The Adam and Dr. Drew Show - Classic #188: Doug Benson Pt. 1

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

November 5, 2014 - Doug Benson joins to show to talk about his new stand up special ‘Doug Dynasty.’ They also take phone calls about giving your significant other a nickname and their interpretation of ‘handling the truth.’See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Well, yet another throwback episode. This is with, of course, the great Doug Benson from November of 2014. It's so interesting looking back through that scope, the retrospectoscope, looking at things from 10 years ago, how we sounded, how he sounded, how the world looked to us. And at that point, he was promoting his new stand-up special, Doug Dynasty. Check out episode 188 with Doug Benson. Recorded live at Corolla One Studios with Adam Carolla and board search. Certified Physician and Addiction Medicine Specialist, Dr. Drew Pinsky.

You're listening to The Adam and Dr. Drew Show. Yeah, get it on. Got to get it on. No choice but to get it on mandate. Get it on. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining in, and thanks for telling a friend. I'm Adam Carolla. That is Dr. Drew Pinski. They're there. Board Certified Physician, Dixon, our guest. Hey. Everyone loves Doug Benson. What's not the love about Doug Benson? Doug Dynasty at premieres today on Netflix. Nice.

And, oh, recorded at the Neptune Theater in Seattle. Love that. You're going to be there soon. Yeah, we are going to be the Neptune Theater soon in Seattle. First show sold out, but a second show added, because why wouldn't I work all weekend every weekend? So really beautiful, cool, hip. Well, Seattle, you know, but just a good vibe.

It's a really nice theater. I really, I like it. And we didn't change much for, you know, how when they go in and do comedy specials, they like, you know, they completely change the look of a place. But the lighting all different, dramatic. And I really like those stained glass windows they have of various Neptune doing various things. And so I just left it and just sort of, we added stuff on the stage, but we used the look of the theater. Right.

But you still showed up in your purple bib coveralls like. Sinbad by shooting in 80s. Remember when black comedians would just wear insane outfits on stage? Just comedians in general. No, no. Let's focus on the blacks. Now, there was a white version of it.

The white express glee at that. The white, no. The white version of it was the super skinny tie and the blazer with the sleeves pushed up, which was of it, at least it was of the era. It still is mock worth.

Yeah. But it wasn't Eddie Murphy wearing ostrich skin that was bright purple. Yeah, and a onesie. And a onesy. A leather onesie. And driving gloves. And with his chest exposed. Whenever a comedian's chest comes out, that's not going to be good.

Gary, do you have one where he's standing upright so that we actually can see the. This one, we can just sort of see the cleavage. You get the idea, though. I mean, come on. Well, Gary, you can always wait until you have a good picture. There you go. He's wearing a snowmobile outfit. Yeah, he really. he's going to go clear the roads

after the show I'm clearing the roads with my comedy look out Snowbank I got a snow plow for a comedy and salt coming at you it always is weird

Doug you're a laid back guy Tell me You called him agitated I was fucking with him Doug you're late back guy Because I was standing around waiting Do you guys thank you This is a much better picture of Sinbad

Do you Do you guys, by the way, students will be able to look at this picture in 255 and not only know what year it's from, but what month and possibly what day. It's like so 80s, early 90s, 80s out. All right. Do you feel, do you guys in general feel that it's weird? And I've always felt weird that when art becomes aggressive, aggressive, which is, this. You know, every one of Dane Cook albums is

like the mic forming a skull and crossbones, and it's called Bring the Pain, or here comes the truth train, or something. And it, and every... Dangerous comes in a lot. It's rock and roll, it's all. Chris Rock does the same thing. Like, Chris Rock... It's comedy, rock and roll. There could be

no less threatening black man on the planet than Chris Rock, but every single one of his alms and everything is like never scared, never back down, your face coming at you with the comedy. Rock and roll does it too. It's like a bunch of guys from England average weight, 122 pounds, and they're doing some sort of super scary thing where everyone's looking pissed off with their hands on their

hips and no tolerance for you. And they're coming at you with their rock and roll. We're black skulls on the wrist. It's music and comedy. Well, music I get it. The music can be aggressive, but comedy's never. No, no. You know why because because both.

Both rock and comedy come from an antisocial impulse. And they sort of distinguish themselves by making that antisociality and commentary on society more intense. Like, I'm going to show you. I'm going to be the renegade. And I'm going to talk the way I want to talk just because, man, and play the music I want to play. I've named all my albums wrong. It sounds like 12 other guys' music. No, you have.

