In her new stand-up comedy special Are You Dressed for the Apocalypse?, Alicia Dattner explores what’s so funny— and not —about climate change, Instagram influencers, spiritual appropriation, earthing, self-love, the mustachioed men of Valencia, dog people, authentic relating, the Big Bang, and ants carrying Cheetos.
It’s raw, uncensored, apocalyptic, non-dual, post post-feminist trauma-informed comedy at its finest!
Alicia Dattner: At age 11, Alicia wrote her first joke. She won’t repeat it here, as mother has requested, “Can you stop telling that joke about me already?” At age 18, Alicia stepped on stage at friend Eugene Mirman’s open mic at Hampshire College. She heckled the audience by mistake, when they laughed at her best joke. And then asked, “Would you like to see my impressions?” “Sure!” they said. So she pulled out the porcelain impressions of her teeth from age five. She felt it went fantastic and knew this would be her life from now on. She moved to San Francisco where she honed her craft for more years than she’d like to admit, sharing the stage with a ragtag bunch of misfit comedians from Ali Wong and Sheng Weng, to Arj Barker, Maria Bamford, and Marc Maron. She eventually made the rounds performing at Cobb’s Comedy Club, The Punchline, The Improv.
In 2001, Alicia bumped into fellow comedian Moshe Kasher at Burning Man where they both were doing standup at Center Camp. Moshe was funnier, maybe because Alicia was still reeling from getting dumped by Chicken John. In 2003, Alicia was writing and directing a comedy short at the Odeon in San Francisco starring Joe Klocek, Jasper Redd, Steve Mazan, Brian Mallow, Daniel Siefert, and Bill Santiago about how the comedic premises are a precious natural resource, and they’re running out.
In 2004, inspired by Chicken’s Circus Ridickulous, Dattner (that’s what they called her at the time) started a comic punk rock circus called “The Latest Show on Earth”, and toured the country with circus partner Ben Turner. Acts like “The Emotional Escape Artist”, “The Self-Taming Lion Man” and “The Dance of the Third Wheel” delighted hipster audiences from Athens to Chicago to New Orleans to New York and 20 other cities.
In 2005, at Burning Man, she held what she believes to be the first Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meeting involving shirt-cocking. She felt it went fantastic and knew this would be her life from now on.
Since then, Alicia has written a string of poignant and hilarious underrated comedy shows, performing them around the world, from Off Broadway to Bombay to Bali, Hollywood to London, all with three word titles: Latest Show (on) Earth, The Punch Line, Eat Pray Laugh, Oy of Sex, and One Life Stand. Finally she’s broken the streak this year with Are You Dressed for the Apocalypse?
She’s filmed these shows for comedy specials and released them to critical acclaim on Youtube. She’s won a slew of awards. Best Storyteller at the United Solo Festival in New York. Best of the Fringe in San Francisco (twice). Best of the Fringe in Hollywood. Solo Show of the Year from Theater Bay Area. Voted Best Comedian in both the SF Weekly and SF Bay Guardian.
After spending a bunch of time wandering in ashrams and Budda Bars of India, Bali, and Portugal, and Brazil, doing a little tantra, and becoming a “life coach”, she now thinks she’s qualified to dole out nondual transmissions and spontaneous awakenings of embodied liberation. (She is not.) (But that won’t stop her.)
Down here in Los Angeles, she’s working on a semi-autobiographical TV show about all these misadventures. She thinks about starting a podcast. (It would be very funny.) Imagine it now in your mind. That will be less work for her.
