When Dave Burd was first starting out, he would fly home to visit his folks in the Philadelphia suburbs. They would be sitting around the dining room table, as families do, and he would ask them the question that every grown son must at some point ask his parents.
Mom, Dad, do you think I’m a comic genius?
“We would say, ‘No, not really. You’re funny, but not really a comic genius,’” his mom, Jeanne Burd, recalls. “He’d be furious at us and this became an issue. He would bring it up in front of his friend, Benny. ‘My mother and father don’t even think I’m a comic genius.’ And we’d be like, ‘You’re no Jerry Seinfeld. But you’re funny.’”
His friend Benny, the producer and hitmaking songwriter Benny Blanco, remembers this too. “Oh my God,” he says. “He’d be like, ‘Mom, Dad, am I a genius?’ And they’d be like, ‘Eh.’”
This was back in his twenties, when Burd was primarily known as Lil Dicky, commandeering the internet with viral comedy rap songs like “Ex-Boyfriend” (about a man stricken with insecurity after meeting his girlfriend’s handsome ex), “Lemme Freak” (about a man who’s sexually frustrated within the confines of a long-term relationship), and “Classic Male Pregame” (about a man pregaming with other men). Crucially, this was before he created Dave, a more-than-semi-autobiographical show in which he plays a guy named Dave, working under the rap name Lil Dicky, who believes he is destined to become one of the greatest hip hop artists of all time.
It’s not that his parents’ reluctance to call him a genius diminished Burd’s belief in himself. But they are his favorite people on earth and still the first ones he consults when he has to make any major life decisions. It was rare that they disagreed with him about anything.
Eventually, he got the answer he was looking for. “When his show came out, I finally said to him, ‘Okay, I really think you’re a comic genius,’” Jeanne says. “I was blown away by it, to tell you the truth. I was really impressed.” Well, by most of it. “I have to say, episode three, when he’s screwing the doll, I could have lived without that,” she adds. “Considering that I saw that at the premiere with no warning whatsoever in front of 600 people.”
And, hey, the world seemed to love it too. Dave quickly became FX Networks’ most watched comedy show ever, ahead of acclaimed classics like Atlanta and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, enjoyed by audiences and pleasantly surprised critics alike.
Let me tell you about my own personal Dave journey. Early in the pandemic, the ads for the show followed me around the internet relentlessly: Burd as a sentient penis, with his mop of curly hair and beard, popping out of a pair of boxer briefs and giving a dopey thumbs up. I had already watched all of television at that point but, come on, a series about an obnoxious white internet rapper? A couple more months passed and I accepted that I wasn’t going to get ripped or achieve inner peace or whatever it was that people were doing. There was no harm in trying out an episode. You know, ironically.
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But then Dave was funny. Funny in that aggressive, unabashed, vulgar way you rarely see anymore. It provided a fuller look into Burd that you couldn’t get from a three-minute song, with a healthy dose of self-deprecation to make his whole deal more palatable. Scratch the surface of the crass jokes and you’d find meditations on masculinity and mental health, personal relationships and privilege. If I started Dave a skeptic, by the finale I had the zeal of a convert. I would later realize that the hardest I laughed in 2020 was watching Dave lose control of his bowels during a hike.
“I’m glad you said that,” Burd says, grinning from his Venice, Los Angeles home. The 33-year-old is wearing a pale pink tie-dye sweatshirt and periodically sipping from a bottle of Martinelli’s sparkling apple juice. “I’d never seen actual shit on TV, you know what I mean?”
He proceeds to eagerly let me in on some television magic. First, there was a machine specially built to simulate Dave getting diarrhea—who says American innovation is dying?—but it broke as soon as he strapped it to his back. Enter post-production, which involved CGI and endless rounds of notes. “At first, I was really unhappy with the look and feel of the shit,” he explains. “I had to send pictures of shit and Google ‘diarrhea’ and be like, ‘Well, I think it needs to be a little bit thicker, it looks too much Coca-Cola right now.’ There was a whole thread and such serious, long paragraphs describing it.”
Hidden in that stream of CGI shit is the key to Burd’s success. He’s fanatical, approaching moments high and low with the same degree of meticulousness. When we speak in May, he’s in the process of editing season two of Dave, grinding out minimum 10 hour days, seven days a week.
