What does it take for the New York Times to call you ‘our greatest club comic’? Not stadium tours or Hollywood fame, but the raw reverence of other comedians quietly standing in the back of a dimly lit room at 2 a.m. just to watch you work.

This episode explores the singular career of Dave Attell, from NYU communications student to Saturday Night Live writer, to the comic who defined late-night cable with Insomniac. We map how he stayed relentlessly true to the club scene across four decades and got completely sober without losing a single ounce of his edge.

• Why he walked away from SNL, where his gritty voice couldn’t fit network sketch comedy
• How the minimal animation of Dr. Katz made his one-liners carry all the weight
• ‘The Ugly American’ segments on the early Daily Show
• Insomniac’s 3 a.m. tours of the American underbelly, treating night-shift workers as peers
• How sobriety refined his comedic ‘math,’ the extreme economy of his joke architecture