Insomnia – an abnormal inability to sleep.
Drunkard – a person who often gets drunk.
It’s 2 a.m., the TV is on and the demented clown music begins, shortly thereafter the show of drunken freaks, fetish femme fatales and graveyard shift dockworkers floods the screen. Not that there’s anything uncommon about these occurrences – they happen in every city, just not with a drunken comedian giving commentary as it unfolds.
“I have a couple of shots, I pretty much drink throughout the entire night,” said Dave Attell in a recent Hatchet interview. “Then I drink a lot of Jager. I never thought the show would reach the level of mediocrity that it has, it really is depraved,”
The depravity he speaks of is his Comedy Central’s “Insomniac,” a travel-log of sorts, featuring all those faces and incidences vaguely remembered after a late night of drinking and degeneracy.
Despite the show’s simple content and unscripted format, it’s a hit with young insomniacs nationwide.
“Once we did the pilot I pretty much thought that would be it” Attell said “I don’t think there’s any real relevance to it, I don’t think that there’s some great need for the show at all. It’s basically a very simple idea, it’s nothing of importance, just a cross between ‘Girls Gone Wild’ and ‘Cops.'”
Of course there are breasts, lots of them, with the censor’s mosaic covering their drunken jiggling. Attell stumbles through bars and clubs galore allowing the odd experiences of the night to unfold. As Attell states, much of what’s shot never actually makes it to airtime.
“Usually when people see the camera they get kind of crazy,” he said. “There’s a lot of drunken mayhem on tape that we don’t put on the show just because we don’t think they would want to see themselves on TV like that. I would hate to have people think I’m out there gunning people and setting them up in the name of sabotage.”
Attell said though he has seen quite a few fights, he has been able to avoid physical violence himself.
“The closest we ever came to an actual fight was in Montreal when some French Canadian immediately just went from friendly tipsy drunk to crazy drunken Frenchman,” Attell said. “We caught him off guard, he went from friendly to crazy and he started screaming at the camera, ‘what are you doing here? Why do you control NATO?'”
The show is cheery and what is shown are the happy drunks – the biker, stripper, college student or Santa Claus in the off-season.
Perhaps most refreshing is Attell’s candid opinion regarding his own performance as host of the show.
“The worst part of the show is introducing something because I’m not a good host, I’ll flub some sort of line and they’ll just put it in there,” Attell said. “You don’t usually see other people messing up, just me messing up. The problem for me isn’t coming up with ideas, it’s having to live with what I just did on camera.”
Now, no sooner than these words came out of Attell’s mouth, did a right wing religious fanatic interrupt the interview. He was quite upset with what was being said, namely the show’s self-proclaimed depravity.
“Do you find it poignant to be mundane and inane on national television?” the fanatic said. “And polish it all off by using the word ‘like’ after every other word?”
But Attell was ready for it, and answered as only the sarcastic comic could.
“Well, I think scripture says, ‘speak the word my brother!’ But no, because you see, I really don’t know much about the Bible, I have seen it in action though, and it is quite scary,” he said. “The hardest part about the show is that because it’s unscripted, unlike a regular show, a sitcom, something Christian-based let’s say like ‘Saved by the Bell’ or ‘7th Heaven,’ they get to try as many times as they want.”
In the end, Attell is just a fun-loving guy who adores stand up comedy and can’t sleep. The third season of “Insomniac” premieres Thursday, Dec. 5.
