Follow, Listen, Laugh, Watch, Read: Five Recs From Comedian David Gborie

Stand-up comedian and writer David Gborie was recently featured on Comedy Central Stand-Up Presents, delivering half an hour in which he compares doing cocaine to peeing your pants. He co-hosts the much-loved All Fantasy Everything podcast, which continues to air every week, thanks to Zoom.

Blvck Vrchives is just beautiful pictures. They do such a good job of capturing times and places. A lot of times when you see historical photos it’s from more metropolitan areas—New York in the 1950s or whatever. With Blvck Vrchives, you see a family reunion in Arkansas, some guys smoking in Clinton, Tennessee, people dancing in a living room in Long Beach, stuff like that. Everyone looks so noble; it’s just a great way to see blackness in all its forms. I get stuck looking at it for hours.

I grew up with her in my house. Obviously my mom was a big fan, and even as an adult I don’t believe other singers in the way that I believe Whitney Houston. “Saving All My Love for You” is about her sleeping with a married man, and the point is that even though he’s married, she’s still not going to sleep with anyone else but him. That makes me want to cry, man, ’cause when you listen to her sing it, you feel her heart. It’s all of the emotions. Part of it is sexy: She’s like, “When I see you, it’s on.” But she’s in such a fucked-up spot. She’s like, “I know you got your family, and that’s cool, and this is never going to be any more than this thing.” But she loves that thing so much, and that gets me every time.

I’m a stand-up comic now, but stand-up didn’t really connect with me growing up. And then right after I started doing it, Elephant in the Room came out, and it was the first time I saw somebody do comedy so effortlessly. I was like, Oh, you can just talk and be the best at it. And from a technical standpoint—he opens the special with crowd work, which no one ever does, and he kind of divides the audience into three parts and plays people against each other. If you can make me laugh at something I don’t agree with, that’s the hardest trick there is. And most of the stuff Patrice O’NeaI says I don’t agree with at all. And when you watch it, it doesn’t fucking matter.

I don’t tend to watch a lot of British stuff, but People Just Do Nothing is real weird and so much fun. It’s a documentary-style show about these guys who live on an estate—England’s version of projects. They run a hardcore drum-and-bass pirate radio station called Kurupt FM, and it only broadcasts to their estate, so only people on that estate can listen to it. There are these typical delusions of grandeur, like the main guy thinking he’s a real rapper and being obsessed with Jamaica even though he’s not Jamaican at all. So much comedy is about rich people, because then they don’t have problems and they can focus on the comedy. I like shows about normal people. I like it when the relationships are complicated, especially in comedy. It’s the opposite of my humor, and the harder it is to do, the more I appreciate the magic of it.

This guy had a difficult youth, did a bunch of crimes, eventually shot somebody, went to prison, got out and ended up becoming a journalist. When I first read his memoir (I was about 14 or 15), I was interested in this guy’s youth, right? But as an adult I realized that it’s just as interesting to read about how he reintegrated into society. That second act of Makes Me Wanna Holler, about how somebody can come back from a difficult life, is just the best. I often think that life is about distance traveled—not physical as much as emotional and mental. And with that guy, the distance traveled is just incredible.