One Night Stand

Dana Gould stood out against the standard club comedy of the early nineties by swapping crowd-pleasing swagger for twitchy, fatalistic anxiety. His act treats contentment as a trap, operating on the premise that feeling happy usually just means you forgot something terrible, while filtering everyday dread through monster movies, insomnia, and the stifling oddities of small-town New England. Director John Moffitt taped the set in Miami Beach for the fourth season of HBO’s half-hour showcase series, which aired in October 1992. Gould was twenty-eight and establishing himself on the West Coast alternative comedy circuit, arriving right between his 1991 Showtime half-hour and his stint writing and performing on The Ben Stiller Show.