I forgot to be. To do that in the title. You foolishly attempted to be funny. because you do comedy you instead should be trying to scare people with your tongue I remember back in the day there was a guy's nickname stand-up

I think his nickname was shotgun or machine gun or something like that but he handed out business cards this is back when comedians had business cards and it said comedy with the safety off right yeah and it's just like what are you talking about

you mean comedy? You mean comedy? Except they legitimately are scared of it. Well no that's The whole thing is if you're into the MMA or you're into pro wrestling, then by all means adopt a persona that intimidates people. Yeah. But if you're telling jokes, maybe you don't need to scare folk.

I think the acts with those scary names and their titles, they sort of burn out maybe quicker, like they become huge and have that sort of attitude in their titles. You guys love none of that. People get tired of it. Don't want to be huge. I just, no, let's not be huge. You know what I mean?

Like those guys play Eventually they play Madison Square Garden You know And then a few years after that Yeah They're just sort of a regular comic again Yeah you're thinking like You're Andrew Dice Clay

Yeah You're Dane cooks Those guys will always work Right They've reached their Right Because Well

What you're What I believe you're What I believe you're saying is You know Dana Gould's never playing Madison Square Garden But he's also never going to bottom out

either because he doesn't have a hook. And his album titles are going to be clever. Right. Like in a cute way. Right. But when you're working with a hook, that's great if it works, but it's not going to keep working forever. The hook being an antisocial hook, you mean?

Yeah, better. Because the ventriloquist kind of a hook, and they sell these big stadiums out, and they're sort of comedy. What I'm saying is, is better to be Mike Singletary than Brian Bosworth. Brian Bosworth had a hook. Unfortunately, his job was to be a linebacker in the NFL. Instead, he had an attitude and a style, which is great. But at some point when Bo Jackson is running you over, the Mohawk is not saving you. So, like, just from a philosophical standpoint in life, don't be the angry rock and roll doctor.

Just be the doctor. Just be the comedian. Or just be the good inside linebacker. Right, right. Oh, no, not be what you are. Be what good at what you are. Be what you're asked to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right. I'm laughing to myself. I see Doug's got some live shows coming up. Did you book Tempe and Tampa intentionally just to confuse people? No, and I even, on my tour dates page, I made sure there's a date in between because it's just saying Tempe, Tempe, Tampa, Tampa is going to confuse a lot of people, especially my crowd. Tickets at Doug lovesmovies.com before you smoke out, go to that website because the ticket, the names of the cities he'll be appearing and gets confusing. Do, now, Doug, on this stand-up special, and forgive me for asking, but everyone is doing so many different things.

Doug loves movies. I'm doing live podcasts. You do live podcasts. You know, everything is some sort of something. It's just, is this a straight stand-up special? It is. It's basically just me doing, it's the first time I've ever done one. I've done lots of albums, but I've never done a special because I personally don't enjoy

watching one person stand there and talk for an hour on television but they finally talked me into doing one and you know and it's uh i had a few years of material to pull pull from and i also insisted on doing a shot where i'm getting high in the alley and i walk right onto the stage because i don't think that's ever been done that's a stand-up special well it's not been it's not it's not a shot plenty of people have been high yeah or on something while doing their specials, but I wanted to be one where it's just, you know, out in the open from jump, you know,

that I'm just high and telling my jokes. How do we know it was real weed? Right, yeah. Because I don't cough after I hit it. If I hit some sort of fake weed, a really big hit, it would make me cough like a cigarette would. And then the other thing I do that's

sort of different in this special, because I wanted to try to approach it differently, is I pull out my phone and I look at my Twitter and see what people in the audience. I read what people in the audience are writing during the show. Like if people are tweeting during, during my performance, then I bring it out and I call them out on it. And it's basically like, you know, heckling, it's like mind heckling because they're thinking it

and they wrote it, but they didn't yell it out. So they're saying, I still find it and then attack them for it. Do you find them? Yeah, I say, where are you in the crowd? And they raise their hand and then we go at it. Now, there's no pre-anything to that. I mean, that's just assuming that the Neptune holds about 800. Yeah, maybe less because they put chairs in for, you know, because it's normally a rock club.

But, yeah, they can get a lot of people in there. Right. So, you know, you get 700, 750 people in one place. Everyone's got a phone. Doug Benson's up on stage. It's been 35 minutes. There's going to be some tweeting action going on. Yeah, even if I don't even mention it.

That's what I'm saying. Don't mention it. There's going to be, it's going to be there. and then you can bus them, so to speak. Yeah. That's a really clever idea. And, you know, it shows, just like it does on all TV shows now, the tweet appears on the screen, right, a picture and everything.

Right. During the show. So you just surprised the audience by pulling out your phone and saying, let's see who's talking shit. Yeah, I do it right away at the beginning to establish that it's going to be a thing, and then I do it a few more times, you know, throughout the show. Oh, okay. So you tell the audience if you want to. At the beginning, I say, let's see what people are saying based on, you know, them just being there waiting for the show to start.

