From The Comic's Comic

Episode #379

Ray Ellin has been the host with the most for most of his adult life. He started by emceeing stand-up shows at comedy clubs in New York City. In the late 2000s, he launched a live interactive talk show, LateNet with Ray Ellin, first for his own website, DailyComedy.com, and later licensing it to air on AOL. Ellin also became the host for the official off-Broadway live edition of The Gong Show, receiving Chuck Barris’s blessing to do so. And before the pandemic, Ellin co-developed and executive-produced a topical stand-up showcase for Comedy Central, This Week at the Comedy Cellar. Perhaps most uniquely, though, Ellin has spent the better part of a decade living almost half of the time in Aruba, where he has produced and hosted stand-up shows for locals and tourists alike on the Caribbean island as Aruba Ray. I’ve experienced Aruba Ray’s for myself, and got Ellin to tell me all about how he wound up a fixture on a tropical island and more.

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Last Things First: When was the first time someone called you Aruba Ray?

I believe the first time it happened was 10 years ago. I started coming to Aruba about 10 years ago this week (first week of March 2012). And it was Dan Naturman — fellow comedian Dan Naturman. I was coming to Aruba every month for like eight, nine days a month for a year, just to get out of the city. I was burnt out. I finished doing the LateNet show. And I kept traveling back and forth, and one time Naturman said, ‘Hey! Look who’s back in town: It’s Aruba Ray.’

What was it about Aruba? Because there are many lovely tropical places in the Caribbean. What was it about Aruba, specifically? I remember Lewis Black did commercials. Was it Lewis Black’s sales pitch on TV that got you to check out Aruba?

No, it was actually a fan who kept telling me, coming to all these different shows and like saying, ‘Oh, you should come to Aruba. I have a condo in Aruba.’ And I was like, No! I’m not traveling to South America with someone I don’t know. And then like a year goes by and I realized it’s just a really nice person who was offering me to go to Aruba and so I went not knowing much. I got a good vibe from them. And then I knew nothing about Aruba. And then I came here and I was immediately so taken by, because I’ve been to tons of other islands. The people are amazing. The beaches are some of the best in the world. The restaurants are outstanding. You feel safe, anywhere you go on this island, you feel safe. I was just taking a friend of mine around yesterday on a tour of the island. And I just said anywhere we want to go is great. I feel safer here than I do in America, for sure.

I’m a satisfied customer. I have been to Aruba twice in the past six years. Both times I’ve visited the Aruba Ray comedy show and both times I’ve been so pleasantly surprised at how hassle-free…If you need a tropical island to just have no cares in the world, Aruba is a is a great place to do it. But I’ve seen your show in two different resorts now. How long were you going to Aruba before the idea popped in your head that you could turn this into a business?

Probably by the third trip. So this was in 2012, probably May of 2012 where I thought you know what? At night, people can go to casinos, go to restaurants, to some bars. It’s not a crazy nightlife scene. There’s stuff to do, but at that point, I’m like, I want to spend more time here. I think shows do well here. I think most of the tourists are mostly American tourists. Some Canadian, some European, but mostly American. And I just thought they would enjoy the shows. I knew which comedians would work well for this crowd. You get a lot of people from the Northeast. Yeah, other parts of America as well. You do get some California and Oregon and Texas and the Carolinas, but predominantly Northeast it seems. And that’s what I thought. And then in April 2013, I met with different venues. I wanted to try to rent space in different places and there’s not a lot of spaces to rent. And I am a foreigner here obviously. So doing business can be as tough. It has its challenges. And there was a magician who had a show in the theater in one of the hotels. It was a great little theater, but he’d been there every every night for five years. So I said to the GM if this guy ever leaves, let me know. And then a month later, I get a call from the GM. He goes hey, the magician disappeared.

The magician disappeared!

Poof! He was gone. So I was like, great. Email me the contract! I didn’t have like a total game plan but I knew which comedians I was first gonna bring. I worked with Brian McFadden and Chuck Nice. We did like every Friday-Saturday together at The Comic Strip for like four years in a row was crazy. Amazed they didn’t shuffle up the lineup. But we were together on these shows for like four years in a row. I go, look I’m trying to put shows together on this island. It’s gorgeous. I think you guys would enjoy it if you want to do them with me. They said yes, we did it. In April of that year, 2013. It went well. I knew there was something there. I mean, it wasn’t profitable, but I just knew I had to get the word out, really. But the show itself was great. The venue was really great. And then it gradually just kept picking up and getting a little bigger and bigger and I started making more and more shows and then of course bringing more comedians. So now I’ve probably had close to 200 different comedians over the past nine years.

