You’re Gonna Laugh

Every comedian’s path to the stage is unique, but there are a few common traits no matter their personal background or upbringing.

A desire to make people laugh. An inquisitive mind. An ability to look at a situation from a perspective – or several perspectives – most wouldn’t consider.

For Dan Cummins (’99, psychology), all of those traits are certainly part of what’s led him from growing up in small-town Riggins, Idaho, to four years at Gonzaga, to performing comedy across the country and hosting massively popular podcasts from his Coeur d’Alene studio. And while the psychology degree Cummins earned led him only briefly into a counseling job after graduation before he turned full-time to comedy, he credits his years at Gonzaga with expanding his world outlook in a way that made his comedy career possible.

“What I’m really thankful for is Gonzaga’s educational style, their focus on diverse core classes where you have to take critical thinking, you have to take theology classes, you have to take philosophy classes,” Cummins says. “Just the overall well-rounded education has served me really well. Not even just the work, but as a human being who cares about humanity.”

In Cummins’ 2023 stand-up special “Trying to Get Better,” he tells the packed Minneapolis theater where it was filmed that despite all our differences, we need to keep talking to each other as human beings. That enthusiasm and advocacy for leaning into tension and communicating respectfully is something that resonates with anyone familiar with a Gonzaga education. And Cummins’ popular podcast “Timesuck” – a weekly deep dive into historical weirdness, conspiracy theories and long-running mysteries – certainly benefits from the liberal arts education and research skills learned while he was a student.

“It’s funny, because I’m not a religious person. I have this interesting relationship with organized religion where fundamentally I don’t like it. But at the same time, I loved the priests who taught me at Gonzaga. And I love what Gonzaga gave me based on the Jesuit model as far as being a curious person, a critical thinker and somebody who wants to do good in the world. My wife and I, we’ve donated almost a million dollars of podcast money to various charities, and had I not gone to Gonzaga, and had I not developed in the way Gonzaga shaped me, I don’t know if philanthropy would have been as appealing to me.”

The Gonzaga Effect

Lest you think Cummins’ ride from Riggins to national recognition was an easy one, you need to consider the years of work the 47-year-old put into comedy before it started to even pay his bills, let alone leave him enough to donate to charity.

That work started at Gonzaga, even if Cummins didn’t realize it at the time. When he showed up to study computer science – a major that only lasted a couple of weeks before Cummins changed his mind – he was fresh out of Salmon River High School in Riggins (population 401 at last count). He’d never been to a concert, never seen standup comedy, never been to a big party. He’d barely even heard of Gonzaga when he applied, but he got enough financial aid to attract Cummins to Spokane.

At Gonzaga Cummins discovered a “super welcoming” environment where he immediately felt at home. Between parties and basketball games and starting a band, Cummins found himself “on campus all the time.” And he embraced the social opportunities with gusto.

“I think the student body was like 3,500 then, so you didn’t feel like you knew everybody, but there was a familiarity with most people,” Cummins says. “It just felt like a really safe place to kind of develop and figure out who you are.”

Cummins first stepped on stage as an undergrad, co-hosting campus talent shows and performing with a sketch comedy/improv show called “Waiting for FM” (a precursor to the current GUTS and Boone Street Hooligans on campus), giving Cummins his “first taste of performing.” Waiting for FM was notorious for poking fun at campus culture, faculty, even priests.

“The year I did it, the sketches I was in, they just really hit for some reason,” Cummins recalls. “All of the sudden there were all these kids I’d never met before who knew me. That was the first time I experienced that on a bigger level.”

The Long and Winding Road to Success

After graduating, Cummins quickly grew disillusioned with the job he’d taken with a crisis residential center, and nearly as quickly he did his first open mic night in the corner of a long-since-destroyed sports bar near the Spokane Arena. That first night on stage went well, Cummins says, thanks to an audience stacked with Gonzaga friends who’d stuck around Spokane. He became a regular performer, but he could see pretty quickly he was different than the other open-micers.

“I was ambitious, I was young, I was hungry, so I approached it very seriously,” Cummins says. “That alone made me stand out, because there wasn’t anybody else in the scene really doing that.”

Cummins was serious enough to start taking gigs anywhere his car could take him, often picking up a traveling comedian at the Spokane airport and driving them to Tri Cities, Wenatchee or Missoula just so he could be the opening act. Much like an athlete or musician, improving one’s comedy craft relies on getting plenty of live action, and travel became a must for Cummins. That work in the early years started to pay off as he kept working.

He landed a college tour, finished in second place in the Seattle Comedy Competition, then a couple years later performed at the Montreal Comedy Festival. He got a manager in Los Angeles and landed a special on Comedy Central. “It just kept going enough where, after seven years, I was like, ‘I’m enjoying this. I’m making a lot more than I was doing social work, and there’s a lot of potential for other things.’ And I just kind of stuck with it.”

While it might now seem like every comedian has a podcast, that wasn’t the case when Cummins launched “Timesuck.” And no one had ever heard of people making a living as social media influencers on YouTube or TikTok yet. He was living in Los Angeles, pitching sitcom and animated series ideas, working in reality TV and as a host on Playboy TV when he started the podcast to help sell tickets when he was touring doing standup.

“It was a Hail Mary,” Cummins says. “It was like, ‘I hope this thing works well enough to get a few people to come to clubs.’ And then it just started taking off. It just completely changed the course of my career.”

Now Cummins has been doing “Timesuck” for nine years, and he also hosts a horror and true crime podcast with his wife Lynze called “Scared to Death.” For the time being, he’s focusing all his energy on his podcasts, even cancelling a national theater tour due to the amount of work it takes to produce the shows in a far more competitive podcast environment than when he started.

“I just got totally burned out running multiple podcasts and touring and having a family,” Cummins says. “So, I thought, let’s just podcast until the kids are out of school.

“I might be writing horror novels in two years and not doing any standup. Or I might be doing some standup and some other podcasts that get launched from these podcasts. It’s almost like there’s too many possibilities, so it’s hard to pick. If you’re a creative person, there is a million ways to monetize your creativity now.”