Uh-huh. Because people tweet like crazy during that period. Right. You know, I'm here. You know, it's always a picture of an empty stage and a microphone. Right. And then... There's more, though, in comedy of doing the stuff that you've always done, which is audience sort of prompting and interaction and improvving with the audience is really what it is.

Yeah. I... John, I... Paul McCurier was saying he does that. A lot of people do that now, I think. Well, I think what people want, and it's good because the comedians want it as well of those who can pull it off, they want, I think what everyone, well, remember a million years ago I said it drew real TV. I didn't say reality TV. I just said real TV.

I said, I think they want real. Something real, you would say. They want something real. You would say it like that. Yeah, but I'd say real TV. Yeah. Because I felt like what we were doing on Loveline. back in the 90s was real.

We took, we're taking, no one else would take unscreened calls. They were screened, but not by us. We never knew. We never knew anything. I remember one conversation he and I have with somebody. They're like, how many writers you guys have? Remember that conversation?

Yeah. We're like, you're looking at them. They go, yeah, yeah, no, no, but the writers. You must have three or four writers, right? Like, no, no, no, we, it's just fun. And I said real, I think what people, more than anything, now just went real. So if you come out, as a matter of fact, back to Chris Rock for a second, when he did, he had an idea for, I think, his last special that seemed like a really clever idea, but I think it kind of backfired on him in the sense that sometimes you have an idea and it's like, oh, yeah, that's great. Oh, that sounds really cool.

And then you see the execution of it. And it's not until you see the execution of it where you go. Oh, it just didn't come out. It's like some sort of stew where you put in all your favorite ingredients, but you take a hit off the ladle, and you're like, oh, it's not as good as I thought it was going to be. Yeah, it didn't work like I thought it was going to work. His last stand-up special, as far as I know. Gary, would you like to put the name of the stand-up special on there? He's looking.

He's looking. Okay. How long we've been talking about it? Two seconds. Okay. No, we started by talking about it. All right. His last stand-up special, he did something that was an interesting hook, which is he did his act and whacked it together from all different locations, like a Phil Collins video from the 80s. He did his – he had his thing at this location and that location and that location.

But you ended up realizing, oh, this is his act, that he's doing the same act in every location, and he's whacking it together. together to make instead of it. So what's different about each part of it? Well, what makes it special to that place? Instead, it's called Kill the Messenger. It's got the word kill on it. Instead of doing what perceived to be a real-time, 90-minute, one-time stand-up show, he went to London, New York, and South Africa, did the exact same act, and then whacked it up

into a 90-minute special, but it ended up serving as a sort of notice that he was doing the same. Yeah. See, when you do stand-up specials, people at home, here's what you do. Bring two of the same shirts. I didn't even change. Do a 7 o'clock show and then do the exact same show at 10 o'clock. And then out of those two 90-minute shows, we shall whack together one hour. Because, look, not every joke's going to land.

Not everything's going to be perfect. some audience may be better, blah, blah, blah. Now, nobody ever says my one-hour stand-up special is actually two separate shows that I whack together because why? It's it disappoints. It's like illusion a little bit disappointed. Right. So now what we want, I mean, the ultimate thing that we want as an audience is we want a person

who stands on stage and if you're very good at your job, you can pretend. is if you've made up this 90 minutes on the spot. Yeah. But we're savvy enough to know that that's not really the way it works. But still, comedians do the, oh, man, what was that thing I wanted to talk about? Oh, my girlfriend just broke up with me. Yeah, six years ago. But either way, they do it. But I think they want more of that now, and they want, they want no net.

They want you talking to the audience. Yeah, they want that. Right. They want that. Well, podcasting has really opened that up because they listen to us talk like we are right now, completely unscripted I'm not that this has been necessarily hilarious

radio is how dare you but it's like radio always but it's like we're in their heads in a way that people will be happy to come see us in person especially if we're promising to do something similar to what they

listen to all the time which is you know my case is not that difficult I love movies and weed and you know the things I have podcasts about it's easy for me to get up on stage and talk about them you know every night you know um all right we have a few uh phone calls some guys calling from munich guys calling from munich yeah germany 49 robert all right hey robert yeah what's going on man yeah well i'm sorry i'm 49 and

11 12 oh you're 49 well maybe why well i'll be in less than two weeks i'm going to turn 50 okay oh all right how what we do you live it to December no no middle of november no middle of What are you doing in Munich? What am I doing? I've been living here about 25 years. Wow. Where did you move from? You can't believe this.