You’re spending how much time in Aruba vs. how much time in New York City?

Probably five months a year in Aruba, altogether. And then probably five months in New York, and then the other two months are like LA, Boston and whatever other random gigs, Florida occasionally, you know, or whatever corporate event you do.

You mentioned The Comic Strip and I think that’s the first place I ever saw you was hosting the Strip.

Yeah, that’s right. That’s where we met.

What was the first show you ever hosted?

Wow. That was probably. I’d just been in New York a little while so I was probably like 23. So I don’t remember. It’s funny. I should remember who was on the show. I have an old playbill. Just a sheet, and one of them was definitely Ray Romano, for sure. He wouldn’t remember that. But I remember. It’s funny. I wish I remember the very first time I hosted. I remember that there was a waitress who worked there, who ended up becoming a talent agent. And she said to me, ‘Ooh, he booked you to host he must, he must think highly of you.’ Because I was just doing sets and then he put me on a weekend to host. I wish I had a time machine to go back and, just do so many things, I wish I could go redo or re-feel.

It strikes me: You’ve built out an entire career as a host. And there’s certainly not a lot of stand-up comedians who do that on purpose.

Right. You know, I’ll tell you, Sean, it’s interesting. I know so many comics don’t like hosting. I love it. I’ve always enjoyed it. I hosted shows starting in high school, and stuff in college, but I just like it. You can help really shape the night and create a certain vibe, and it’s really fun to me that I have the time to interact with people and do material, and I just I really like it. I like that you’re sort of the constant thread. You know, it’s funny. When I played baseball, I was a pitcher. I liked that. I liked that you’re sort of, in some ways like the constant throughout the game. When I played soccer, I was the goalie. I liked that. In basketball. I was a point guard. There’s just something about it maybe it’s a feeling of control or…

I was just about to say, maybe it’s a control issue.

It could be! It could be, but it’s just something about it. You know, it’s funny. When I was a kid, I would see my mother host parties in the house. She was a classical pianist. Sometimes shed’d play piano for the guests, but often they’re playing cards or dinner parties, whatever. And I probably just picked up something from seeing that, how she just kept it fun. Everyone had a good time. Maybe there’s an element of that. I don’t know. I just love hosting stuff and it’s funny how most people might be like, they don’t want to host a stand-up show. They wouldn’t want to host a game show, they wouldn’t want to host a talk show. I enjoy doing all those things. I think it’s fun.

When I moved to New York City in 2007, you also had this show called LateNet. Tell me how that came about. Because your IMDB and online bio mention a variety of other shows that I’d never heard of — I guess they might have been online, or cable access, or I don’t know where they were — so tell me how LateNet happened?

