David A. Arnold tells Jalen Rose how to make it in comedy

There’s a theme that’s emerged on “Renaissance Man” with many of the comedians I have interviewed. Most of them can trace their early fascination with the craft to Eddie Murphy. And David A. Arnold is no different. He was 10 when he saw Murphy’s iconic stand-up special “Delirious.”

“And I didn’t know that it was something you could do,” David told me. “I just saw somebody in my TV making my mother and aunts laugh the way they were laughing. And I’m like, ‘These people normally be cussing me out.’ I ain’t never see these people laugh in my life. Anyone who can make these angry black women laugh like this, I need to know what’s going on.”

As a young fella, the Cleveland native tried an open mike and bombed. But years later, after a career in the Navy, he was inspired by D.L. Hughley to try again.

“And the next thing you know, I was a comedian,” he said.

It was a slow burn for David, 54, who toiled in the comedy club scene but truly had a career breakout on social media with raw and hilarious observations about his life and family. Much of that powers his new Netflix special, “It Ain’t for the Weak.”

The name of his special is a nod to the perseverance he’s needed to beat substance abuse and survive both the grind of being a touring comedian and bombing onstage — something he did spectacularly years ago in San Diego, where he was going to headline a 3,000-person theater.

The week before his show, he had stopped by the theater and they convinced him to do a short set. Three minutes in, things went south and he said the boos blew him off the stage.

“There was nothing like 3,000 people all at once agreeing at the same time that you not s–t,” said David. He walked off before it was done, but it got worse. They were handing out fliers for next week and his face was splashed across them. Outside the building, the crowd littered the ground with the papers.

“And I sat in my car for two and a half hours going, ‘What happened?’ And I called my boy. I
said, ‘I’m not doing the show.’ He said, ‘You got to go back and do the show because if you
want to be a comedian, you got to face all these obstacles,’ So I just rewrote my set, went back the next week and murdered. And an old lady walked up to me after the show and said, ‘Baby, I was here last week when we booed your a–,’ but she was like, ‘You came back and you redeemed yourself.’

“And that’s when I realized: You gotta bomb. You got to take it in the face and you still got to want to do it.” David has stamina and thick skin, but he also has good instincts. He came of age when people like Jerry Seinfeld, Ray Romano, Roseanne Barr and others landed sitcoms off their comedy sets. But television didn’t work out for him.

“BET told me I wasn’t black enough, and I was not marketable. Right. That’s what they told me. I’ll never forget this. I was in the middle of developing a show with Kevin Hart.” After that rejection, he was “crushed. I sat on my couch for about a month.”

Then, he dusted himself off. This middle-aged man saw comedians, most of them on the younger side, blowing up with the help of social media. “So I picked up my cellphone and I started posting videos and little comedic rants, stand-up that I did 15 years ago that nobody saw. I started putting it on the phone one minute at a time, and I started posting videos with my wife and my kids. I started to rant about what it’s like to raise teenage daughters with a wife that’s always in your goddamn ear, and the next thing you know, this s–t took off. And I went from zero followers to over a million on all these platforms.”

David said he was most inspired by comedians like Eddie Murphy, Wanda Sykes, Jerry Seinfeld and Jim Gaffigan. But he found his own voice with relatable storytelling and lessons from his upbringing, household and family. While it’s a hit with crowds, sometimes it didn’t go over so well with his family. More specifically, his stepfather, who adopted him, wasn’t so thrilled with a joke he told.

“I said, ‘Did anything I say onstage and in that story, was any of it a lie?’ And he said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘I’m going to do the joke. Because one of the things that I have the right to is my story and this is my story.’ And the truth of the matter is, I wrote the joke in a way where I lift my dad up.

“I have the right to my story. And that’s the same thing that I dealt with cancel culture. I tell stories and I have a joke that’s in my special right now that some people thought was a little controversial, but I’m like, ‘Hey, stop. It’s about me getting off drugs.’”

One area he doesn’t touch is politics. “I’m not here to do that,” he said, adding that’s for people like Bill Maher or Jon Stewart. “I don’t care enough about politics. I don’t give a s–t about that. My job is to talk to you on a human level.”

And that’s precisely what he does. The man certainly knows his strengths.

Detroit native Jalen Rose is a member of the University of Michigan’s iconoclastic Fab Five, who shook up the college hoops world in the early ’90s. He played 13 seasons in the NBA, before transitioning into a media personality. Rose is currently an analyst for “NBA Countdown” and “Get Up,” and co-host of “Jalen & Jacoby.” He executive produced “The Fab Five” for ESPN’s “30 for 30” series, is the author of the best-selling book, “Got To Give the People What They Want,” a fashion tastemaker, and co-founded the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy, a public charter school in his hometown.