Possibly to get in on the “comedians awkwardly explain their participation in controversial events” trend, David Spade just walked his fans through the decision-making process behind a recent corporate gig.
Earlier this month, Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff made headlines for his newfound support of Donald Trump, and his suggestion that the president could send National Guard troops to invade his hometown of San Francisco.
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Not long after the Salesforce controversy erupted, comedians Kumail Nanjiani and Ilana Glazer “abruptly withdrew” from scheduled appearances at Salesforce’s annual conference, Dreamforce — although neither of the comics have “publicly addressed their cancellations.” Salesforce then “replaced the pair with comedian David Spade for Thursday afternoon’s event,” as the San Francisco Chronicle reported last week.
During Monday’s Fly on the Wall podcast, Spade attempted to explain that he only took the gig because he didn’t know what was going on.
After revealing that corporate gigs are “usually a lot of fun and pretty harmless,” Spade told co-host Dana Carvey that he didn’t actually realize that Nanjiani and Glazer had pulled out of the show, noting that he was told that Glazer would be his opener, and he had heard that Nanjiani, a past Fly on the Wall guest, was sick.
After agreeing to do the show at the last minute, Spade only learned about the other comedians’ cancellations while en route to Dreamforce. “I’m already in San Fran. I’m going there to the gig, and there’s an article that gets sent to me,” Spade recalled. “They both fell out now, because of a possible political thing. I heard the word ‘Trump’ thrown around.”
“That’s not what I was told — I was told nothing,” Spade continued. “Then there was a rumor (that) Kumail had COVID. So I’m on the way going, ‘Wait am I supposed to not do this?’”
Spade went ahead and did the show anyways, but he was displeased to see his name mentioned in an unflattering write-up about the event in SFGate soon afterwards. While the article mentioned the “CEO drama,” the author’s complaints about Spade were mainly to do with his act, which it described as “40 minutes of rambly, down-home storytelling.”
“He tried many sound effects, and made much use of his classic sarcasm, but joked little about the conference, its themes, or San Francisco,” the article noted, unfavorably comparing Spade’s performance to last year’s headline-making John Mulaney set.
Carvey theorized that the article may have been written by A.I. and suggested that the author may not have seen Grown Ups or Tommy Boy, which seems like an overly-complicated explanation for one critic’s disinterest in Spade’s admittedly last-minute show.
Beyond that one review, there doesn’t seem to have been much blowback to Spade’s performance, which means that he may have just Streisand Effect-ed his participation in the now-controversial event, which a lot of fans probably never even heard of until he brought it up on Fly on the Wall.
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