D. C. Benny
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
D.C. Benny is a stand-up comedian who has performed on Comedy Central Presents. He has performed at many different comedy clubs in New York and in Los Angeles.
[edit] Biography
D.C. Benny has been working as a New York based comedy writer/performer/producer for over 15 years. Benny landed running in the New York comedy scene when he was hired to write and perform in two multi-spot commercial campaigns for Comedy Central, which played in constant rotation. These spots led to two network development deals. One with ABC and then a second deal with NBC culminating in the network commissioning Benny to create the pilot “People Who Live in My Building”, a show where he played the whole cast of characters. NBC was so impressed with what they saw, they then hired Benny to produce a variety of man-on-the-street and in-studio segments for “Friday Night Videos”, which ended up being some of the highest watched episodes of the season.
After that, Benny teamed up with the production company Edithead and shot a trailer for “Justice Patrol”, an animated Cop show about a cowboy and an Islamic fundamentalist fighting crime in New York. Director/Producer Justin Foran saw the show and soon after, they were screening it as part of a multimedia presentation in a sold out U.S. comedy tour. This show spawned yet another development deal with MTV, where Benny wrote an animated pilot for the rapper Eminem as well as creating the shows "Chop-up Video", "A Day In The...” and "Scared Shitless."
All this time, Benny was appearing onscreen in national commercial campaigns for Volkswagen, Dell, Levis (director – Doug Liman: Go, The Bourne Identity), Martini and Rossi, and Budweiser, for which he wrote two specs, as well as a spot for the now notorious Enron corporation, that he co-wrote and was directed by the equally notorious director of American History X, Tony Kay. He can now be seen in a commercial for AIG.
A couple months later, Benny, after a standout performance at HBO's Aspen Comedy Festival was offered a job writing for the The Dennis Miller Show, which led to another job writing on the MTV Video Music Awards, as well as several segments for VH1’s I Love the '80s. Since then, Benny has written spec scripts for HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Bernie Mac Show, as well as spec sketches for Conan O’Brien, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Martin Short and Chappelle's Show.
After Aspen, director Justin Foran and Benny co-produced and starred in the underground classic “Balls”, a hidden camera prank show for F/X, which has a huge cult following. Later that season, Benny teamed up with Edithead again and directed and starred in “Talent Pool”, a show about a comedy manager that was for the Bravo network.
Benny met producer Jason Sokoloff in 2003, and since then they have worked on a lot of different projects together; “Brooklyn Zoo”, an animated show about an unusual group of blue collar superheroes, “In My Head”, a pilot presentation with producers Edithead that won first prize at the Montreal Comedy Festivals “Just For Pitching” event, as well as the pilot presentations “Who Knew”, “The Manhattan Comedy Festival” and the forthcoming comedy concert film, “Hebrew Homeboys”, which has been billed as a “Kosher Kings Of Comedy”.
Currently, D.C. Benny performs standup nightly at the premiere comedy clubs in Manhattan, and has had his writing published in Cracked Magazine, Jest, The Comical, The Comic Bible, Girlcomic.net and Green Magazine. He has opened for Gilbert Gottfried, David Allen Grier, Bernie Mac, Kevin Pollack, Margaret Cho, Jeff Foxworthy, Tommy Davidson, and many others. During the week he works as a producer and sketch writer for Sirius Radio’s show “Jim Breuer Unleashed” (www.breuerunleashed.com), second in ratings only to Howard Stern, and produces his monthly story-telling show Urban Myth (a favorite of Dave Chappelle), which has been the subject of two documentaries and a special on BBC radio, and which is currently being produced as an on-air segment for “Jim Breuer Unleashed.” He also continues to create cutting edge comedy content for every outlet from TV/film, to radio, to the Internet, from the page to the stage.[1]
In October, 2006, Benny began playing the recurring character of Chaz Dargote on As the World Turns.
Recently, Benny was hired as a staff-writer for Dailycomedy.com, a site where professional and amateur comedians post new jokes frequently.
