Trauma Mia!
TRAUMA MIA!
Comedian Dylan Adler doesn’t run from his dark past. He writes jokes and sings about it, in detail.
LOS ANGELES—Two minutes into Dylan Adler’s tight ten, he has already whipped through a handful of musical impressions: Michael Bublé and Lin-Manuel Miranda sing a Christmas duet, the late Steve Irwin covers Adele. (Adler belts out the word “hello” in a convincing Australian drawl.) Next, he says, is his take on a Disney classic. “A dream is a wish your heart makes…” he sings, just as Cinderella does to her animal friends in bonnets and night caps. He crams into the next measure: “But what about a dream where you have sex with your twin brother at an Arby’s??” The crowd, warmed up from tight tens before his, laughs. “I know!” he eggs on. “Arby’s is gross!”
I’m at a backyard comedy show in Highland Park with rows of polyester folding chairs and a wet bar offering drinks payable to a Venmo account written in chalk. It is Adler’s fourth show in Los Angeles, before Vulture named him one of 24 comedians “you should and will know,” before he became a staff writer on The Late Late Show With James Corden, before he made his on-camera debut on the show as an unqualified, melodramatic sports correspondent, and before he moved from New York City. Adler is visiting for two months to write for TikTok’s first live sketch series Stapleview, for which he is also a cast member. (The show has since been discontinued after an eight month run.) While in town, he has more than twenty shows and a few TV auditions lined up. He is crashing at his uncle’s house and does not have a car.
The morning after the show, I meet Adler for coffee and a hike. He arrives at the café, late but profusely apologetic, wearing purple running shorts approximately 15 inches above the knee, a slim-fitting tee, and a drawstring backpack. I ask if he wants a drink. He says he’s fine, then looking at my coffee, “I should be buying YOU a drink!” Adler tells me he thought the show went well, and that he walked away feeling good, but that he played it safe in a new city. “I wanted to make a good first impression. I did some new material, but a lot of it was jokes that I know work,” he says. “Punchy stuff.”
Dylan Adler and James Corden playing a game of ‘Late Late Live Tinder’ on March 6, 2023
Despite his young age, 26, Adler has a good idea of what works and what doesn’t because for as long as he’s been a person whose success relies on entertaining others, he’s had mankind’s most comprehensive measuring tool at his disposal: social media. His first Instagram posts date back to 2018, but it was not until 2020 that he, like other performers eager to reach captive eyeballs during the pandemic, began uploading funny videos regularly. Doing so, on a platform built by algorithms with the sole purpose of blasting content, is like selling out a show every minute of every hour of every day. A traditional venue holds 50 to several thousand people. On social media, a single video can reach that many viewers in minutes.
In one video, Adler is a passive aggressive roommate taking out the trash for the third time in a row. In another, his own butthole, named Samantha and played by a man wearing a mask—meant to be of Sloth from The Goonies but looking much more like a rectum—breaks up with him after a two-year dry spell. “I have felt creatively stifled and bored! I want to be in an environment where I can grow and expand!” his butthole cries out. “Samantha, I understand…” he condoles, before asking where she is relocating to. (It’s Lindsey Graham.)
In a series of videos, he is a gay man in a scarf and beret making it a point to fit into heteronormative environments: in the living room watching the game with his fanatic mother and father, in the park passing a football back to a young, local man. “It’s not that simple!” he says when asked to return it. “I’m gay!”
Often in his standup, Adler reveals that his father is Jewish and his mother is Japanese. “Yes, I’m biracial,” he says. Then, after a pause, confused, “Oh, usually that gets a standing ovation.” A joke like that does two things. It acknowledges that he is a racial minority and it makes the premise of that reality the butt of the joke: Hollywood glamorizes mixed-race people.
Adler has a natural way of turning the tables on himself. Last spring, while visiting Universal Studios, he did a backflip in front of a crowd gathered for a choreographed show as if to steal the performers’ spotlight. His caption: “I was rejected from being a dancer at Universal Studios so I came to their first show.” Thousands of Twitter users devoured the video, snapping at him for being petty and rude. “I see why they rejected you. Smart move Universal,” one person commented. “White people always gotta make it about themselves,” wrote another. Then a stranger replied, “Bestie he’s Asian delete this quickly.” The joke all along: Adler has never auditioned for the theme park.