Burd is an extremely affable person, which can obscure the fact that this rigor extends to all aspects of his life. When he makes music, he’s not enjoying himself at late-night studio sessions. “I wake up at 8:30 a.m.,” he says. “I treat it like school. I’ve never even written a lyric past sundown.” He has a girlfriend now, his first in seven years, but when he was single, he would make sure to schedule a date per week. “I’m at the age where if I can’t envision a real future then it’s a total waste of time,” he says. “When you go on every first date and you’re thinking, Is this my wife? That’s a tough way to be.”
Much has been made of middle class millennials’ obsession with productivity and ambition, and Burd might as well be the poster child for this affliction. “Every moment I’m like, how can I optimize this?” he tells me. “How can I maximize my happiness? How can I maximize the potential of this cut? How can I maximize this afternoon? How can I maximize my talent?”
The show is one way. Dave has catapulted him from a frat-friendly internet sensation with a controversial past to an entertainer with broad cultural appeal. It walks a fine and tricky line, politically incorrect, while offering Burd up as the object for our laughter—a clueless denizen attempting to navigate the modern world with almost pathological honesty. Offscreen, his whole life is a series of similar balancing acts. He finds himself torn between wanting to make people laugh and wanting to be considered a serious rapper. He wants to make no-holds-barred comedy and yet he hates offending people. He wants to be present for the people closest to him, which can be hard when he also has an overwhelming desire to be as successful as humanly possible.
And as for that last one, he’s not even quite sure why. “I know that no matter what I do in terms of being a successful comedian, and if I won every Emmy and won every Grammy, it wouldn’t make me feel any more satisfied,” he says. “If I know that no amount of success will make me satisfied, why do I spend so much time trying to achieve the satisfaction?”
This degree of overthinking more or less hangs over Burd all the time. And to get to the root of it, we have to go all the way back to the day he was born.
In the opening minutes of Dave’s first season, Dave is at the urologist’s office. He’s worried that he might have herpes. (Spoiler: It’s razor burn.) Before he drops trou for the doctor, he lets out a lengthy preamble. “I just have, like, a very bizarre situation down—okay, when I was born, I came out of the womb with a tangled urethra so immediately they had to go in and do all types of surgery to it. As a result, there’s so much scarring down there,” he warns, before adding that “my dick is made of balls.” A few episodes later, we learn that this condition is called hypospadias, which occurs when the opening to the urethra is located on the underside of the penis. It’s also 100 percent true.
How did it feel to, well, expose himself like that? “It felt great,” Burd tells me. “So top of mind, my whole life, was my penis.” It profoundly affected him on both a physical level, from urinating blood to needing secondary surgeries, and a psychological one. “When I lost my virginity, my thought wasn’t, I’ve lost my virginity!” he says. “My thought was like, My penis is functional.”
Burd is certainly not the only man on earth driven by phallic anxiety—I would venture to guess that’s the rule, not the exception—but he is more open about it than most. “I feel like me being born with this issue is the thing in my life that has defined my personality,” he says. “It’s caused me to be the way I am, the neurotic overthinking man that I’ve become.”
As a child, overthinking meant OCD and spending 20 minutes every day doing elaborate rituals for a supreme being named “Spirit Chief” in order to ward off any family deaths. (Today it manifests as not falling asleep during Sports Center commercials. “If the commercial break is even broached or discussed, that counts as a commercial break and I have to wait for the whole break to come back and then I can go to bed,” he explains.) He knew early on that he was good at making people laugh and he was willing to do anything to get that reaction, including pissing his pants in front of his friends. During summer camp as a child, the talent show ended one year with the kids chanting “We want Burd!” So he got up on stage and improvised.
“The feeling I got that day was immeasurable,” he says. His big talent show appearance became an annual tradition—and a source of stress. “It quickly lost its joy when the entire first three weeks I’m thinking Fuck, what am I going to do this year?” he remembers. “It made me miserable by the end of it.”
At work, the neurosis has a name: The No Stone Unturned Method. This means he must try out every single possible version of something, whether it’s a lyric or a joke, before he’s satisfied. “He’s the worst person I’ve ever been in the studio with,” Benny Blanco tells me. “But also the best person.”
The flipside of his neurosis is stratospheric confidence. The co-creator of Dave, Jeff Schaffer, remembers the first time he met Burd: “He’s talking to me, a stranger, about how he’s going to be so huge. He’s telling me he’s going to be the biggest entertainer in the history of entertaining. And I’m like, Oh, he’s delusional. This is great. I love this.” Schaffer, who’s also worked on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, adds that he sees “a lot of Larry” (that would be David) in Burd.
