by Adelie Salagnac

photo by Jody Lauren Miller

It is no secret that I have a terrible sense of humor – and to prove my point, I’ll tell you that my current favorite joke is “How did the hipster burn his tongue?” (In case you were wondering, the answer is “Because he drank his coffee before it was cool”. I know. Hilarious.) I promise you Darren Keith is way better at this than I am, and if you are not convinced, you should check out his brand new show, DK the Gig.

According to Darren Keith, creator, writer and actor of DK the Gig, the new comedy series about “a musician with a big head who plays on a small stage”. Check out below the trailer of the pilot.

“If you like the trailer, please share it, post it, tweet it, high-five it, let your kid take it to his school’s show-and-tell, or dress it up all fancy-like and take it out for a night on the town. Whatever you can do to help spread the word,” he says.

Keith is also the executive producer of the show. “I wrote all the music, I even edited the trailer and the pilot,” Keith goes on. “That stuff is something that I either wanted to do, or had to do to get where I wanted to go. I had never done anything like this before!”

Musician since age 15, Keith had always felt like something was off. Of course, he did great things with music, and he truly was passionate about it. He could not help but constantly wonder if he had possibly chosen the wrong career path, if he should instead do something with his sense of humor and his writing abilities. Then one day he decided to stop questioning himself and to jump into the great unknown: DK the Gig was about to see the light of the day.

“The first thing I thought about was doing this show, about this musician. All the times I have been on gigs and playing music, I always thought of those funny scenarios,” Keith recalls. “DK the Gig seemed like the most natural, organic thing to do for me. I just started writing all these things I had been thinking about for years and years.”

Photo courtesy of Darren Keith

Keith, whose sense of humor does not need to be proved anymore, likes to joke about it now. But the process he has been through to put out the series has been a long, tedious and exhausting one. “What was the most challenging part of it? Every part of it!” he laughs.

“I have always been a musician; it was the first time I ever acted, the first time I ever produced a show, the first time I ever wrote a script. It has taken a couple of years to get to this point, just because I had to learn everything, and start from scratch. It was like being thrown into a pool without knowing how to swim at all: you just got to figure it out quickly! I think you learn, either from a positive or negative perspective. You learn something from the entire process. And trust me, there were a lot of negative things, a lot of crazy things happened!”

From parting ways with his producer, having to cancel the shoot two days before it was supposed to be done, or going through marathon editing sessions of dozens of hours, to switching shooting location no less than four times, Keith has been through a lot. Was it all worth it?

“It has been a total roller coaster ride. But would I change anything? I don’t know, because I am happy where I am at right now with the show. You have to kind of take the good with the bad. You learn some lessons along the way, and those things happen for a reason.”

After years of hard work – and countless sleepless nights, Keith finally made it. DK the Gig’s pilot premiered this weekend, and he can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. He has a hard time containing his excitement about being able to share his work, at very long last.

“Oh my God, I just want to be done with it! I just want it out of my system. This is a very personal and profound thing for me, even though it is a comedy, because of having thought about doing something like this for my whole life, but never having done that. I had that feeling, ‘I either do something about it or I take this to the grave’.  After all that I have gone through to get to this point, Saturday is the result of all that. There will be a lot of relief.”

Stay tuned on https://www.facebook.com/DKthegig/ for the latest updates about DK the Gig and Darren Keith’s projects.