You may best know David Spade from his TV work on “Saturday Night Live” and “Just Shoot Me,” the movie comedies “Joe Dirt” and “Tommy Boy,” and as a standup comic. But these days, he can also claim stardom in the podcast universe.
The Michigan-born Spade is co-host with “SNL” cast member Dana Carvey – of two podcasts, “Fly On the Wall” and “Superfly.” The former, which the duo introduced in 2022, is one of the top 25 comedy-focused podcasts. It’s primarily concerned with “SNL,” both past and present, and has featured the show’s numerous cast members as guests.
The popularity of “Fly On the Wall” led to the recently inaugurated “Superfly,” which has a more free-form blueprint in which Spade and Carvey riff on a myriad of topics, show business and otherwise.
“I wanted to do a podcast, but I didn’t want to do it alone,” offered the 60-year-old Spade – who performed in October at Ocean Casino Resort – during a recent phone call.
“I knew it was too hard,” he acknowledged. “It seems very easy; that’s why there’s three million (podcasts). I didn’t know who to do it with. And I was trying to think of people. Do I just get an unknown sidekick? But I felt there’s safety in numbers.
“I was casually seeing Dana more than usual,” added Spade, who grew up in Arizona. “He lived near me after always being in San Francisco. And so I’d hit him up for dinners and we would always crack up. And then we realized we always talked about “SNL.” We have the same manager and we all discussed it and thought maybe this would be a good way to start a podcast.”
Despite their success, with “Fly On the Wall,” the pair weren’t exactly satisfied.
“We wanted to do it on video and they didn’t,” Spade explained. “And so after a while, they wanted to do a spinoff and I said, ‘I’ll do one if it’s on video.’ So we said, ‘Let’s just do current events. And now we just do one called ‘Superfly’ (available on YouTube). So it’s kind of the same thing. It’s just me and Dana. We can have people on if we want, but the core of it’s just he and I.
“It’s like when you were on ‘SNL,’ you’d always kinda just be aware of what’s going on, what feels like a story that’s gonna stick around,” he added. “So, we’ll scribble headlines, just stories that are funny to me, like when Kanye West asked his wife if he could have sex with her mom.
“And then we just talk about it: What would you tell your wife?” Spade continued. “How should she react? And we just riff on that for as long as we can. And we go to the next story. And then sometimes Dana (who has returned to “SNL” as President Joe Biden) talks about what it was like on (the show) this week. And then I tell about my weekend on the road.
“It is a little more fun (than “Fly On the Wall”) because Dana and I just blab, like we’re at dinner.”
As for hosting, Spade took what is arguably the hardest left turn of his career last fall when he signed on as emcee of the Fox game show, “Snake Oil,” a take-off on “Shark Tank” in which contestants were pitched goods and services, half of them fabricated. The object was that the contestants had to determine which were real and which were “snake oil.”
It was an interesting career move for Spade, because his cool, sarcastic and somewhat chill persona was pretty much the opposite of the game-show template of being upbeat, energetic and an unctuous master of ceremonies.
“I said, ‘I’m not right for a game show,'” he recalled. “And they (the production company owned by comic actor Will Arnett) said, ‘We want (a host where you’re almost annoyed with the game. We’re trying to find different angles on it.'”
While it’s always been an article of faith that game–show hosts know exactly what’s going on at all times, Spade insisted that for him, part of the fun of “Snake Oil” – which streamed on Hulu – was that he had no idea which items were real and which weren’t.
“I said, ‘Don’t tell me which ones are real,'” he recounted. “And then when I’m playing the game, I’m like trying to chime in, going, ‘I have no idea.’ I’m not allowed to steer them, but I’m like, ‘I can fully tell you, I will guess wrong on this one,’ because even when I’d watch a rerun, I’d go, ‘I don’t remember if this is real.’
“But that’s the fun for me,” Spade added. “That’s the hook I like.”
Despite teaming with Carvey on the podcasts, the former “Saturday Night Live” cast member with whom Spade will likely always be most connected is the late Chris Farley, who died of a drug overdose at age 33 in 1997. When a Farley biopic was announced earlier this year, Spade publicly expressed concern that it would emphasize his close friend’s drug use. But he suggested he’s now feeling a little bit better about the idea.
“I’ve talked to the writers and the director and I think they’ve got a handle on it,” Spade offered. “It’s a big, big story to tackle, and it’s not my story to tell. It’s whoever’s doing a movie about it. But I would hope that it goes all right. I think everyone that’s involved seems pretty cool, and they’re doing the best they can.
“So we’ll cross our fingers and hope for the best.”
