Blake Clark

He occupies a dual space in American entertainment. To the public, he is a familiar face in television sitcoms and Adam Sandler movies, or the voice of an animated dog. To other comics, he is a battle-tested club act who came up in the 1980s boom.

He is the guy who survived the boom, survived the bust, and just kept putting in sets.

The standup leans on plainspoken frustration. He plays the reasonable man surrounded by idiots. He works best when he lets the volume of his voice do the heavy lifting, turning a minor annoyance into a gravelly, roaring punchline. If the act has a flaw, it is that he sometimes settles for easy rhythms. He will play the standard notes of a Southern good old boy even when the underlying joke is smarter than the persona.

Before he stood on stages, Clark was an infantry platoon leader in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne. When he started out, he built his material around that history, translating the bleak reality of a combat tour into dark club humor. That core grit never washed out of the act.