Take My Company, Please!
from May/June 2003
by Tripp Whetsell
Performances on a recent Monday night at Caroline’s, the New York City comedy club, began with a half-dozen potty-mouthed twentysomethings in T-shirts. Then David Moore, 47, bounded onstage in a suit and tie. “I’m a businessman,” he told the packed house. “I had to be. Look at me!” He got a big laugh.
Nor was he speaking with forked tongue. Over the years Moore has performed his standup comedy act the way other corporate types play golf—somewhat addictively, he concedes, and making time for it between running his own business and serving on various boards.
Much of his act revolves around today’s scandals, and not all of the jokes are repeatable here. But some are. “Boards all across America have had problems. Tyco, Enron, WorldCom. The only guy who’s benefited is Bill Gates. A year ago the Justice Department only cared that he was too powerful. Now it’s finally figured out that making too much money is not nearly as bad as faking it.”
How did his business associates react when they first heard the news of his other life? It got a laugh. “They thought it was about as funny as Donald Trump dating a woman his own age,” he says. What Caroline’s pays him is a bit of a joke, too. He makes $20 a night.
The Harvard Business School grad has two daytime gigs that help make ends meet. He’s chairman and CEO of Garden State Brickface, Windows & Siding Inc., which he bought in 1992 and turned into one of the country’s largest remodeling companies, and chairman of Sonostar Ventures, an investment firm in Chappaqua, New York, that he founded five years ago. Moore has also worked at putting various mergers-and-acquisitions deals together, including Metropolitan Life’s 1996 sale of its Century 21 Real Estate to HFS Inc., later Cendant. His past boardroom stints include time with U.S. Home Systems, but he quit the last of his public-company directorships a year ago. He still serves on five nonprofit boards, including that of the City Parks Foundation in New York.
Moore says the business side of his life “gives me energy for comedy, and vice versa.” He is writing a book (Leading With Laughter) and checking out openings on the lecture circuit.
So far, he has no plans to quit his day jobs.
