Skip to content
Brick Wall Comedy
Brick Wall Comedy
Cover image credit: Thumbnail: YouTube · Dan Licata

For The Boys

Dan Licata

YouTube · 2024

A loud comedian tries to win over a room of confused teenagers.

Watch on YouTube(opens in a new tab)

or watch it free on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

The central premise of For The Boys is an exercise in beautifully engineered discomfort: Dan Licata, a thirty-something comedian, stands in the auditorium of his former high school in Buffalo, New York, to deliver a stand-up set to a crowd of fifteen-year-old boys. Licata plays a manic, arrested-development version of himself, presenting outdated cultural touchstones like Bam Margera and Papa Roach to a room of teenagers who have no idea who he is talking about. The resulting hour thrives on the disconnect between his loud, unearned confidence and his audience’s polite, bewildered silence.

Filmed at Amherst Central High School and released on YouTube in 2024, the special finds Licata leaning hard into a sophomoric, high-volume style that stands in sharp contrast to his quiet writing work on Joe Pera Talks with You. He treats the teenagers like peers, gifting a student a DVD of Jarhead and launching into a long, self-aggrandizing explanation of why he remained a volcel until the military captured Osama bin Laden. Other premises involve a fictional fifty-floor walk-up he claims to share with his mother and twenty pitbulls. The crowd’s flat reactions keep the show grounded, preventing Licata’s absurd tall tales from veering too far into pure performance art.

The set list

5 bits

  1. Edging with urine and expanding his urethra with gauge earrings.

    Explaining extreme and painful bodily habits to teenage boys with hyperbole.

  2. Walking into what he believes is a birthday surprise party that turns out to be an intervention for masturbation addiction.

    Describing his family trying to send him to an Italian-American jerk-off retreat and his submarine-themed basement room.

  3. His grandmother getting paralyzed from the waist up stage-diving at a Mama Roach concert.

    Describing her dive during the song 'Last Resort' at an all-female Papa Roach cover band show.

  4. Suffering over 400 concussions, including at his dry hot-tub water birth.

    Detailing his mother using the dent in his skull as a pipe carb and discussing his 'Chicago-style CTE'.

  5. Condescendingly explaining 9/11 to 15-year-olds using Marvel and Harry Potter terms.

    Describing Osama bin Laden as Voldemort and Thanos combined, and claiming he became a voluntary celibate until bin Laden was caught.

How it plays

Tone
Sophomoric, crude, surreal, and hyper-vulgar, balanced with inherent empathy and wholesome warmth.
On stage
Heightened, blustering arrested-adolescent persona; described as a Jackass-fueled manchild and stoner friend of AJ Soprano who never grew up.
Pace
Frenetic energy with rapid momentum and few pregnant pauses, delivering material with brash confidence.
About
Adolescence and high school life, Jackass stunts and dirtbag culture, Severe bodily injuries and concussions, Dated pop culture references, Millennial male insecurity

What the critics said

Universally praised by critics as a chaotically brilliant, densely written, and hilarious high-concept debut that expertly balances lowbrow vulgarity with sophisticated joke writing.

In the room: An awkward, polite, and initially bewildered room of fifteen-year-old boys who were visibly confused by dated references before slowly warming up.

Summed up from reviews, articles and listings. Sources: pastemagazine.com, letterboxd.com, filmmakermagazine.com, coagulopath.com, last-donut-of-the-night.ghost.io, vulture.com.

Backstory

Filmed in the auditorium of Licata's actual high school alma mater in front of a cast audience of approximately 60 fifteen-year-old boys, framed around a high-concept assembly / guest speaker premise.

Details

Released
Taped
Amherst Central High School, Buffalo
Where
YouTube
Director
Danny Scharar
Topics

If you liked this