For The Boys

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 Licata plays a manic, arrested-development version of himself, presenting outdated cultural touchstones like Bam Margera and Papa Roach to a room of teenagers who have no idea who he is talking about.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.