Dawan Owens

hahaha@dawanowens.com / www.dawanowens.com

Growing up on the West side of Baltimore wasn't easy for Dawan Owens. As a result of his parents' divorce, Dawan was forced to assert his independence at a very early age. In fact, by the time he was in the second grade, he was routinely catching a bus across town all by himself. Dawan quickly learned that he had to find creative ways to deal with the everyday struggles of growing up in West Baltimore. "I wasn't a fighter, so I tried to crack jokes to make people forget that they wanted to beat me up. If that didn't work I gave away packs of Now and Laters (had to be Apple) in exchange for keeping my life."

Vowing that she would not let her son get caught up with the gangs and violence plaguing their community, Dawan's mother moved him and his older sister to the suburbs of Baltimore County (the summer before he entered junior high). "I went from a school that was 99% black to a school that was 98% Jewish…You should have seen their faces the first day of school. They had a look on their faces like WOW, we may actually win some basketball games this year. "

By high school, Dawan had perfected the art of using jokes and silly antics to disguise his shyness. "People used to make fun of my birthmark, which really affected my self esteem," Dawan recalls. "But I couldn't let them see that, so I had to come back at them quick. When ripping on someone, the person with the quickest and harshest comeback usually won. I wanted people to fear ripping on me, so I would just go at them as hard as I could. Mothers, fathers, handicapped brothers... nothing was off limits for me."

A stand-out on his high school football and baseball teams, Dawan walked on to the University of Pittsburgh's football team, and later joined their baseball team. "When people ask me if I played football in college, I ask them to define what they mean by 'play.' If playing means being on the team, then oh yeah, I played. But if by 'play', they mean participation in an actual intercollegiate athletic event - if they want to get all technical - I plead the fifth."

After graduating from Pitt, Dawan began working in Corporate America for an IT consulting firms. But he soon realized that comedy was his true calling, so he decided to pick up a mic and go after his dream. Since then, standing at six feet four inches, Dawan for some reason has never had a problem commanding an audience's attention. He has worked with some of the funniest comics in the business: Ted Alexandro, David Alan Grier, Bobcat Goldthwait, Gary Owen to name a few. Dawan's comedy is a blend of clean, clever observations, political incorrectness and downright silliness, but no matter the topic, Dawan delivers it with a confidence that makes it almost impossible not to enjoy.

Upcoming Shows

Dawan keeps his calendar at www.dawanowens.com.

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