Dec. 31: Jimmy Dunn rings in the New Year with laughs at The Rex Theatre

If you go:

Jimmy Dunn Dec. 31/7:30 p.m.

MANCHESTER, NH – Whether 2023 was good to you or it could have been better, it’s always a smart idea to conclude it with some laughs. One of the best ways to do so is by enjoying an evening of stand-up comedy, which is exactly what’s going to be happening at The Rex Theatre in Manchester on New Year’s Eve. Boston comic Jimmy Dunn, who you might know from the television series The McCarthys, Love and the reboot of Frasier, will be performing. He’s been doing comedy for roughly 30 years and he’s also made appearances on the Late Show with David Letterman, the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal and Denis Leary’s Comics Come Home in his home city. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. with Dunn relaying his boisterous brand of humor that has made him a fixture in the local entertainment scene.

We had a talk ahead of his performance about how he got his start in stand-up, how he became part of the Frasier reboot, writing episodes for TV series and his plans for next year.

Rob Duguay: You got your start in comedy by telling jokes at a bar in Gloucester, Mass., where you got paid in beer and fried clams. How were you able to get this particular gig there? Did the place have an open mic where the owner saw you perform and he decided to put you on a weekly show?

Jimmy Dunn: It’s a pretty interesting story, actually. I was a big fan of comedy, I was kind of sniffing around the comedy clubs and I was thinking that maybe I could do this. At the time, I was working at a bank and one of the accounts we had was with a bar that was called The Blackburn Tap, so I knew the owner and they started doing comedy. At one point, I asked him where he found these comics, he told me how he worked with this agency in Boston and he asked me why I was interested. I said that I was thinking about trying to get into it, and that was the whole conversation.

About a month later, they did some shows and they weren’t really drawing as many people as they thought they would be doing. The owner asked me if he put me on as the host, could I draw some people. I knew I could draw some people, but I had never been on stage before, so I just bluffed my way into it telling him “Yeah, of course! I can do that!” He then put me on for the next Sunday night as the host, I asked him “How does that work?” and he said that I would be on for 10 minutes and then I’d introduce the pros. He told me to make sure to fill the place up and that’s what I did, I packed that place.

Everybody I’d ever known was in that room and I had never done stand-up before. I got away with it and I had a few jokes that were pretty funny, but most of them were like everybody going “Oh, look at Jimmy. He’s an idiot.” I got a taste for it, I learned a little bit and he was really happy that lots of people were there so he let me do it every week. I did it every week for 14 straight weeks until they shut down during the beginning of the summer because it was getting quiet down there, but that’s how I learned to do stand-up. I didn’t start going to open mics until after that, which is where I started meeting a bunch of comics.

I met the pros, they started helping me network and that was it. Once I got a taste of it, I just committed myself fully to it and I went to every open mic I could go to for probably at least a year until I was really making any money.

RD: It’s great that it turned out that way. Who do you consider to be your biggest influence when it comes to initially wanting to pursue a career in comedy? Are there any particular comedians or any family members?

JD: My dad was really funny. He was a storyteller and my dad’s buddies and my uncles were all storytellers, so I learned how to tell stories from them. My dad paints houses for a living, so he was on a job site and in a house every day with a bunch of other blue-collar guys and they would tell stories. They were just the best storytellers and a lot like a comedian, those stories would get exaggerated over time and they would get funnier and funnier every time. You’d hear the same story six times, but it just keeps getting funnier.

I learned how to do that from my dad and his funny friends, but when I saw what was going on in the middle of that comedy boom with the heavy hitters in Boston like Don Gavin, Kenny Rogerson and Lenny Clarke, those guys were just absolute rock stars. I watched them and I went, “Oh, that’s how you do it.” Still to this day, nobody writes a better joke than Don Gavin. He never got famous, he’s famous around New England, but he makes a living telling jokes on the best cruise ships in the world. There’s also some national guys that I really like, I love Lewis Black, but those local Boston guys were the true hammers.

RD: Very cool. You’re currently on television as part of the reboot of the series Frasier that’s streaming on Paramount + where you play a Boston firefighter named Moose. How were you approached for the role and what was the experience like for you being on the show?

JD: It was the coolest job I ever had. I spent last winter filming it and it was just surreal. I’m on a sitcom with Kelsey Grammer, it doesn’t get any more cool than that. The rest of the cast are all so damn funny and it came about because about eight years ago I got on a sitcom called The McCarthys, which was based on a family in Boston. I got on the radar of some casting directors out in Hollywood and when they were looking for a big Boston firefighter with a booming Boston accent, that was right in my wheelhouse.

They called me, I auditioned a whole bunch for it, but they knew me from The McCarthys. I got the role, spent the winter doing it and now I watch it every Thursday. It’s just the coolest thing in the world.

RD: I can see why you feel that way. You also worked with the acclaimed film director Peter Farrelly as a writer for the television series Loudermilk, where you were a co-writer for two episodes. Was it a major difference for you being a writer for an episode of a show rather than acting in it?

JD: It’s funny, when I was in my early 20s I went to Hollywood thinking that I was going to be a TV writer. That’s what I wanted to do, I took writing classes at UCLA and I always wanted to write a sitcom. In some of the classes where you had to write a sample episode, everybody back then was writing episodes of Frasier because it was the smartest and best show on television. When I found my way into stand-up, I never really pursued sitcom writing and after performing a few shows, I met the Farrelly brothers who are two of the coolest people in the world. Many years later, they were working on something and my name came up from a couple of other comedians that were in the room.

Peter reached out asking if I wanted to try writing something and putting something together. I pitched him a few ideas and the next thing you know, I’m out in Hollywood sitting with some of the best television writers in the world. There were people in that room writing on that show who wrote some of the best episodes of Family Guy and Curb Your Enthusiasm, they’re really fantastic television writers, and I was sitting there with them pitching jokes and writing scripts. That was a really cool gig, Loudermilk didn’t pick up the traction that I think it should have, partly because business-wise wise it got moved around a bunch, but it was a great experience. Writing with somebody like Peter Farrelly and hearing what he’s thinking, he’s a couple steps ahead and he’s shooting the show while writing it.

You learn things from that which you can apply later when you’re actually acting on a show. Peter and Bobby Farrelly are two of the funniest people on the planet.

RD: Yeah, and they’ve made some of the funniest films of all time. With your upcoming show at The Rex happening on New Year’s Eve, what are some of your plans for 2024?

JD: My plans for next year are to hopefully go back to Hollywood and make some more television, but we will see about that. My first love has always been stand-up comedy and I think one of the many cool things that the exposure on Frasier is going to do is it’s going to get me out to more audiences. I’m going to get to perform in some rooms across the country again and that’ll be really fun. I’ve been writing new jokes and I’m looking forward to doing more stand-up and making people laugh.