.

I feel like Dave found a place where he could be accepted and grow his brand and become a name. All he had to do was enter the right-wing world and slowly accept all the right-wing media truths.

I’ve crossed paths with so many people who have gone on to do great things in comedy. I’ve also crossed paths with people who stopped doing it and moved on with their lives.

I walk through Times Square sometimes after improv rehearsals, safe in the knowledge that I’m pursuing comedy for fun and not as some stepping stone to stardom, and barkers try to get me to buy tickets to their shows. They have laminated booklets now and sell tickets to clubs that aren’t even in Times Square. I don’t even think they’re comics trying to get a spot, just people getting paid for bringing in traffic.

I should be as annoyed with these people as tourists used to be with me but I’m polite. I say no “thank you” and, sometimes, “I used to do this.”

Honestly, I should be happy for Dave. He got what he wanted, a show with his name on it, a book, a little bit of fame.

I guess it’s just a little, though. I shared this piece with a writing group a while ago and they were pretty disinterested. “I mean, is this guy famous? Is this someone I should know?”

Eh, not really, just some guy I used to know.