We’ve partnered with Tom Gribbin, a musician, promoter and former owner of a comedy club empire, to bring top-flight stand-up to the Palladium Side Door.
This week, we’re featuring Dean Napolitano, veteran of TV, movies, and the comedy club circuit. The show is Friday, August 29 with another top funnyman, Nathan Wallace, opening the show.
For tickets and information, you can follow this link.
My pal, Bill DeYoung, profiled Dean for the St. Pete Catalyst. His story appears below and at this link.
Comedian Dean Napolitano gives it to you straight
The Florida funnyman performs Aug. 29 at the Palladium Theater’s Side Door Cabaret.
By Bill DeYoung/St. Pete Catalyst
The standup comedy universe has changed dramatically since Dean Napolitano launched his career in the early 1990s. There’s YouTube, and TikTok and social media, where allegedly “funny” people pop up every day with wacky videos and memes. There are fewer comedy clubs, and more single-spotlight corner stages in bars and hotel lounges.
A new trend is “Don’t Tell Comedy”: Pop-up shows in places like wineries or brewhouses.
Napolitano, a native New Yorker who’s been based in Florida for more than a decade, is as traditional as they come: He’s a standup comedian who simply stands up and talks to the audience, as if carrying on a (very funny) conversation.
Napolitano is coming to the Palladium Theater’s Side Door Cabaret Aug. 29. He has honed his technique – although he (like most comics) would bristle at that word – over 35 years on stage around the country.
He’s proud of his conversational style. “It’s as if I’m telling it the first time,” he explains. “I really am passionate about the stuff I talk about, and when I’m delivering it to a new group it’s always real.”
His dad once told him he was not just a good comedian, he was a great “communicator.” Napolitano took that as a terrific compliment. “When I was coming up,” he says, “there were some comics that were just phoning it in.
“I’d work with these headliners, when I was an opener or a feature, and I’d think ‘Man, they just look miserable up there.’”
He talks about relationships, and family, and everyday stuff like grocery stores and doctor visits.
“My goal now, at 55, I just want to enjoy what I do. I still love it like the first day I went up onstage. I love writing new material, I love having ‘improv’ things happen at shows. Which happens quite often.
“And one of the things I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older as a comic is to enjoy the quiet onstage when something doesn’t work: ‘Hey, I’m enjoying the quiet because you guys thought that joke sucked. That’s all right.’
“I always write more for myself than I do the audience. What makes me laugh, I think people generally find funny. And so I always try to keep that in mind, not trying to be a ‘pleaser’ up there, you know?”
Napolitano tried for the big brass ring by moving to Los Angeles in 2001. “My goal was always to get a sitcom,” he explains. “I think that was most comics’ goal, to a degree. I wanted to be the next Everybody Loves Raymond, an Italian family sitcom. I pitched one.”
The powers that be didn’t bite. Instead, he got small parts in Dirty Sexy Money, Army Wives, Burn Notice and other TV series, but returned to Florida in 2011 to care for his aging parents.
He appeared in the 2016 crime drama Triple 9, with Casey Affleck and Woody Harrelson, and 2019’s Cult Cartel.
“I don’t think you need to be in Hollywood any more, to be honest,” he observes. “You can do everything from your own home, and then book an acting job by submitting an audition. Used to be you had to drive – and now they don’t want you to.
“I still have things I want to do, as far as acting goes, and creating content. But as far as standup … well, it used to be a negative to go on cruise ships. They said ‘Comics go on cruise ships to die.’ But now you’re seeing really good comics on cruise ships, that have been on the Tonight Show or the Late Show. You can go out and make your money and be comfortable, because you’ve earned it, and still do the regular clubs.”
Napolitano works about 45 weekends per year. When he’s not onstage, he explains, he’s observing.
“I always try to experience new stuff, like I went skydiving and I wrote a bit on that. During the day, I’m not like I am onstage. I’m mostly quiet. I was quiet kid.
“But when I go up there, I get to be that alter ego. I dated a girl once, she came to a New Year’s show, and when I got offstage she goes ‘who the hell was that?’”
Dean Napolitano, with Nathan Wallace and Friends, at 8 p.m. Friday Aug. 29, Side Door Cabaret. Find tickets at this link.
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