By Chuck Darrow
You may best know David Spade from his TV work in “Saturday Night Live” and “Just Shoot Me,” from such film comedies as “Joe Dirt” and “Tommy Boy,” or as a standup comic. But these days, he can also claim stardom in the podcast universe.
The Michigan-born, Arizona-raised Spade is co-host–with once-and-present “SNL” cast member Dana Carvey–of two podcasts, “Fly On the Wall” and “Superfly.” The former, which the duo introduced in 2022, is one of the top 25 (among what seems to be thousands) comedy-focused podcasts. It’s primarily concerned with “Saturday Night Live,” both past and present, and has featured numerous cast members as guests.
Its popularity led to the recently inaugurated “Superfly,” which has a far more freeform blueprint in which Spade and Carvey riff on a myriad of topics, show business and otherwise.
“I wanted to do a podcast, but I didn’t want to do it alone,” offered the 60-year-old Spade–who on Nov. 9, performs at Ocean Casino Resort–during a recent phone call.
“I knew it was too hard. It seems very easy; that’s why there’s three million [podcasts]. I didn’t know who to do it with. And I was trying to think of people: Do I just get an unknown sidekick? But I felt there’s safety in numbers.
“I was casually seeing Dana more than usual; he lived near me after always being in San Francisco. And so I’d hit him up for dinners and we would always crack up. And then we realized we always talked about “SNL.” We have the same manager and we all discussed it and thought maybe this would be a good way to start a podcast.”
Despite the success the pair were enjoying with “Fly On the Wall,” they weren’t exactly satisfied.
“We wanted to do it on video and they didn’t,” he explained. “And so after a while they wanted to do a spinoff and I said, ‘I’ll do one if it’s on video.’ So we said, ‘Let’s just do current events, and now we just do one called ‘Superfly’ [which can be seen on YouTube]. So it’s kind of the same thing. It’s just me and Dana. We can have people on if we want, but the core of it’s just he and I.
“It’s like when you were on ‘SNL’ you’d always kinda just be aware of what’s going on, what feels like a story that’s gonna stick around. So, we’ll scribble headlines–just stories that are funny to me, like when Kanye West asked his wife if he could have sex with her mom.
“And then we just talk about it: What would you tell your wife? How should she react? And we just riff on that for as long as we can. And we go to the next story. And then sometimes Dana [who has returned to the show to portray President Joe Biden] talks about what it was like on ‘SNL’ this week. And then I tell about my weekend on the road.”
“It is a little more fun [than ‘Fly On the Wall’] because Dana and I just blab, like we’re at dinner.”
Speaking of serving as a host, last fall, Spade took what is arguably the hardest left turn of his career when he signed on as emcee of the Fox game show, “Snake Oil,” a take-off on “Shark Tank” in which contestants were pitched goods and services with half of them being fabricated. The object was that the contestants had to determine which were real and which were “snake oil.”
It was an interesting career move for Spade because his cool, sarcastic and somewhat chill persona was pretty much the opposite of the game-show template of the upbeat, energetic and unctuous master of ceremonies.
“I said, ‘I’m not right for a game show,’” he recalled. “And they [the production company owned by comic actor Will Arnett] said, ‘We want [a host] where you’re almost annoyed with the game. We’re trying to find different angles on it.’”
While it’s always been an article of faith that game–show hosts know exactly what’s going on at all times, Spade insisted that for him, part of the fun of “Snake Oil”—which is still streaming on Hulu–was that he had no idea which items were real and which weren’t.
“I said, ‘Don’t tell me which ones are real.’ And then when I’m playing the game, I’m like trying to chime in, going, ‘I have no idea,’ I’m not allowed to steer them, but I’m like, I can fully tell you, I will guess wrong on this one because even when I’d watch a rerun, I’d go, ‘I don’t remember if this is real.’
“But that’s the fun for me. That’s the hook I like,” he said, adding that “Snake Oil” may return to the airwaves (full disclosure: My daughter, Jolie, was one of the writers of the “infomercials” that were part of the pitches to contestants).
Despite his teaming with Carvey on the podcasts, the former “Saturday Night Live” cast member with whom Spade will likely always be most-connected is the late Chris Farley, who died of a drug overdose at age 33 in 1997.
When a Farley biopic was announced earlier this year, Spade publicly expressed concern that it would emphasize his close friend’s drug-dependency issues. But, he suggested, he’s currently feeling a little bit better about the project.
“I’ve talked to the writers and the director and I think they’ve got a handle on it.
“It’s a big, big story to tackle, and it’s not my story to tell. It’s whoever’s doing a movie about it. But I would hope that it goes all right. I think everyone that’s involved seems pretty cool, and they’re doing the best they can. So we’ll cross our fingers and hope for the best.”
For tickets, go to ticketmaster.com
Chicago back
in Atlantic City
Friday and Saturday, Chicago returns to AyCee. The last time the venerable “jazz-rock” band played in Our Town, it was as part of a special-guest-filled “Decades” performance and taping at Ocean.
The 57-year-old Rock & Roll Hall of Fame-enshrined unit is back on the road and is checking into Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Atlantic City for Friday and Saturday programs that, it can be assumed, will be typically heavy on the unit’s many hits.
For tickets, go to ticketmaster.com.
Chuck Darrow has spent more than 40 years writing about Atlantic City casinos.