I’d started a website called Dailycomedy dot com with a guy I met. It’s funny. My mom always said to me, ‘Don’t ever turn down any gig. You never know what it’ll lead to.’ And I went on this really crappy late night radio show I think it was AM radio, at like two in the morning. And I met this guy who’s an older guy, used to work at AOL. And we’re just talking about comedy and comedy on the internet, whatever. And the next day I got an email from him. And he just said to me, basically, you know, why don’t you come up to my house. He had a townhouse on the Upper East Side and we talked about what could we do online in the comedy space. And together we started dailycomedy.com which really was really good. And honestly it was kind of ahead of its time. We had a lot of different great comedians who would post topical material and create videos, sketches, that kind of stuff. And the competition at the time was like, you know, like Turner had a big website. Funny or Die had just launched. Budweiser launched Bud TV, which they put $30 million into their website, and DailyComedy outlasted everything except Funny or Die. It really did pretty well a lot. A lot of comics would post stuff — Keith Alberstadt. Gary Vider. There’s a woman, I feel terrible I’m not remembering her name right now, but she’s won Emmys for working on the John Oliver show, and they’d just come on and post really funny stuff. Just for the hell of it. It was a really good site. So I always wanted to host a late-night talk show. I always wanted to have the Tonight Show or Letterman show, any show like that. And I thought maybe we can do something like this through DailyComedy. We partnered with a company that had this technology where basically, people from all over the world could jump in on their webcams and watch the show. I mean, this is long before Zoom. I mean, this was you know, whatever, 13 years ago, before Zoom existed. Skype, I don’t think was happening yet. So they had this cool technology. The hard part. I was really overseeing everything. I dealt with the venue. I would make sure I can get audience to come. I was booking the guests, which was the hardest part, and you know, the guests were great. We had Leonard Nimoy and Paul Shaffer and Chevy Chase and Hank Azaria, Fran Drescher, I mean, people I was really excited to meet and talk to. So it went really well. We’d have like a couple hundred people in the live audience and then people watching all over the world. And I set up a monitor on my desk and people could ask questions, in real time, to my guest, and it was really something. And then AOL agreed to take on the show. And I really thought like, this is it! This is gonna like, it’s gonna go through the roof. AOL is a big comedy. I mean, it wasn’t as relevant, as you know, as Google or Yahoo, but it’s still big. It’s a big company with millions and millions of users. Anyway, we started doing it there, and we moved to a nicer studio and the production values were even better. And then, AOL was taken over again, a new CEO. The first time I learned — I’d heard these stories, but I experienced it firsthand — new CEO came in, he let go of like 200 people in the New York office, including everybody who oversaw my show, and that was the end of that. I was so burnt out at the time, people said to me, why don’t you continue doing the show as a podcast? At the time to do a podcast you had to like get into a studio and do it. And I was fried, and it was just a lot, and that’s when I came to Aruba. Just to get away from New York. And I really thought to myself, Sean, I just want to travel all over the world. I want to go to Europe. I want to this and do that. I came to Aruba and I just loved it so much, that I just kept coming and coming. And I was really burnt out. I mean, I was fried. I didn’t feel in a good place. I was just unhappy. I was bummed that LateNet it ended, and I was bummed that like, unless I could quickly find a new home for it with MSN or Yahoo or wherever. I just sort of like I was just tapped out. And so coming to Aruba really just was a great life-changing experience. That’s why I keep coming here as often as I could, not thinking about performing here. Just kind of try to save my life, you know, it was just so ugh.

Everything about LateNet kind of amazes me though, in retrospect. I think it amazed me at the time, too, because the tech wasn’t there yet. And also, you mentioned you were booking your own guests, but you were booking famous entertainers, and it’s like, how is he booking these people for this show that I don’t know who’s watching or how they’re watching? And then it’s interactive. But infrastructure online isn’t there for interactivity, so I don’t know how this is all happening. Is this like, a unicorn, of a show?

Thank you. We had some technical glitches for sure. I mean, that when we first started doing it, yeah, like venues weren’t wired to really handle the kind of internet we needed. Fran Drescher was the first big guest. And she was like, my sister had a friend who had a friend who knew Fran, and we basically like, you know, we really did a big push for her charity. That’s what it was, for breast cancer research. She’s a breast cancer survivor and a great spokesperson for that cause. I don’t know how we did it. It was just such a hustle. I mean, getting, you know, Leonard Nimoy — I loved everybody I had on the show I really did — but Leonard Nimoy it’s like I was never like this crazy big Star Trek fan. I liked Star Trek. But I knew what an icon he was. And he got there an hour before the show. And took pictures, hung out and just was there like I didn’t have to worry about him not showing up or being late. We did an hourlong interview, which was only supposed to be 10 minutes. And then he hung out for an hour after and like signed stuff for everybody in the audience. I think he was over 80 at that point. He was just awesome. And so interesting. I mean, he acted on a million things from like, The Twilight Zone. He had record albums and wrote poetry and photography. He was a great, super nice guy. So when you meet somebody like that, that’s how everybody should treat each other in the business. Because you know, you meet people all the time, I’m sure, who are just not very gracious and yet they’re successful, you know, and that’s disappointing.

Those are the people who deserve the gong.

The Gong Show was fun. I hosted the official live version of The Gong Show. And I met with the producer, Leslie Gold, who used to have a very popular radio show, The Radio Chick, and we shared the same vision for it. I always thought the original show was like fun and upbeat. It was more like a party atmosphere. It was good natured. And then the future incarnations were very like kind of roast, kind of cringy, kind of, you know, not fun. So we shared that same spirit and then I met with Chuck Barris. She had me meet with Chuck. She wanted him to sort of give his blessing. He was the original host and creator of the show.

And CIA agent?

Yeah, secret agent, that’s right. When I met with him, they said ‘Don’t ask him about The Gong Show. Don’t ask him about if he was a spy or not.’ Because the movie Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is based on his life. And I’m like, what am I going to talk to him about? I don’t know what else? How’s real estate in upstate New York? I don’t know. Anyway, of course, we talked about The Gong Show, and he brought it up. I told him how I had hoped to do the show and sort of carry his torch. And of course I did my take on it. Because you have to keep in mind, it was a TV show, and a half-hour TV show only needs 22 minutes. And, you know, the audience is watching a lot of different camera angles. They’re cutting around and it’s not just on the host for 22 minutes. For a live stage version. I can’t jump around like a maniac for 22 minutes, that’d be absurd. But I did tell him I wanted it to be fun and good-natured. You know, Jay Leno had said that. There’s one time I met him and he said, he just kind of giving random advice. And one of the things he said, he said to me, you know, Don’t make fun of like someone’s weight. Don’t make fun of what someone looks like. You can make fun of their tie. Don’t make fun of their physical appearance, and to me that it made perfect sense. You know, why would you do that? I mean, they can’t change it or have a hard time changing or don’t want to change and they just are who they are. And so that really stuck with me and I said something like that to Chuck Barris as well. Like when we do The Gong Show, it’s not gonna be mean, it’s gonna be fun.

You mentioned there were different incarnations of The Gong Show. Was the version you were tied to, was that ever pitched in TV development?

Yes, they had met with, I think it was Sony TV, to try to develop it as a TV show. And then as I learned from the experience with LateNet, executives come and go and they have their own thing they want to do and I get it. So you know, I never tell anybody but anything until any more until, like we’ve shot it, and like the day it’s gonna air I will then go and like post something on social media. I never say a word anymore, because I did a pilot for a game show called Worth The Wait. It was trivia for people waiting on these really long lines for venues, like so people waiting on line at Madison Square Garden to get into a concert, or at Broadway show or whatever. It’s actually really good. It’s a good pilot. I didn’t tell anybody I did it until, unless it got picked up. There’s no point to me. You know, why? And that’s happened a lot of times.

So then how did you approach Noam Dworman, the owner of the Comedy Cellar, or did he approach you? How did This Week at the Comedy Cellar come about?

(This Week at the Comedy Cellar aired three seasons from 2018-2020 on Comedy Central.)

Well, we were talking one night at the club and he said to me, what do you think about a show where comedians would get onstage and talk about whatever’s going on during the week and, you know, that kind of thing? And I said I think it’s a great idea. I’d love to run with it. Let me see what I can do. Because at that point, you know, I don’t know if Noam knew everything I’d done, but I made that movie The Latin Legends of Comedy, which I, foolishly, in hindsight, it was a huge risk, but it all worked out. I financed that on credit cards, and I ended up selling it to 20th Century Fox, and I’m lucky I did. That I recouped what I put out. But he knew I was happy to do stuff, I’m happy to get my hands dirty. So I said I’d love to run with it. And so I pitched it to a few different production companies. And then Noam and I met with a company that we ended up working with, and I produced the pilot for that. So he originally said something and I said let me run with the ball here, but from the time he first mentioned it to me to the time that thing got on the air, it took like three years probably. And you might wonder, what went on during those three years? Like you’re keeping the ship afloat. It’s like the production company gets sidetracked with other stuff. Noam has his business to run, he get sidetracked with other stuff. And you’re just trying to keep everything moving. Then lawyers take a while to hash out details, you know, and then when we pitched it, we pitched it to like eight or 10 different places. Some places like Bravo and CNN, you know, it’s great to have those meetings, but you know it’s never gonna end up there. So I had hoped that HBO was gonna take it because I was a huge Game of Thrones fan. Like a psychotic fan. And I in my head I’m like, well we have a show on the network and certainly someone at the network would be more than happy to let a producer on some other much smaller show fly to grow Croatia and meet the cast on set. So, but as it turned out, we meet with HBO and it went great, but the show ended up on Comedy Central which you know, we wrapped season three, literally as like, we’re transitioning to go into lockdown in New York. As we finished season three. I think we put a disclaimer on it. We shot I think with a very small audience. People might have had masks on at that point. We put that disclaimer on those final couple episodes. But we wrapped Season Three, and then like five minutes after, the computers were turned off. All right now go be alone in your apartment for a couple months. You know it was like that quick. It was a great experience. You know, doing a weekly topical stand-up show, you’re wrapping up one episode as you’re prepping and shooting the next one. It’s crazy, but a great experience. A lot of fun. You know you learn so much more about, there’s politics in everything, certainly in show business. It was good, a great experience.

