SPOILER ALERT: If you're interested in listening to the Steve Byrne WTF episode, there's a fairly detailed account of a story told. You might want to skip this post.
Lately I've become obsessed with Marc Maran's podcast, WTF. It's dramatically reduced my music listening at the moment; it seems whenever I have a moment to listen to anything, I want to hear these conversations.
Yesterday, I listened to the episode that featured Steve Byrne, a comic that had previously been unknown to me. Before introducing Steve Byrne, Maran played a clip from a previous episode with Dane Cook. In this segment, Maran asks Cook if there was a comic that he believed "stole his essence." Cook says yes and named Steve Byrne. He talks about a conversation they had about it and how that talk resolved things.
On this podcast, Byrne was able to tell his side of the story. He said that Cook told it as if he iniiated the conversation and that it was a mentorship situation. Byrne said that he called Dane Cook after he was told that he would no longer be welcome to perform at a certain comedy club, because Cook had issues with him. So Byrne called Cook to find out what it was about and went over to his house to talk.
They did have the conversation where Cook said he thought that Byrne was stealing his essence. Byrne said that he thought that was crazy but was willing to let it go. Then Byrne added a detail that Cook failed to mention. At the end of the conversation, Cook basically told Byrne that this was his city, and that he should leave town. Byrne had just moved to L.A. after working for seven years in New York.
Cook also failed to say that a few weeks later, he and Bryne had an argument outside a club. Byrne had told a few of his comic friends about what happened. It was a story that became public knowledge among comedians. Cook wasn't happy about it; Byrne didn't back down.
The next morning Byrne received an email from his agent. He and Dane Cook had the same agent. The agent terminated his relationship with Byrne. For a year or so afer that, Bryne was blacklisted from certain comedy clubs in L.A.
I listened to this podcast while I was walking the hills of our neighborhood. When I returned, Mike was probably unfortunate enough to be sitting outside, and I told him the whole story, blow by blow. Last night, when we were looking for something to watch, I discovered that Byrne had some of his comedy specials on instant streaming on Netflix.
We first tried "The Byrne Identity," which is such a great title, but the opening fell flat, and we might have just ended it at that, but that story he told was so compelling that we ended up watching "Happy Hour," which made me laugh very hard at times. I kept saying to Mike, "He really seems to me like he has his own essence." We considered watching some Dane Cook to compare essences and decided against it almost as soon as the words hit the air.
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