3 weeks Ago
Actor David Walton does his stand-up routine at the open mic night at The Comedy Mill in Biddeford in early April. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald BIDDEFORD — About 10 seconds into his open mic set at the Comedy Mill, David Walton asked the audience, “Anyone else’s dad about to die?” Most people didn’t respond, but one person shouted loudly “he’s already dead.” Walton cleared his throat and said “Good, great” before talking about his own father, a real estate developer who felt at home in board meetings, who rarely gave out hugs, never changed a diaper and was obsessed with Ivy League colleges though he went to the University of Vermont.
“I don’t understand how our generation is confused about why our parents are disappointed in us, do you know what I mean?” said Walton, 47, of Scarborough. “I’m an actor, I wear makeup for a living, it’s pathetic. This is a man who did business deals and gave boardroom meetings and this sort of thing.
” MIDLIFE CRISIS WITH A MICROPHONE The Comedy Mill set was about the 20th time Walton performed at an open mic night. He’s been chronicling his efforts to learn the art of stand-up comedy since October on a podcast called “Starting Stand-Up in Maine.” He acknowledged it didn’t go too well and that he felt uncomfortable on stage.
The audience was mostly other comics waiting for their five minutes and thinking about their own material. “It’s not easy. I’m going to sit down and write and bare my soul and try to figure out a way to make it funny, then get up there,” said Walton, who is known for roles on TV shows like “New Girl” and “About A Boy.
” “Writing it today, I thought it was going to go really well.” David Walton in the audience after performing at the open mic night at The Comedy Mill in Biddeford in April. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald Walton describes his podcast as “where I put a microphone to my midlife crisis and try to make it funny, for the stage.
” He’s performed mostly at free open mic nights at The Comedy Mill, located inside Mulligan’s restaurant, and at Empire Comedy Club in Portland. His desire to learn stand-up is tied up with his need to say things he couldn’t say at the dinner table and things that weren’t scripted for him by others, as is the case with his day job. He leads a meditation group in Scarborough and says he’s obsessed with the bigger questions of life.
So to explore his own identify and give voice to some of his questions, he started recording rants about a variety of things and decided he might like to try to hone the rants into stand-up material. He’s also a fan of the “show your work” ethic, so he thought a podcast showing people what he’s going through as he tries to learn stand-up could be interesting — and satisfying. “The rants were kind of serious, about, let’s say, how desire creates suffering, a kind of Buddhist premise,” said Walton.
“Inevitably I’d start being irreverent. It was almost like I was pushing down the funny to try to be this serious person.” A post shared by David Walton (@startingstandup) KILL THE CLOWN Walton grew up just outside of Boston in Chestnut Hill, near Boston College.
He was one of six kids in the family. He went to private schools, including a strict all-boys school that had virtually no opportunities to participate in the arts. When he was in the ninth grade, he went to a coed school and shared classrooms with girls daily, for the first time.
Walton said he had always been a bit of a joker, the kind of kid who liked to make others laugh. But in his first year being around girls all day, he says he was “out of control, an absolute maniac.” He tried to make girls laugh all the time.
He mostly succeeded, and was voted class clown. But after making his female classmates laugh, they’d go hang out with other, cooler young men. So he decided that to have the kind of boyfriend/girlfriend relationships he wanted at that time, he’d have to kill his inner clown.
Later, at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, he tried hard to be cooler and less of a cutup. It worked, Walton said, and he soon found that girls liked him.
But Walton feels like he continued to suppress his dorky, goofy instincts for a long time. David Walton chats with fellow comedians before the start of open mic night at The Comedy Mill in Biddeford. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald At St.
Paul’s, he quickly got involved with theater, and acted in plays. He decided he had a passion for acting, and pursued it at Brown University in Rhode Island. But he says he didn’t think about being a professional actor, mostly because he didn’t know anyone who was and didn’t realize it was a thing anybody might do.
But a friend at Brown, John Krasinski (future star of “The Office”) was very focused on becoming a professional actor. So Walton began to think maybe he could work as an actor too. He started focusing on theater and acting, even though his degree was in psychology.
Soon after graduating in 2001, he began landing parts on TV and in films. In 2012 and 2013 he played the love interest, Dr. Sam Sweeney, to star Zooey Deschanel’s character on the Fox sitcom “New Girl.
” Soon after that he starred in the NBC sitcom “About a Boy” with Minnie Driver, based on the novel of the same name by Nick Hornby that had also previously been made into a 2002 film with Hugh Grant. His credits in the last 20 years include more than 45 roles in TV shows and films. He’s currently in the new Netflix medical drama “Pulse,” which premiered this year in which he plays a prominent plastic surgeon.
Walton lived in Los Angeles for more than 15 years, with his wife, actor Majandra Delfino. But they had been coming to his family’s summer home in Scarborough for years. The couple has two children and they decided they wanted to raise them in Maine, so they bought a home near Walton’s family’s house and moved there full time in 2019.
LEARN AS YOU GO In the eyes of other comics, one of Walton’s biggest challenges is trying to learn stand-up while working as an actor, traveling to film or TV sets and managing maybe one open mic night a week. “Most people starting out doing 20 open mics in their first couple of months,” said Caleb Sherman, a house comic at Empire Comedy Club who has been a guest on Walton’s podcast. “I know he’s busy, he’s got to work and he’s got a family, but repetition is such a big part of this.
” By his third podcast episode, Walton had started preparing for and going to open mic nights in Maine. Sherman, who saw one of Walton’s early open mic sessions at Empire, remembers hearing some murmurings from the crowd, from people recognizing him from his stint on “New Girl.” “He is clearly a performer, he didn’t have any of the normal first-night jitters.
He’s clearly done public speaking,” said Sherman. “So he had one less barrier to overcome. But there are all the other pieces to it, like reading the room and trying to perform to for just six people.
If people see your disappointment because they didn’t laugh, there’s a snowball effect.” On the night of Walton’s set at The Comedy Mill, he practiced his new material about his father in his car on the drive from Scarborough to Biddeford. He arrived before the 7:30 p.
m. sign-up, then chatted with others comics and open mic organizers before the 8 p.m.
show. For a few minutes, he sat in a booth alone, drinking a Coke and going over his notes. David Walton goes over his notes before doing five minutes of stand-up at The Comedy Mill in Biddeford.
Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald When the show started, he sat in the audience with the other comics and a handful of other people. Soon after starting in about his father, and UVM, he found that a member of the audience went there. He apologized for using the school in jokes and said “This is going to be fun.
” Even when his jokes didn’t get laughs, he moved along pretty fluidly, except for one point where he was speechless for a few minutes, looking at notes, and asked the crowd to “hold on a second.” One of the bigger laughs he got was when he talked about how his father “built office buildings in Waltham, but I built my pecs for a shirtless scene where I’m bent over a piano by Stanley Tucci (in the 2010 film “Burlesque.)” Afterwards, Walton said he’d listen to a recording of his set, to figure out what worked and what didn’t, and what he might have done or said differently.
He said he knew it might have been risky to talk about Ivy League colleges, and about dying. He was glad the Stanley Tucci line got a laugh, and thought it might have something to do with Tucci being a funny name to say. “So when I go over this, I’ll know the Tucci joke works, but I’ve got to memorize (the set) and get it tighter.
I could probably get it down to two and a half,” said Walton. “It’s all part of learning.” Comments are not available on this story.
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