Former Daily Show correspondent Dulce Sloan's most memorable gigs

Former Daily Show correspondent Dulce Sloan is coming to London next week for her first Soho Theatre run. Here she talks about five of her most memorable gigs…

Best gig

The best gig I’ve had in my career so far will probably be confusing for a lot of people. Most people would think it’s the first time I performed for a sold-out crowd or the first time I got to bring a friend on the road with me. But best gig was opening for my good friend Josh Johnson. 

I’ve been friends with Josh since 2016. We used to perform at these conferences called NACA where different performing acts like comedians, musicians, magicians, poets, and spoken word artists would perform for 100s of college students for an opportunity to perform at their school. 

It was a gruelling process. I truly felt like a hooker on the stroll. But that was the first time I ever saw Josh perform and I was so impressed by him that I was telling the students to book me and also book him.

A year later, I started at The Daily Show and Josh started as a writer two or three months later and he was my saving grace. If you saw me perform at the desk on The Daily Show, Josh wrote it. This helped solidify not only our friendship, but my respect for him as a writer and performer.

I asked Josh a few months ago, if I could hop on some of his shows because I missed my friend and I wanted to celebrate all of his success with him. I’ve only opened for someone on the road two other times so it was great to see Josh create a space for himself and create a fan base that truly love who he is as a comic. It was so inspiring for me to see.

He put a fire under me and gave me the courage to start posting more of myself and what I feel about current affairs online.

Gig that changed my life 

This was the Laughing Skull Comedy Festival in Atlanta. I had been a paid regular for four or five years but I was unable to get into the festival. I had applied two years in a row before getting in the 2015 festival. So I was very excited to have finally gotten in. It was a competition festival and the first prize was a paid headlining weekend at the Laughing Skull. 

The festival had three rounds. I got third place in the first round. After the show, one of the judges introduced himself as a booker for the NBC Standup For Diversity Comedy Competition and said they were having auditions in Atlanta in a few months and I was automatically in the callback round. And then he introduced me to the other judges. 

Getting third place in the first round put me in the wildcard show, where I got first place so  was off to the finals at the Atlanta Improv, a  large 300-seat club that is no longer in business. 

I got there, changed my outfit and went over my set. I was waiting to go up and the comic before me was doing his closing joke about fat people. This is in Georgia in the heart of the Deep South so there were some plus size people in the room. I felt every Atlanta comedian looking at me going ‘Are you gonna let this New York Yankee comedian talk about us like that?’

So my focus changed. How do I blow this man out of the water and make sure HE doesn't win? So I started listening to his set to figure out what I was gonna comment on. He said, "yeah fat people say stuff like "more cushion for the pushin…"’ in reference to having sex. And I thought. That's it. Got him. 

He ended his set and the host called me on stage. I was wearing leopardprint pants. A red, sleeveless, open chest peplum top and a very visible leopard print bra. I started my set by saying, ‘I got your cushion motherfucker’ and the whole crowd erupted! 

I got a huge applause break and I had to raise my hand to quiet the crowd because I only had seven minutes. All the comics came up to me and congratulated me and swore I was going to win. The host also thanked me because not only did I break the tension in the room, I lit the crowd up. 

I got second place in the competition but I was the biggest winner overall.  One of the judges became – and still is – my manager.  One of the judges was the booker of the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival and put me in that year's class of New Faces of Comedy. Later that year I won the NBC Standup For Diversity Comedy Competition and got a holding deal with NBC that helped me move to Los Angeles the following year. That festival truly kickstarted my career.

Best heckler 

I don’t love the idea of the ‘best heckler’ because I don’t want to encourage such things. But I can say my best heckler experience was when I was taping my Comedy Central half-hour special in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2019. 

For the entire month of January 2019, I was sick. Very sick. Lost-20-pounds-in-seven-days sick. So with a special taping coming up the first week of February, I didn’t have much time to prepare. But, as they say, the show must go on. 

I get to New Orleans with my stylist, my make-up artist, and three of my best friends. One of my friends had the whole job of making sure that I took all of my medication on time. It was all hands on deck to keep me alive and well.

The day of the taping comes, and I am extremely nervous. More nervous than I had ever been in my career because I felt the most unprepared. I’m only nervous if I don’t feel prepared. I was the last comic to perform on the last show So I had time to hydrate and worry about my set. 

The announcer called my name And I come on stage to an excited and attentive audience. So attentive that a lady in the audience is loudly repeating my jokes and saying, ‘Girl you funny. You funny!’

Now she wasn’t wrong, but she was interrupting my taping and instead of someone coming over to quiet her down, the cameraman turn the camera to her, so she felt more encouraged to talk to me. Now, I had heard about two other comics who had been heckled during their tapings and one of them was tackled so bad that it destroyed her set, so I wasn’t gonna let that happen to me. So I had to come up with a plan.