Adler has a bounty of self-deprecative source material: he’s a gay man, racial minority, sexual assault victim, person in therapy, and identical twin. “Where’s the pilot?!” he sometimes shouts on stage after divulging his many identities ripe for Hollywood production. But Adler does not rely on who he is to make people laugh, he puts in the work. His energy is so high that after a while of watching him, you would like to offer a Gatorade or protein bar. He’s not just telling jokes into a mic. He wrote a song for you! He’s playing the piano for you! He’s recounting trauma and dancing and backflipping and manufacturing tense scenes all in the name of the one thing he always comes back to: making you laugh.
What should have been a ten minute commute to Griffith Park turns into a half hour joyride. Lost and embarrassed, I try out a joke of my own, conflating the carpool karaoke segment on The Late Late Show with Jerry Seinfeld’s web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee: “This is like James Corden’s Comedians in Cars.” Adler kindly ‘Yes, and’s: “Asians in Cars Talking About Comedy.”
Minutes later, we graduate from being lost getting to the mountain to being lost inside a parking lot at the base of the mountain. “Two Asians in a Car Going Around in Circles with Coffee in Griffith Park!” he builds. It’s February in LA, the sky is blue and the sun is hot. Adler coos to himself: “Oh my god, it’s so nice out” and “Holy shit. I wanna move here so badly.”
Born and raised in San Rafael, California, Adler has lived in New York, mostly Brooklyn, for the past eight years and is approaching ‘over it.’ He hates the cold and the claustrophobia, but says it’s where he cut his teeth, comedy-wise, and found community.
He studied music composition and theory at NYU. Adler is a theater freak. His favorite musicals are Wicked—“BASIC!” he shouts immediately after giving that answer—Pippin’, The Color Purple, and, of course, Hamilton. Among his most well-known impressions is one of Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Tony and Emmy-award winning playwright behind Hamilton and composer behind Disney’s Encanto and Moana. Adler says his imitation of Miranda’s strained rapping and frenetic hand-waving developed from a place of real obsession. “I think he’s a genius. I’m a fuckin’ stan.” Adler was also on the diving team; it helps with the backflips.
Photo by Arin Sang-urai
After graduating, he started doing standup and improv, eventually joining the Upright Citizens Brigade in 2020. Shortly after, both New York locations of the theater shut down due to the virus. Adler says “the improv bubble burst,” partly because of shuttered venues, partly because of performers’ changing attitudes as popularity on social media became more and more profitable. In the past, it was a ‘chicken or egg’ question. Which comes first? Becoming a successful live performer or amassing followers? Now, the answer is clear: online success almost always translates offline through ticket sales and other opportunities like small roles on television. And virality is a golden ticket achieved through authenticity. Without pressure from management to sell out shows or make specific audiences—as in, the individuals inside a venue on a given night—laugh, performers can do what they want.
Adler remembers an improv workshop he did with Funny or Die writer Alex Fernie. “He asked me, ‘What is it personally that makes YOU laugh-cry? That’s what you have to aim for,’” he says. “That stuck with me. I used to think, ‘What’s going to make this group laugh? Then I made the conscious switch to, ‘What’s going to make ME laugh the hardest?’”
One answer, for him, is rape. In 2022, he and Kelly Bachman, a writer and comedian who made headlines in 2019 for confronting Harvey Weinstein on stage in Manhattan, released ‘Rape Victims Are Horny Too,’ a heads-on musical comedy album about healing after sexual assault. Bachman has been raped several times. Adler was raped in his college dorm by a man he considered to be his friend. “He wasn’t even good looking!” he exclaims in one of the tracks. “Does that make it worse?” Bachman asks coyly. “Ugh. It definitely makes it worse!” he shouts back. The two met at a comedy show called “Rape Jokes By Survivors,” where they, according to them, independently bombed on stage, then in a like-recognizes-like scenario, decided to join forces to create even more rape jokes. The hour-long album includes 32 tracks. Some are parodies, like ‘Rapey Boi,’ a rendition of ‘Sk8r Boi’ by Avril Lavigne and ‘Trauma Mia,’ a rendition of Mamma Mia by ABBA. Some are original, like ‘Why Am I Still F_ed Up?,’ a song about feeling emotionally stagnant despite years of therapy, and the hit single ‘Tell Me I’m Hot (But Don’t Touch Me)’ about wanting affection and validation but not wanting to be touched, and crying after sex. Adler also sings about getting picked on in high school, revenge, and hoping that his bully “chokes on a thousand chodes.”