Burd insists that he’s not arrogant. “I don’t feel like I’m like, Fuck you, I’m the best,” he says. “It’s more just like”—and here he turns to gaze upwards beatifically, his curls practically aglow—“Wow, I’m the best.”
He can pinpoint the exact day his confidence exploded. He was in his early twenties, working at an advertising agency in San Francisco. He had started in account management but got himself transferred to the creative team after sending the higher-ups on the Doritos account an MP3 file of himself rapping chip stats—a real-life, 21st century Peggy Olson. On the side, he was quietly filming a slew of comedy rap videos that he planned to strategically drop on a weekly basis. His parents tried to stage an intervention before he went public, convinced that he would ruin his life and future career prospects. Burd steamrolled ahead. The morning he released his first single, “Ex-Boyfriend,” he remembers staring in the mirror while brushing his teeth and just weeping with relief. It was an immediate hit, racking up over one million views on YouTube in 24 hours.
“I was always very self believing, but to see it work the first day like that, it made me totally like Kanye-like in my self belief,” he says.
Still, the plan was never to become a full-time rapper. The rap was meant to be a vehicle for his comedy, the way other people did standup—something that would get him in the room with producers. But then he released an album, 2015’s Professional Rapper, and in 2016, he was even anointed on XXL’s annual Freshman cover, alongside Lil Uzi Vert and 21 Savage. He never thought he would perform live, and here he was, going on tour. “Nothing gives me more anxiety than the idea of doing karaoke in front of my friends,” he says. “But also, you should know I hate concerts. I don’t like going to concerts. I don’t know why people go to concerts. I can’t relate to the activity of wanting to stand for two hours amongst other people and hear music that’s not at the quality that you’d hear when you listen with your headphones.”
Technically, his original scheme worked, though Dave’s success doesn’t mean he’s ready to call it quits in his rap career. Burd is currently about three quarters done with a new album and leaning towards more straightforward rap. His earlier stuff feels embarrassing to him. “When I initially started, there was probably more of a desperation to just have something get attention, just so I could get noticed,” he says. “Which is probably not the right way to make music. Now I feel like I have more pride in the art of songwriting and making good songs.”
If you’re wondering what business a white Jewish kid from a well-off Philadelphia suburb has trying to break into a historically Black art form based on struggle, so have many others. In the New York Times, the critic Jon Caramanica wrote that Burd’s music is “a lumpy jumble of entitlement and irony,” adding that his “forever-arched eyebrow serves as a distancing mechanism, a tool to put him beyond reproach, regardless of the scale of his racial infractions.” Salon, not mincing words, called him “the sociopath’s answer to Macklemore.”
Burd himself has rethought some of his work. He removed the YouTube video for “White Dude,” a song which extols how awesome it is to be a white man instead of a woman or a person of color. “Even though I knew I was never serious with it and it was just a joke, it just didn’t feel like a joke I was proud of,” he says. “And I don’t like making jokes I’m not proud of.”
He attributes this change of heart to growing up and spending time with people from other walks of life. This includes Davionte Ganter, aka GaTa, his hypeman in reality and on the show, who is Black. (One of the best, most lauded episodes of the first season focuses on GaTa’s struggles with bipolar disorder.) I mention the ongoing conversation around Burd and cultural appropriation to GaTa and ask if the two have ever talked about it. “No. But a lot of people were rubbed the wrong way about some things that he said or whatever the case may be with his music. At the end of the day, I can’t stop my friend from being himself,” he tells me. “That’s one of the most genuine things about Lil Dicky. He is himself at all times. I respect people that don’t bottle up things because at the same time there’s people that’ll say some things, but you will never hear them publicly.”
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When I ask GaTa to tell me a story that’s emblematic of his friendship with Burd, he immediately shares about the time when another friend of his got shot six times and landed in the hospital. “Dicky sent food to the hospital for my friend and his family for two weeks,” he says. “Dicky don’t know nothing about gang violence or nothing that’s going on like that, but he saw how it affected me. I was just like, Man, Dicky a real genuine dude.”
In 2018, Burd released a single with Chris Brown called “Freaky Friday.” The premise is that he and Brown switch bodies: the ultra-famous R&B singer gets the chance to live in peaceful anonymity for the day, while Dicky gets to enjoy the fruits of a luxurious lifestyle and gleefully say the n-word multiple times (Brown is the one actually singing it). It’s arguably more offensive than “White Dude,” not least of all because Brown has a history of domestic violence accusations.
