On The Loose

Most comics who grind out club sets for two decades before filming a debut special end up sounding either over-rehearsed or mildly bitter. Dave Waite mostly sounds puzzled by how he got here, and that unhurried posture drives the whole set. Even when a car crashes through the wall of his house right after an afternoon snack run, his main concern is that neighbors looking through the rubble will judge his messy bedroom.

He works a familiar lane of everyday annoyances and bad decisions, then takes an unexpected exit. Jam bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish become an accessibility program for white dancers who need twenty-minute songs just to find the beat, and taking mushrooms at those shows turns into a coin flip between floating like a piece of kelp and getting cornered into involuntary therapy. Other bits go after the Arby’s app, Airbnbs, dating app witches, and a one-sided war with Chipotle.

Comedy Dynamics released the 49-minute special in April 2026, more than twenty years after Waite started doing stand-up in Cincinnati from a newspaper ad for a comedy class. By then he had logged stints in New York and Los Angeles, five comedy albums, an appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and a 2023 spot as a paid regular at The Comedy Store.

Instead of booking a theater in Los Angeles, he taped the special in August 2025 at Commonwealth Comedy Club in Dayton, Kentucky. The room sits inside a converted church just across the river from Cincinnati, which Waite noted in a local TV interview was as close as he could get to performing at his parents’ house.