What We Missed 2025: Author Jason Klamm on rediscovering comedian Dick Davy

While 2025 was a year for the books in terms of concerts in and around the area, there were, unfortunately, a few cancellations, which led to some disappointment here at the Pitch. Not least of these disappointments was the fact that we’d already conducted interviews with some of these artists. So, in the interest of making lemonade out of sour grapes (or some other such mixed metaphor), we present a couple pieces which might otherwise have been lost to the ages.

In September, Michigan-based author, actor, and comedian Jason Klamm, the man behind the excellent history of the ’90s sketch comedy golden age, We’re Not Worthy, produced his first comedy LP. After over a decade of hosting the history-making Comedy on Vinyl podcast, Klamm put together Presenting… Dick Davy. Released on Stand Up! Records, the LP bookends the career of comedian Dick Davy, a stand-up and activist from the ’60s whose true identity Klamm discovered on an episode of Comedy on Vinyl back in 2018.

As the label explains it, Presenting… Dick Davy is “the wild story of a young cantor, the politically leftist son of a politically leftist New York rabbi, steeped in folk music and anti-war passions and nights at the Apollo, who honed a comedic sensibility and established a common humanity with his audiences by adopting, well, a new persona. And then, two records later, he seemed to be gone.”

Klamm wrote 6500 words of liner notes for Presenting… Dick Davy, and the end result is a very niche, yet very important album which took six long years to complete. Speaking with Klamm via Zoom about the whole thing after having read the story of Davy and hearing just what the man did, it’s obviously this was more than a standard reissue project, beginning with the fact that the archival material from which this project was created were acetates, lacquer-coated metal discs used for direct recording which are delicate and last, at best, for a dozen or so plays before the lacquer begins to flake and degrade.

Dick Davy. // facebook.com/dickdavycomic/

“Very, very fragile, very scary,” Klamm says of the process. “And to have them sent all the way from. San Francisco down to Burbank where I was and where my buddy Taylor was at was a very scary thing.”

Also, the work put into this was a massive set of investigation. Dick Davy was not well-known even in comedy nerd circles, and to be honest, his work was just as adjacent to the burgeoning folk movement of the ’50s and ’60s as it was to comedy. Listening to the album while reading the liner notes, it definitely feels like these recordings are simply the icing on a very, very large layer cake of historical discovery on Klamm’s part.

“The first time around, it was kind of a lark,” explains Klamm of how it all started after having heard about Davy when comedian Kliph Nesteroff came on his podcast back in 2015. “I’m like, ‘Maybe I’ll find Dick Davy, and I can tell Kliph Nesteroff about it and he’ll be excited and then we can both enjoy that.’”

And then Klamm didn’t. By his own admission, he gave up after two weeks, but every once in a while, he would dig back in, thinking, “Maybe?” and then would find nothing. In the end, it was what Klamm describes as “a little hint in a lower part of a whitepages.com trial.” From there, thanks to another free trial at The New York Times, there was a wedding announcement for a Richard Hoffman which stated Hoffman also went by Dick Davy professionally.

It’s very niche, which is why the initial pressing is limited to 300 copies. That said, Klamm thinks that, regardless of numbers, “I think he was genuinely important in as much as like anybody who actually tried and like busted their ass and got two whole records put out and then kind of disappeared is important.”

If nothing else, Presenting… Dick Davy is worth seeking out. The comedy was very much of its time, although, while I was not laughing uproariously, I was definitely grinning at it all. More so than anything else, however, listening to the record left me fascinated by this snapshot of a very particular political point in time that still has parts of it which tickle the familiarity parts of your brain, and it starts to resonate more and more as things go along.

“Yeah, there’s obviously plenty of Dick Davy stuff that’s dated except for thematically,” Klamm acknowledges. “I think thematically it’s all very strong and still relevant, but the whole idea of something being a snapshot does come up with these records that there’s almost nothing else you can say about them except for that this is a perfect distillation of a certain period or even a certain venue.”

Interestingly enough, Davy’s first of two albums released in the ’60s, 1966’s You’re A Long Way From Home, Whitey is pretty remarkable because it’s something that didn’t really get cut to vinyl that often, which is a white performer performing at the Apollo.

“Not that it didn’t happen,” notes Klamm. “He wasn’t a groundbreaker in that way, not the way newspapers made it sound at the time, but it is fascinating and interesting.”

Presenting… Dick Davy is intended to bookend a career which has been “already been sort of succinctly squished into these two records,” as Klamm puts it, and there are genuine surprises to be found on its two sides. There are two songs on the album, “Evening Shade” and “It Ain’t Easy,” and while the former is lovely, the latter legitimately feels like precisely the sort of outsider folk rock which–had it been released a 45 single–which goes for dummy money on Discogs.

Listening to it, you’re waiting for the joke, and there isn’t one. The song is sincere, which is very odd coming from a Jewish New Yorker pretending to be an Arkansan from the smallest town in the country.

“It makes me wonder,” agrees Klamm. “The big mystery of him is, I still don’t really know what he wanted out of his career. I don’t know who he was offstage, when he was just around performers. I get the vibe. He still pretended he was from Arkansas. But yeah, the fact that there is a sincere song–a little goofy, obviously–it’s a little fun, really well written by him.”

Klamm doesn’t know what Davy–aka Hoffman–intended it for other than a hit song, but can’t even conceive of how the comedian would’ve even pitched it to a record label. Even after years of research, Klamm says he still has a lot of discovery to do and even with that, a lot of questions will go unanswered for the rest of his life about Dick Davy.

“I still research him every once in a while,” Klamm admits. “But the one big thing is I don’t know what he wanted. I don’t know what he wanted outta his career. I’m not a hundred percent sure.”

Presenting… Dick Davy is out now from Stand Up! Records.