Interview done by Brad Mielke for joonbug.com
“I was in the 6th grade’s Gifted and Talented Program,” says D.C. Pierson, still torturing himself 15 years later. “There was this girl who I kind of arbitrarily picked to be the object of my affection. All throughout elementary school she had kind of been a buddy, so I finally said, ‘Uh, I think I like you.’ She was completely creeped out.”
He still hasn’t recovered. On Sunday, Pierson premieres his new show, “D.C. Pierson Is Bad at Girls,” at the UCB Theatre in Hollywood. The storytelling hour will trace his sad, pathetic, and hilarious path through the treacherous world of dating. ”It’s kind of a running theme,” he says. ”Someone I know is a pal, then I’m like, “Uhh? And they’re like, “Ughhh!” And I’m like, “Ugh.”
What he’s lacked in romance, he’s more than made up in success since his move to L.A. The 6-foot-2, 26 year-old Shaggy Doo lookalike came west with Derrick Comedy, the viral video troupe that garnered over 50 million hits as NYU students from sketches like “History of the Drunk Dial” and “Bro Rape.” Their self-produced feature, Mystery Team (starring Pierson along with Donald Glover and Dominic Dierkes), earned them a trip to Sundance and a quick dose of notoriety. Glover quickly became a star on NBC’s Community, Dierkes became a writer for The Onion News Network, and Pierson published a novel, The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleepand Never Had To.
While the posse continues to work together (Pierson and Dierkes have both appeared in guest spots on Community, and Pierson is currently developing a film adaptation of his novel with fellow Derrickians Dan Eckman and Meggie McFadden), videos have been on hiatus, sometimes stoking anger from internet trolls.
“If you don’t put something new on the internet every two weeks, there’s this faction of people who are like, ‘oh man, they must have died! They quit for no reason!” says Pierson. ”We want to make more videos, but we want it to be better than anything we’ve ever done. But none of us have had time to be in the same room and work on that stuff. For free.”
The move from New York to L.A. can be jarring for entertainers, and Pierson says it took awhile to transition. “There are all the cliche New York/L.A. differences,” he says, sounding bored as he lists them. ”You have to drive a lot, everything’s spread out, the weather’s really nice. But I definitely did have a chip on my shoulder when I moved out here.”
He recently posted on his blog: “To be in L.A. and miss New York is to be like, ‘I’m sophisticated.’ To be inNew York and miss L.A. is to be like, ‘life is sophisticated.’”
“Totally!” he says as it’s read back to him, adding that he recently realized that he really likes L.A. ”New York is great, you know? But it’s such an easy way to denote, ‘I’m an interesting person.’ There are good and bad things about both of them. The standup scene out here is amazing. There are just so many talented, funny people. Yeah, things are more spread out, so you might have to trek to a show…but there’s a lot of, I don’t know — vibrance.”
To be with him for a few minutes, it might be easy to assume that Pierson is a loner. By his own admission, he was a bookish kid, who now rarely shaves and still says things like “super duper.” But his penchant for collaboration has made him a highly sought-after personality in a variety of fields, whether standup (he and Eliza Skinner host a show on Saturday nights at The Underground Annex), improvisation (he’ll perform his weekly show, “Shitty Jobs,” directly after “Bad at Girls” on Sunday), or writing. He recently scripted MTV’s Video Music Awards — the highest rated show in MTV history.
Despite not setting out to be an actor, he’s parlayed his comedy into a film career. He joins Glover, along with fellow Mystery Team star Aubrey Plaza, in The Hand Job, which is currently shooting. When asked about the title, he giggles. ”I’ve been officially instructed to tell you the title is The Hand Job,” he says. While it’s listed officially as The To-Do List on IMDB, “that was a title they were using in production. Because they couldn’t shoot at an elementary school and say, ‘this movie’s called The Hand Job. We’ll set up the camera and lights now.’”
The film isn’t slated to come out until 2013, so he doesn’t think about it much. ”That’s the interesting thing about comedy,” he says. ”You get to have a couple of different things on the boil. You have people you’d like to be working with, and to get to work with all of them…that’s pretty cool.”
His hard work hasn’t always been so appreciated…at least not by girls he’s trying to impress. Asked why he didn’t have much success with ladies, he sighs. ”I never gained a ton of experience,” he says. ”I was always working on comedy stuff. There were times when I was in college, budding into dating someone, when I’d have to be like, ‘I’m too busy for this.’”
“D.C. Pierson Is Bad at Girls,” though, is less a lament than a diary: not so much a “Where did I ever go wrong?” and more of a “Oh my God, I can’t believe I actually did this.” The stories, told by Pierson with no script and just a microphone to aid him, take the audience through his experience in 6th grade (“mortifying,” he says) into high school and college, drawing a straight line from his — and all men’s, for that matter — trouble with girls to trouble with women.
Apparently, though, there is light at the end of the tunnel. “It’s only recently that I’ve been going out on dates in L.A.,” he confesses, though he adds it’s going well. ”I know like 3 or 4 textbook ‘New York dates’ that I know how to do, but I really didn’t know how to go about it in L.A. I learned relatively recently that it doesn’t have to be intimidating or bad. But…my learning curve was pretty steep there for awhile.”
Just one more question, however obvious: is he seeing anyone now?
“Um…I have a, uh…well…to be perfectly fucking vague about it, I have a situation right now,” he stammers. “But I haven’t been in a relationship for a really, really long time. So, as you can tell, by how vaguely I’m talking about it, there’s a lot of nerves associated with it. And I don’t even know if it’s going to work out. It’s something I’m excited about, and nervous about, but…I’m excited to see where it goes.”
“D.C. Pierson is Bad at Girls” premieres at the UCB Theatre (5919 Franklin Avenue, Hollywood) on Sunday at 9:30pm. Get tickets here.