Here’s the thing. If someone is heckling in a positive way,  you can’t attack them because the audience will turn on you because that person was being encouraging. So you have to find a way to shut them down without alienating the audience. 

So I walked over to her as the cameras were being put on her and said ‘Sis, I’m in the middle of taping my special. If you want to get out of here at a good time to still enjoy the bars and stuff on Bourbon Street you gonna have to let me finish. I need you to quiet down.’ She says, ‘Oh no am I interrupting?’ I said, ‘Yeah sis you're interrupting." She says ‘Oh, I’m sorry. You doing good!’ I said, ‘Thank you’ and continued with my set. 

Her interrupting my set, knocked all that nervousness out of me. Having someone heckle reset my brain and made the comic in me truly activate.  She helped me realise I know exactly what I’m doing. I know these jokes, I know this crowd, and we’re here to have a good time. This is the one and only time I will say that heckling was good a thing

Worst journey to a gig

This trip help me learn the lesson that if I have a bad feeling about a show, I should not do it. And I had a bad feeling before this show. And a worse feeling after. 

I was booked to perform in Augusta, Georgia, with two other younger comics. The show was two hours away and one of the comics offered to drive. When they got to my house were high on pills, drinking underage and had open containers of alcohol in the car.

You must be wondering, why didn’t I stay home? Well, I was the headliner of the show so I had to do it. I made the young man get out of the driver’s seat and we headed down to Augusta. I start driving  and saw that the gas tank was low because, of course it was. 

I asked if we should get gas and the young man told me ‘no the tank is full. The gauge is just broken. We’ll be fine.’

 We get an hour outside the city, truly in the middle of nowhere Georgia and I see that the broken gas gauge that was close to E has now dropped below E. We are coming up on an exit and I think to myself, ‘I should get off and get gas just in case.’  But no, he said, the tank was full. We should be fine. Then the car runs out of gas.

So now we are Stranded on the side of the road and I am furious. I tell the young men they have to go to the gas station buy a gas can and get gas. They tell me they are too drunk and high to walk there and they don’t have money anyway. So  I had to walk to a gas station; buy gas and a gas can and relieve my bladder that was trying to escape my body.

I get back to the car and a  police officer has arrived to offer to help so I had to try to make sure the cop didn’t realise that the two young comics were drunk and high so we didn’t get arrested. While all of this is happening, the booker from the comedy show is calling me and texting me nonstop asking where we are because we are already an hour late.

So we get the gas in the car, drive another hour to the show, much to the relief of the audience and the frustration of the booker. Two young men are both too messed up to have any kind of a decent set and I once again have to clean up their mess. 

I get on stage and have to do 30 minutes of stand-up and a drunk man at the end of the bar starts heckling me, telling me that him and another man want to take me into the bathroom and do inappropriate things with me. 

I proceeded to let him know there is a knife in my purse and he won’t be doing anything of the sort.The show ends and people at the bar tell me that I made the man cry. I repeatedly said I don’t care and I’m ready to go. 

The young comics have met two young ladies and they want to stay. I told them, ‘you get in the car the next five minutes or I’m going to leave you in Augusta.’ They thought I was kidding until they saw me in the car pulling away and called me to come back to get them. We rode back to Atlanta in silence.

Least welcome post-show comment

Being a black woman can be an interesting journey. Between the Matrix-like moves I have to do to stop people from touching my Afro to the mental gymnastics of figuring out when to speak up for myself and when to be quiet. Just existing in the world can be a march into the unknown. You never know what someone’s going to do or say. 

Usually, after a show, you have to deal with people telling you they ‘really love your comedy skit’, 'I really enjoyed your material, but…’ or offering you a street joke and unsolicited advice. 

I know how to deal with it, but every once in a while someone takes that bar and not only do they set it lower, but they sent it to hell.

I was five years in and I had a 50-something drunk white woman tell me I was very funny and that I looked like the black nanny named Adelaide who raised her. 

She then turned to her friend and yelled, ‘Nancy! Doesn’t she look like Adelaide?’ Nancy was shocked and mortified. Her husband apologised profusely and said repeatedly that she’s drunk.  I stared at her in shock and was even more surprised when she tried to hug me and tell me how much she loved and missed Adelaide. After which, her husband and her best friend whisked her away. 

While this was happening the other opener on the show,  a white male comic was having a pity party for himself because he had a bad set so the audience members were walking past him to tell me and the headliner that we had a great set. After this exchange with the drunk lady, he  loudly said to himself that her comment made him feel better because he had a bad set.  So truly attacks on all sides.

 And if you are wondering, no, he is no longer a comedian.

• Dulce Sloan is at Soho Theatre from March 17 to 22. Tickets

Published: 10 Mar 2025