Dana Snow died a week ago, I'm told. I don't know the cause of death and I don't know his age…but he graduated from Beverly Hills High School in 1970 so that should give you some idea. There was a memorial service for him the other night at the most appropriate place to hold a memorial service for Dana Snow…a comedy club. They were his natural habitat. If there is a grave for him, I know what he would have wanted on the headstone. He'd want it to say "Dana Snow, Comedian." Either that or a good joke.
I met Dana sometime in the early seventies at some local comic book mini-con or another. Comic books were Dana's secondary interest and they were a distant second. His first interest, far and away, was comedy, especially stand-up comedy. I had not seen much of Dana the last few decades but I find it hard to imagine that he ever had a third-place interest. He was an enormous fan of just about everyone who ever made an audience laugh and he devoted just about all of his life to trying to join their ranks…and succeeded here and there in his own way. If unrelenting persistence is a virtue — and in some instances, I don't think it is — Dana was the champ.
He could often be found in comedy clubs — usually the smaller ones, sometimes the ones that took him 90 minutes on the bus to get to. He'd sit there, watching other up-and-coming comics, waiting for his chance to go on even if it was at 2 AM in front of four patrons. He was a fierce taker of notes and extremely generous with everything he had. Some comics thought that when he was sitting in the back of the club scribbling, he was writing down their best jokes for purposes of theft. Never. He was studying, jotting down observations and thoughts that he felt might help his performance and his career. If he wrote stuff down about your act, he'd gladly share it all with you. Just trying to be helpful.
At times, he was. He worked for me for a few months — typing, filing, helping me sort the Groo mail, etc. He told some people that it ended when I caught him stealing…and that's not exactly true. What happened was that I found out he was working on his own stuff for too large a part of the time I was paying him by the hour to work on mine. I believe that was the reason he lost several other jobs around that time. He was just incapable of not working on his own stuff for very long.
That was in the nineties. The last decade or two, I ran into him here and there…usually at a tiny theater in West Los Angeles where a couple of different improv comedy troupes performed. When I went to see them, I'd see Dana in the back, taking notes like his life depended on it. I guess in some ways, it did. He was a benevolent presence and I know he helped hundreds of different comedian friends in whatever ways he could. His greatest regret was probably that when they had that memorial for him at the comedy club the other night, he couldn't sit in the back and take notes.