Chest pains that presented as a heart attack. A love affair with psychedelics. Eschewing the Mormon faith.
Comedian Korey David has a rich palette of life experiences to pull from during his time at the mic. The Denver comic will headline the Habitual Offenders Comedy Showcase on Thursday at Loonees Comedy Corner. The monthly event, hosted by Tracy Kellet, features a panoply of Colorado comics, including Kate Strobel, Justin Leger and Cody Ullrich.
“As brash as anything is in my act,” David said, “I try to make it innuendo and not right on the nose, where it’s being gross for the sake of being gross.”
David, a finalist in the 2019 Comedy Works New Faces, a competition held by Denver comedy club Comedy Works, moved to Denver five years ago from upstate New York. He’d started doing comedy a couple of years earlier as a way to test out short stories he was writing. That approach bombed. But he did thrive on being on stage and trying to make people laugh.
After losing his job and his relationship, he decided to push reset on his life and head to Colorado. It was a good move. He’s found more opportunities and better comics who force him to improve his schtick, he said.
If only that schtick were cleaner, according to his mom, he said. His conservative Mormon parents have had to adjust to David’s lifestyle and colorful career, where much of his act falls in the dirty category.
Comedian Korey David moved to Denver three years ago from New York, where he eschewed his parents' Mormon faith, calling himself the black sheep of his family. Photo by Nick Holmby
He recalls the day he thought he was dying, and his parents took him to the hospital. When the doctor asked if he’d done any recreational drugs, he was forced to confess in front of them to doing a boatload of said drugs, including psychedelic mushrooms.
“My mom is super innocent, and asked me why I told him mushrooms,” David said. “She thinks I have a portabello problem. My dad explained it to her. That’s been a lot of my adult life.”
His self-described role as the black sheep of his family frequently pops up in his act, along with new material about his views on health care, dating app culture and talking to his parents about social and political topics.
“My dad can only talk about baseball, so I have to code the conversation to figure out how he feels about immigration and sexual identity,” David said. “I’d like to think my take speaks to the bigger picture and how I feel about society. It’s not easy to do. It’s a way to divide the audience. Even about health care, I slam Republicans in a joke, but in such a way that I get you to turn on me, but then I get you back on my side.”
And he especially likes performing in Colorado Springs, a city, he said, that’s gotten a bad rap from comics.
“The demographic, on the surface, is more conservative, military, blue collar,” David said. “But I’ve always felt like it’s a great place to test your material. In Denver you’re performing for a liberal, progressive, urban demographic. Go an hour away and it’s completely different. You can find out if jokes are viable or not, or if it’s just pandering to the audience.”
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