Daniel Moquin

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Daniel Moquin will tell you that he plans on being a comedian only for as long as he enjoys doing comedy. In this way, he may be the most practical person I have ever met in my life. Maybe the source of his nonchalant approach really comes from a deeper sense of balance – balance in the way that two equally heavy weights set as far apart as possible on opposite ends are capable of leveling the plank that unites them. The internal conflict of “opposing attractions” seems to be in constant harmony within Moquin, and visualizes itself as a laissez-faire sense of sarcasm and dry humor which often lands him in situations where he seems to be okay with things not being okay. Such as when he just “went along with it” for a few years when he didn’t have enough money to get back from Europe. C’est la vie, carpe diem, etcetera.

Claiming dual hometown citizenship in both Montreal and New Mexico, Moquin didn’t get his start in comedy until the age of 22-ish. He attended New Mexico State University and graduated with not one, but two Bachelor’s degrees that have both proved to be completely worthless. He’s enigmatic when explaining his work history, “I was a farmer, I sold knives, I worked on movies, I even had a job where I got paid to have someone point a gun at me.” You want to tell yourself, There’s probably not really a reason to be concerned, this guy is a comedian. He’s just joking, right?Then he explains why he realized he wanted to do comedy as a kid: “Whenever I said something funny, my mother would feed me a treat, but when I said anything unfunny, I got the cane. Since I hated starving to death and getting beaten, I decided comedy was my only choice.” Heh…someone please give this tall man multiple hugs.

The world seems warmer lately which is not so bad because I don’t really like wearing sweaters.

DANIEL MOQUIN

Moquin has come a long way since he started doing stand-up. He recalls his first show as being really horrible. “It was at an open mic in Toronto, and I thought I would do very well because many people were in attendance and all the other performers were doing very well. but the second I got on stage I clammed up and stammered something out along the lines of ‘I also hate George Bush,’ even though nobody had mentioned George Bush at all before that,” Moquin chuckles a bit at this part, “I awkwardly stood there and waited for the audience to laugh, but they didn’t…so I ran off the stage.” In fact, he explains that a lot of his shows have been terrible which seems to be a standard rite of passage for aspiring comedians. “There are so many bad shows,” Moquin candidly explains, “The worst one I did was in a dark ballroom in Midland Texas. It was in the middle of a power outage and nobody could hear me because the microphone wasn’t working and many people were angry.”

Becoming a comedian is a bit like going through puberty all over again. Moquin has gone through his awkward phase and seems to have reached the other side in just five years. In 2015, Moquin began collaborating with fellow comedian Everett Byram on writing and performing their own sketches as well as booking road shows. The pair also do a free comedy show together called Boys Club every Monday night at 10:30 PM in a shopping center above a laundromat at The Next Stage Theatre. Now he seems to think he “doesn’t suck” as much anymore, and we’d have to agree.