Josh Hartnett is cute, sure, but he’s a little green for us gals in the Been Around the Block Club. Plus he’s got a girlfriend anyway, duh! So, for those of us who like our hometown heartthrobs with a few rough edges and a checkered past, not to mention killer timing, may we present Minnesota’s newest star, Dave Mordal.
Mordal is from Elk River and he’s 42, and he’s currently starring in Last Comic Standing, an NBC reality-TV program. Last winter, just for the hell of it, Dave drove down to Chicago to audition, and he got on. Here’s the premise: A group of stand-up comics from across the country are trapped in Heidi Fleiss’s rat-infested Los Angeles mansion. When they’re not fighting for the toilet, they are pitted against each other in stand-up showdowns. It’s sort of like Survivor, Fear Factor, and Star Search all rolled into one. The winner gets an NBC development deal for his or her own sitcom, along with a Comedy Central special. Mordal became one of the early favorites in a sequence that showed him trapping a rat and dumping it over a neighbor’s privacy wall.
The Rake caught up with him recently at the Acme Comedy Club. Dave strikes you as a guy who’d help get your car out of the ditch on an icy morning. A guy you’d hang out with, but you’d be a little leery about letting your sister date him. The funniest guy at work.
Which is precisely how he got started in comedy, nine years ago. “The whole thing was pretty straightforward. I just fell into it. At work, I was always more of a practical joker than anything else.” Examples? “A comic I know from Seattle was coming to play Acme a few summers ago. I told him he was arriving on the day of the Minneapolis Harvest Day Parade (which doesn’t exist). I said he’d have to ride on the Acme Comedy Club float, since he was that week’s headliner. I picked him up at the airport a couple of weeks later, towing the Acme Comedy Club float. Me and two of the waitresses from Acme made it in the pole barn at my dad’s farm. Took us 80 hours. It was a beaut! I took him all over the city, towing him behind my truck, out on the highway and everything, pretending that I couldn’t find the street that the parade was supposed to be on. Had him convinced we were lost. Rattled his nerves good. He left town early!”
Though he’s sworn to secrecy about the show’s final outcome, Dave confesses that he enjoyed the experience—which in the world of comedy probably means he killed. “My favorite thing about being on the show right now is knowing what happens. My least favorite thing is the stupid questions people ask.” Like what? “Did you win? Are you still doing comedy? That sort of thing.”
“But the kicker has to be when I was at my brother’s house watching the premiere with my family and friends, and at the first commercial break, I’m sitting right next to them, looking right at them, and someone says, ‘Is this live?’”—Colleen Kruse
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