Maybe Southern California. What's different culturally over there besides not waiting through a river of horchata to get to your car? But what is different over in Munich? We just, we came over and it was kind of a hallway. day, and we just fell in love with the city and decided to stay and found jobs, and we've been here since. What kind of work do you do? That's not answering my fucking question.

I didn't answer any question. What do you do for work? What's the work? I was working in IT for many years, and now I'm now a freelancer. Are you German? No, I'm actually from East L.A. He's Mexican. So Adam's question is even more pertinent.

I would say more Native American, but yeah, something like that. Is there, I'm picturing no gum on the sidewalks. Yeah, you're pretty much right on that. Germany's got a lot of advantages. It's a lot different. I mean, I got out of L.A. because I just, back then I realized I had to get out. Are you by the Marion Plotz?

No, I live a little bit east. I live about five miles east of the city center. So I was in a meeting like last Christmas. How close to the Porsche factory? Well, no, Porsche's in Stuttgart. That's far away. It's out by the airport. Everything's on the way to the airport.

BMW is more in the city, yeah, and more in the center of the city, yeah. All right. Or Audi. You've lived here this whole time. You must be fluent German at this point. I think I am. I speak kind of a mixture of, I still, I can't give rid of my American accent, so I speak kind of a German-Bavarian mix, which people think is funny.

So I guess it's to my advantage. So you totally get, you've gotten bold. all these 25 years of not ever really being absolutely fluent, but you live there? I think I'm pretty fluent. How long did that take? That took a while. Mainly, well, mainly working in IT, I work with American companies, so it's been most of my day speaking English, and then come home and speak German, and then kind of, depending on my wife or girlfriend

or whatever I had at the time, then, you know, that would kind of tip the scale. A lot of Germans I've run into speak English, but I run into them, you know, in Hollywood, so that makes sense. But as a culture, especially in a place like Munich, do you find a lot of people speak some English? Oh, yeah. No, it depends on the generation. I mean, all the younger kids, they have to take in those from school, so it's pretty much a given now. It depends if they're from East Germany and they're a little bit older, they may not speak English as well. They might speak Russian or French.

Oh, okay. But most Germans, depending on our age, most of them have had something. So interesting. Question. Do you have a question, Robert? Yeah, I actually do. It's kind of related to age as well. So my question is really about my girlfriend, because I've been married a couple times, and partner.

Oh, by the way. It's really what do we call her? What do we call someone now in our age, 50 years or so, a girlfriend, partner? Your lady friend. Lady friend. That's super creepy. I want to introduce you to my lady friend. I love her.

Lady friend, it's good. It's like, it implies you're having sex, but there's not a great commitment there. And that there's always an age gap when you, no one introduces their lady friend who's older than they are. Right. She's got to be significantly younger. How old is she? She's younger than I mean. How old?

46. No. Robert. I'm not old enough. Robert. Are you aware that you never answer a question directly ever? Fucking IT guys. Are you aware of that?

Can't communicate. By the way, how old is she is as basic a question as basic a question as what is your birthday or what day is it? It's literally a number that you must regurgitate. Right. And by him saying younger, that's a pretty big category when he's 50. She's younger. Well, she's younger. One has been divorced a few times, and in Germany, we could be talking about a 14-year-old at that point.

Hey, they don't judge. Do you throw out your wife's ages like that, if asked? Well, that's, because that's what he's probably doing. But that's a good, that's a good point. Yeah, maybe sometimes. Had he answered any of our other questions directly, I would have thought that. But that one question came back with a direct answer, all oblique, all obscure. No, but I do think guys do get trained to answer how, as if the.

significant otherwithstanding next to them. And if you were at a cocktail party, you'd answer would definitely be younger. She doesn't need 46 being thrown around. That's for sure. She's German, right? She's German? He just said goodbye to her?

No, no, no, no, no. I'm alone. All right, and Robert, your connection is bad. So the question is... What to call her? So is it a girlfriend, high girlfriend, I think. Well, what do they say? Your frow.

In German, German. All right, his... Your frow. His phone line is degrading more. as the second swear on, so I'm going to put him on hold. I don't know. He's not going to say it in English anyway. It's not, I think it's more about what to call her to her for her.

Oh. Not the folks he works with. I see. But first off, we're living in a day in an age where anyone, look, you could fucking, you could date a grandfather clock and nobody would judge you. You know what I'd be like he's dating a grandfather clock. I know, but, you know. But what does he call him?

Well, it's his own thing. How does he introduce this clock? At party. He's into mahogany. What can I tell you? The point is, there's never been a better time to have a relationship where you don't need a title. You know what I mean? It just is.

Everyone's got something going on. All right, you want a pen to. Well, you can point at the thing, and I'll hand it to you. I don't want to bother you. I have a crazy idea. You could think to grab it before the show. I know. That's not something that.