Burd stands by the song. “With Chris Brown, we can do one of two things: We can never hear from him again and say ‘I won’t accept any Chris Brown whatsoever,’ or I feel like we can allow him to use his talent for good,” he says. “When I see people react to the song, I really think that it makes people laugh and it makes people happy. I don’t think it’s the type of thing that really is making the world a worse place, on a micro-specific, talking-about-the-song level.” (Later on in the conversation, he adds: “A song like ‘Freaky Friday,’ let’s be honest about it—it’s a fucking global smash hit. It sounds like a hit. If you’re not even listening to the lyrics, it literally has the palette of a hit.”)
The fact that he can’t have it both ways is something that Burd is still learning. “I’m aware of how insensitive my art can be, but I’m a very sensitive person and I hate offending people,” he says. “If I see anybody that’s offended by something I’m doing, it really hurts my heart, truly.”
Burd knows he’s not for everyone … but he also thinks he might be. He prefaces what he says next by admitting that it sounds crazy. “I’m very confident that if I had 10 hours to spend with somebody, that they would like me. There have been very few instances in my life where someone has known me and disliked me,” he says. “Yet a ton of people, understandably so, would dislike me as an artist or me as a comedian.”
Here, he turns reflective. “I think it all comes back to the root of why I do comedy in the first place, why I love making people laugh. Because I want people to like me,” Burd admits. “I like that feeling. It’s probably ingrained in me as a child, that I’m seeking love.” He’s made peace with one thing, at least: “There’s so many people on this earth that I’m not going to be able to spend any time with.”
The writers’ room for Dave is a little like group therapy, if Burd had 10 therapists exclusively laser-focused on him. He sits there and bears his soul. He tells them his innermost thoughts and presents them with all of his flaws. Then they work together to unpack them and transform them into comedy.
Jeff Schaffer is one such person who has been let into the mysteries of Burd’s psyche. “He’s the smartest dumb person I know,” Schaffer tells me.
“Just making sure…” I ask him. “You don’t mean the dumbest smart person?”
“Yeah,” he says.
Schaffer adds that he’s “continually amazed at the depth and shallowness” of Burd’s knowledge. “It’s amazing what he doesn’t know, ” he says. “And it’s amazing what he can do.”
Burd, too, finds himself frequently musing about his depth. “Am I the deepest person or do I just lack depth entirely?” he says. “Am I deep or am I completely, not remotely deep?”
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The one big flaw Burd fixates on is his selfishness. It’s something that Dave explored a bit in season one, but season two delves deeper and darker. It’s less laugh-out-loud funny and more of an awkward excavation of creative pressure, the loneliness of being single after a long-term relationship ends, and feeling abandoned by your friends. Some of these themes come up in his new music too. He pulls out his phone and scrolls through his notes, listing them off: “Anxiety. Love. Being a good guy. Being a good person. Happiness. Not eating fruits or vegetables.”
I wonder if there was a specific incident that got Burd to actively start trying to be a good person.
“I love my parents so much and there was a moment five years ago where my mom…” Here, his voice cracks. He starts tearing up at the memory. “I didn’t do enough for her birthday and she pretty much explained to me that she felt unappreciated and it killed me,” he continues. “I’ve always been very selfish and your parents love you unconditionally. Then, as an adult, to hear that from my mom as a person. I think feeling the guilt and the self-loathing that I felt from that moment has carried my soul.”
If that moment marked a turning point in Burd’s personal life, he can delineate his professional life as Before Dave and After Dave. Before, he felt as if nobody quite understood what he was capable of. Afterwards, he felt as if he had made it. He could exhale and relax a bit—or as relaxed as Burd can get. Creating season two felt better, maybe even fun. He’s secure in the knowledge that he knows what he’s doing. And of course there’s his relationship, with a commercial producer he met right before the pandemic, and she understands him.
He is happy, truly happy. “I couldn’t have had a better life and a more privileged and lucky life,” Burd says. But! “But I can always find something to complain about. I have unbelievable ambitions that are ambitious even for ambitious people. In my heart, I feel like I can be one of the entertainers of our time.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Kevin Amato
Production Assitance by Danielle Gruberger
Styled by John Mark
Hair by Pavy Olivarez using Living proof and Oiudad
Grooming by Golden Sunshyne using Atomic Beauty Cosmetics
*Special thanks to Sergio Perez and *The Great Western Steak & Hoagie Co.