This is honestly insane. After 32 years of making comedy together as Dan and Jay’s Comedy Hour, we just recently wrapped up a “residency” of our “traveling museum” (we don’t have our next location locked in just yet), filled with real and definitely very fake artifacts from the real and seriously so fake history of our group. The weirdest part is not even that this happened – this is the kind of thing we’d dream up (after all, we are currently writing up a book-length fake history of the group going back hundreds and possibly thousands of years) – it’s that it wasn’t our idea.
I’ve (Jason here) established a fun relationship with the Detroit Public Library since I first did a Q&A for my book on the history of 90s sketch comedy there a couple years ago. I was chatting with the amazing Cully Sommers, who runs the DPL’s Popular Library about an LP I produced and was taking some time to get released, when suddenly everything aligned, and Dan and my first cylinder, The Inquisitive Florist, was going to be releasing that same month, September of 2025.
Cully proposed the unbelievable – that we’d not only get to pretend like our cylinder was indeed the re-release of a 110-year-old one-off record like that Wu-Tang one from a few years back, but we could also bring some artifacts from the group’s purportedly real history. Cue the gears in my head spinning away, me hopping to making props and plans and things, and then realizing I had another book to finish. Two, in fact, since I had to finish a 50-page version of our fake history entitled An Historium to accompany the cylinder, too.
This meant that Dan had to visit me in Metro Detroit. It had to become a performance. It had to become our FIRST LIVE PERFORMANCE ever. After 32 years of improvising and making sketch comedy, this was going to be it. The days before our performance and our display, we – no surprise – spent most of our hyperfocus on the artifacts and the museum cards that accompany them.
Weirdly, lots of these artifacts already existed simply because I had wanted to, for instance, make real-looking cans of Synthetic Cheese, our long-time fake sponsor. I’d been working on fake books and letters from historical figures to go in the full history book, too, so we had a lot, but anything we didn’t have had to be created at the last minute, and every one of the 40-some artifacts had to have an accompanying museum card telling a couple lines of bullshit history. We stayed up all night doing that, with Dan then tweaking our presentation that we would end up mostly improvising, anyway, and the next day our wonderful wives took a couple hours making two 9-foot-wide museum displays look amazing.
Somehow, we’d realized the true nature of our group through a simple invitation. We may not be a super-famous improv or sketch group, but pretending like we have been around for centuries in front of an audience, and then having an institution enable our bullshit made it clear that we’re performance artists. Yes, most of that comes in the form of podcasts, and comedy albums, and movies, but there’s a place for the props and books and the rest of it. It all comes together in this thing called “pretending to be Dan and Jay’s Comedy Hour while actually being Dan and Jay’s Comedy Hour.”
We are hoping to bring some variation on our time-travel-filled presentation and the museum to other cities, so you can invite us to your place to defile history in real time by emailing us at hi@djch.xyz.
You can see a gallery of images taken of the display on our kayfabe-safe website, DanAndJay.com:
