Corner Tavern sits snug in the middle of Atlanta’s Little Five Points neighborhood, which can be kindly described as a fun, counterculture-oriented part of town, friendly to all kinds of people, and well-stocked in entertainment of the music- and alcohol-based variety. Conversely, it can be described, as it once was to me when I first moved to the ATL, a “pseudo-Bohemian tourist trap.” Even if you’ve never had a pint there, you probably have a neighborhood in your town just like it. Sitting at Corner Tavern’s bar, you see a lot of beards walk in. Big beards, shabby beards, Zach Galifianakis beards, show-off beards, beards on beards on beards on beards. Again, friendly to all kinds. It’s enough to make a guy who’s waiting to interview someone with a beard, someone who’s comedy group is named after this particularly hirsute facially trait, more than a little anxious, as if every dude who walks in is the person I’m supposed to be quizzing. Luckily, Dave Stone is warm and friendly from the start. Clearly, he’s a pro, even though he’s only been doing this stand-up thing for a few years now. He’s even happy to talk beards.
“I don’t know if anybody would,” he responds when asked if it would be weird if a member of his group, the Beards of Comedy, went clean shaven. “But even if they did, it all started off as a joke and as a novelty. But yeah, I will acknowledge that it would be awkward if someone shaved for a while.”
Stone grew up in Canton, Ga., a small town by any measure. The 2010 consensus put Canton at just south of 23,000 citizens, and Stone admits that his upbringing was rural-verging-on-rednecky, but it seems like it suited him well enough. To this day, he’s quick to a joke (When someone tries to bum a cigarette from him through one of Corner Taverns windows, he begs off, then says, as soon as the guy’s out of earshot, “I always want to ask people if I can bum a Kit Kat. I don’t smoke, but, ‘Naw, man, you got a Snickers?’”), even when—especially when—its at his stomach’s expense. Hearing him talk about his upbringing, its clear his parents put him on the road to hilarity.
“It’s kind of a weird twist,” Stone remembers. “I was always envious of kids that had cool parents with the cool records, because my parents listened to country or whatever. Not that there’s no merit in that, but in high school it’s like, ‘Oh, I got this Black Sabbath album from my dad’s collection,’ and all my life I was like, ‘Oh, I wish my parents…’ But what they did do was comedy. Stand-up comedy was exposed to me at an early age, listening to a lot of Bill Cosby records, Clint Wilson. At the time I didn’t notice it, but now I appreciate it. I discovered all of the cool music on my own, but I think being exposed to good stand-up early on had an influence on me.”
After leaving his family home, Stone attended the Connecticut School of Broadcasting in Marietta, a suburb of Atlanta. He wrote a bunch of stand-up material at age 20, but “didn’t have the balls to go on stage.” He did some radio work in Athens and eventually at 99X, the big rock station in the ATL, using the vocal cords that Atlanta magazine recently described as “a powerful voice, deep and resonant, a real radio voice. He was good at projecting it, manipulating it, doing vocal caricatures.” He was learning to be funny, how to entertain people. It wasn’t until he finally got onstage at a taco joint in Midtown Atlanta that he thought he might be able to do this comedy thing.