The nonmusical parts of the album are somewhere between a sacrilegious sermon and a winded self-interrogation about acceptance and growth. No topic is off-limits. He shares his experiences being fetishized on dating apps and a time, that when hugging his mother, he became convinced she wanted to attack him. (It is not uncommon to think that a loved one wants to hurt us after having been betrayed by another person of confidence.) “My trauma brain will go there,” Adler says. But he doesn’t mind so long as he can get a good laugh out of it. “When it comes to comedy, you have to erase all shame and just do it.”
He calls the process of making the album, and performing it, “a cathartic, beautiful experience.” Beneath the intentionally half-baked melodies and mediocre singing (neither performer is vocally trained, though Adler has an above average voice) is an absolute truth: Being a victim of sexual assault does not make you a damaged or nonsexual person, Adler says. “The goal of the show is to help survivors feel less alone and less crazy—
–oh my god that guy is hot. Sorry.”
Adler spots a hot person that derails his train of thought. A natural occurrence on the trails. I point to the Griffith Observatory in the distance and ask if he wants to go.
“That round thing?” he asks. “I’m so down.”
As we approach a lookout point with a clear view of the Hollywood sign, Adler murmurs a Miley Cyrus lyric: “Feelin’ kind of homesick. Too much pressure and I’m nervous.” I ask if he wants a photo with the landmark.
“No, I’m good. I’m good,” he says. A pause.
“You know what, I’ll take a photo with it. Let’s do it.” A shorter pause.
“No no, I’m good. It’s a little far away!”
Moments later, a hiker, likely overhearing his indecision, asks if he wants his picture taken. “Sure!” Adler says emphatically.
He hands the woman his phone. She takes a few photos, gives it back to him, then asks if he would return the favor. Adler begins framing the shot—with his own phone.
“She probably wants the photo on her phone,” I say.
“Oh my god, SORRY!”
We laugh. She laughs. Adler fulfills her request with the right device and we part ways.
Photo by Arin Sang-urai
In 2020, as anti-Asian sentiment grew in America, Adler was attacked by a man while out for a run. Immediately after, his face still flushed, he posted a video recounting the incident on Instagram. Soon after, he posted a funny Tweet: “3 days ago I was attacked on the street and tried to take a pic of the guy but my camera was in selfie mode. Fml.” A year later on March 16th, 2021, the Atlanta spa shootings left six Asian women dead. Adler says there was a heightened sense of community within Asian performing circles after the tragedy, especially as the media oscillated between condemning the crimes and passing them off as arbitrary acts of terror. Through open mics and social media, Adler met Jenny Yang, Atsuko Okatsuka, Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast, and Ronny Chieng, many of whom are his friends today. “It’s so fulfilling,” he says, “to feel like I’m a part of a beautiful Asian community.”
On a 37-degree winter evening in East Hollywood, I’m waiting in a crowd outside The Yard Theater for Adler’s one-man show titled “Hit That Track.” The start time was 9:30 PM. At 9:45 PM, we remain standing, clutching our coats. Minutes later, Adler tip-toes out from the front doors and flees into the night. It is not a promising cue.
Right as patience begins to wane, he reappears and we are let inside the theater with velour seats, draped red curtains, and a black stage with a single birch wooden stool, a keyboard, and a mic. It has been a year since I last saw Adler perform live. His tight ten has grown into a modest hour. He delivers his greatest hits—the joke about his brother and Arby’s, a Lin-Manuel Miranda impression, a backflip—but tries out new material now that he is worn into the city. A bit about his resemblance to Lieutenant General Shimizu, a military officer in the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II, seems to land.
Towards the end, Adler breaks for a heart-to-heart with the audience. He admits that he left a critical cord for his keyboard at his apartment in Silverlake and had to Uber two miles to get it before the show. He apologizes for making us wait, though he doesn’t have to because no one is upset. For one, easily bothered people do not attend comedy shows. Second, we have been too busy laughing. Adler knows how to extract the parts of a life that are painful or uncomfortable or covered and turn them into potent medicine. Watching Adler, you’re not sure if you’re laughing with him or at him, but either way, you’re laughing.