Stand-up comedian and cabaret performer Adam Sank has built a career out of turning his queer life and dating experiences into sharp, self-aware storytelling.
The Summit native will perform his award-winning show Bad Dates: A One-Man Show About Many Men at Cape May’s Clemans Theater for the Arts hosted by East Lynne Theater Company on Saturday, June 6. He’ll then head to Asbury Park to emcee New Jersey’s 34th annual Pride festival on Sunday, June 7.
The comedian’s performing credits include NBC’s Last Comic Standing and The Today Show. In addition to touring Bad Dates nationally, Sank also hosts The Adam Sank Show, a podcast available on all major audio platforms.
While Sank, 55, has lived in Manhattan for the last 30 years, he frequents Summit, where his family still lives. “In some ways, it was an easy, nice childhood,” he says, though he recalls feeling like an outsider growing up in one of the only Jewish families in town at that time. “Being a closeted gay kid only made that feeling of otherness worse,” he adds. Humor has always been a balm for him amid tough times.
Sank wrote Bad Dates after stepping away from standup for a brief period. “I had all this material from over the years—bad dates, bad relationships—it was a lot of that kind of stuff. And then one day, I thought: What if I put something in a show that isn’t just there for the joke? Something unfunny and serious.”
That tonal shift became the backbone of Bad Dates, which centers on coming to terms with being single. “We’re programmed to believe that couplehood equals happiness and singlehood equals misery,” Sank says. “And that’s ridiculous.” He adds that Bad Dates is a misleading title. “It could really be called Good Singlehood.”
Sank says he hopes the show makes his audience “feel less alone in the world in some way.” The best art, he says, is “the kind that makes you feel seen.” And that sense of connection, he explains, is central to queer comedy. “LGBTQ people have our own language,” he says. “It’s all humor, shade and sarcasm.” Still, performing remains a challenge, and a journey through the unexpected. “There’s no tougher audience than a queer one,” he declares. “You never know what’s going to happen up there. It’s a bit like herding cats.”
In addition to Sank’s set, the Pride festival in Asbury Park will include performances by country artist (and former baseball player) Bryan Ruby and the New Jersey Gay Men’s Chorus.
“Asbury Park is a special place,” Sank says. “Growing up, it was not a gay destination; it was a place my father spent his teenage years waiting tables.” But now, he says, the seaside city exemplifies queer community-building: “Not only [does the gay community] survive oppression, discrimination and hatred from all sides, but we move into undesirable places and turn them into a beautiful, livable, welcoming communities, with massive events celebrating Pride like these.”