Right, because of course, not only did the pandemic kind of kibosh on a season four, but then there was such an overhaul of the executives that Comedy Central that year, that I don’t know if any of the people you worked with are still there.

I think they’re all gone. There might be one person on the West Coast who’s still there. So I knew, once the network you know, and this is not just Viacom, but lots of companies. They let go of so many people. When that happened, I’m like, we’re probably not gonna have a season four. We couldn’t shoot during the pandemic anyway. And if we were gonna if I mean think about it, it’s interesting Sean, if we were actually going to resume a season four, it would have been over definitely over a year into the pandemic. By the time we ever, and everyone would have to been COVID-tested. All those people. I don’t know if we could’ve pulled that off. So even if everybody at the network stayed. I knew that was the end of that. That’s OK.

How did you how did you personally cope with just the fact that you knew there wasn’t going to be a season four, but then also I would presume, you couldn’t do the Aruba shows for a long time?

Right. So what happened was my oldest sister passed away unexpectedly two years ago yesterday, actually. So she passed away. We were in production, final two weeks of production. COVID already, you know, obviously existed. So then, we wrapped the show and go into lockdown. So I’m alone in my apartment. I can’t be with my parents. Because of they weren’t in the same state. So because of COVID, can’t do that. I can’t go to Aruba. Aruba was shut down. So I couldn’t do any shows there. And suddenly, I’m like, What the? Like, it was just it was so surreal. I can’t even. You look back on something and you know factually everything that happened, but you can’t quite remember all like, it seems like you know, it still feels like it didn’t really happen to you, you know, even though you know it did. So I started doing shows online, in part just to try to keep busy. And I really wasn’t in the mood to do them. And then you know, sometimes you don’t feel like getting onstage, you kind of can trick yourself into getting in the mood and once you’re doing it, you’re feeling it. And these Zoom shows they ended up, I did them first to raise money for an organization in Aruba, I donated the tickets. I used my my database from the Aruba shows to have people buy tickets to watch online, then I donated the proceeds to an organization in Aruba. Then off that, I started this thing called Comedy Cloud.

And Comedy Cloud was designed to do Zoom shows for companies who wanted to bring employees together, like reconnect people that are all working remotely and boost their morale and that sort of thing. And I also learned, so there’s some amazing comedians that I know you’re a fan of, who suck on Zoom. Like they’re not into it. So I got a group of comedians together that are good on it. I did over 100 shows for companies, so that was something to do it just weird. Like as soon as the show’s over in your log off, you’re like, OK, now I’m alone in my apartment. Again, this is great.

And then Aruba reopened in July 2020, when they got COVID free. So I flew down here not to do shows. I just really needed a break after being cooped up in my apartment. I finally saw my parents. I spent a lot of time with them. And after that, I flew down to Aruba. I was on the first flight. There was like, I mean, literally, five people on the beach. Instead of hundreds there were five. The sea life was stunning. It was a gorgeous thing. I had a couple friends I got them to fly down. They stayed down for nine weeks, just to be here, but everything was closing early. There’s still restrictions. So I was in bed at nine o’clock every night watching Netflix. The island was open but it was very limited. And then we started doing shows again Dec. 1, 2020 in Aruba, but it was two nights a week. A big spacious room that I’m sitting in right now and there was probably 13 people at a show. 20 people at a show. People were still afraid to travel. The first show was myself, Dan Naturman and a guy from Boston, Tony V, who actually is in the cast of the movie CODA, which is currently nominated for an Oscar, and they won the SAG Award for Best Ensemble, so I’m very happy for him. Great guy, great comic. So the three of us did the show. And after the show, multiple people came up to us and offered us $100 bills each. Like thank you so much! We needed that. Please take this. We’re like no, no, we don’t take tips. Don’t please, we’ve been cooped up so long. This was so great. I was shocked. I forgot that people — I knew people were afraid to travel — but it hadn’t even dawned on me, that oh, yeah. People haven’t had any live entertainment. Anyway, we didn’t take the money.

