Who are Dan?  Who are Jay?  Perhaps you’ve asked yourself this very question while reading their names.  Dan is Dannel Gomiller, who pronounces his first name as though it was spelled normal, and whose last name means “maker of mounds.”  Jay is Jason Klamm, whose last name is not pronounced as it seems, but does mean “moist” in German.  You read that right.

Since meeting in 1990, Dan and Jay (or “The Moist and The Mound”) have been comrades in arms, nerds before it was cool, and comedy partners since they wrote their first stories together in 1992ish.  They started teaching themselves comedy on cassette tapes in 1993, which is unique mainly because those tapes still survive, and definitely unique in that they discuss those very tapes, and the VHS tapes that followed, on the Dan and Jay’s Comedy Hour podcast.

In 2001, they created one of the world’s first viral videos, and helped pioneer the concept of the meme, or as they called it then, “making fun of something we recognize by repeating it.”  That same year, they released Shoestrings, their first comedy album.  Between 2001 and 2014 (the start of the podcast), Dan and Jay’s Comedy Hour came out of the woodworks whenever Dan and Jay collaborated, usually on family-only Christmas albums.  In 2014, Dan and Jay decided to create their first publicly-available Christmas sketch album, Ho, Christmas Tree!, which was released to critical awareness on November 25, 2014.

In December of 2016, Dan and Jay’s Comedy Hour made history when they announced the smallest comedy record in history, entitled Vinyl Dwarf.  At 1.5″ in diameter, playable on a custom player and plinth from People in A Position to Know and Mobile Vinyl Recorders, it’s the smallest piece of audio comedy in history.

Since Jay lives in Detroit and Dan lives in B (or “Boise,” to those in the know), the two keep up on a weekly basis, and record it, hence the podcast.  Since they are brothers from one another’s mothers, the show keeps their friendship close, and their enemies closer.