We still did two nights a week that entire season. And it’s funny, Sean is that there’s a lot of comedians who canceled because they were afraid to travel or some got sick. Erica Watson God bless her soul, she passed away. A lovely, lovely person, great comedian. So what ended up happening is Brian McFadden, Mike Vecchione and Katie Hannigan all stayed in Aruba for nine weeks in a row. They left for three weeks. I brought in a few other people and then they came back and stayed for another three weeks. So they were down for 12 weeks each. We had a great time. It’s funny, Sean, when I said to Mike, Do you want to stay longer? So many comedians are canceling they’re afraid traveling getting sick. If you want you can stay longer. Mike said to me, he goes, ‘don’t know. I mean, I’m moving into a new apartment. I’ve got to sort that out. So but then again, I can’t really work in New York because nothing’s open in New York and I can’t go to the gym in New York and it is cold in New York.’ So goes, ‘Yeah, what the fuck am I thinking? Of course I’ll stay,’ and every day we went to the gym. We went to the beach. We did shows. We had great food. It was a really great blessing. It was obvious none of us were making money doing shows at that point. It was absurd to even think that, but it was a great that we can perform and we could be in front of people and that was a godsend. You know that was really nice.

It’s got to be wild, to think back to like the kid version of Ray Ellin, knowing that middle aged man, Ray Ellin would be spending half of his life in Aruba where there’s signs around the island with his name and his face on it.

You’re right. If anyone said that to me, when I was 15, when I was 20, whenever. I think I would say, What’s Aruba? What do you mean? I never would have imagined it, and it’s just funny how life takes you on different journeys. I almost got the job Cash Cab. I almost got the job hosting that, and it went to Ben Bailey. And we’re very, quite different. They went in a different direction and that’s OK. And instead of that, I don’t remember if that was before LateNet or after that, I have no clue. But you know, I might never have come to Aruba if I’d gotten Cash Cab. There’s arguments for both but I can certainly say that coming to Aruba has been just a wonderful experience. A wonderful, great life-changing experience. That if I’d done Cash Cab, that might never have happened and I would have done some other things. You know that whole saying about one door closes another one opens. That’s completely true. You have to be persistent and persevere, try to keep moving forward and I definitely had periods where you get in a funk and you need to figure out a way to be motivated and just keep moving forward. Everybody has sad facts in their life and of their life, and you have to do your best to keep forward momentum, forward motion. Everybody has some form of tragedy, some more than others — I’m going on a bit of a tangent, but yes, young me never would have imagined I’d come to Aruba. And Aruba definitely, emotionally during the pandemic was great. But financially, it hasn’t been. It’s been so challenging because even though now we’re fully open, a lot of people are still afraid to travel. Because now there’s almost no COVID in Aruba again. They went from 4700 cases to like 30 in the past six, seven weeks. It’s great, the way they’ve handled it. And you’re outside most a lot of time. And of course more people are vaccinated and so on, so if they get sick, they don’t die. Like I don’t think anyone’s passed away in Aruba in the last several months because the vaccines are keeping people alive and there was seven times the amount of COVID two months ago than there was over a year ago when a lot of people did pass away.

So I got vaccinated. I was very lucky. I got one shot Pfizer and one shot of ceviche. And oddly enough, ceviche is just as effective as Pfizer and you swim even better! It’s crazy how it works.

Ending with a joke. What a professional. Ray Ellin, Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for giving me a professional reason to come to Aruba. I thoroughly love Aruba and see why you thoroughly love it and I look forward to seeing you in person again soon.

Sean, thank you and I also want to thank you for being such a great supporter of the comedy community. Because you’re not only a fan, but a terrific journalist. And you are such a wonderful part of the comedy community and I appreciate that very much, as I know a lot, so many other comedians do as well. And I appreciate you having me on your show.