Last one on.
Last one off.

Don Barris came to Los Angeles from Saginaw Township, Michigan, in the mid-1980s and has been a regular at The Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip ever since. The early years were lean. By his own telling, he lived in his car and slept backstage in the Main Room. He found his footing hosting the Store's Monday potluck open mic, which back then ran from seven at night until two in the morning.

In 1992 he created The Ding Dong Show in the Belly Room, a show Mitzi Shore named herself. It is part panel show and part late-night variety hour, built around a cast of the Store's most colorful characters with Don as ringmaster. More than three decades later it still runs every Monday and is the longest-running show in the club's history. It was featured in Showtime's 2020 docuseries The Comedy Store.

That same year he met an open-mic hopeful named Perry Caravello. With Walter “Mole” Molinski, the three became The Big 3, first on L.A. public-access TV with Simply Don the Public Access Program, then on Comedy Central. Windy City Heat (2003), directed by Bobcat Goldthwait and produced by Jimmy Kimmel, Adam Carolla and Daniel Kellison, convinced Perry he was starring in a detective movie. Don co-wrote it with Tony Barbieri and Kimmel and played the gangster Big Lou. The film became a cult object, and The Big 3 carried on with a podcast from 2010 to 2015.

Kimmel hired Don as his audience warm-up on Win Ben Stein's Money, then The Man Show, then Jimmy Kimmel Live!, where he warmed up crowds for years. He still closes The Comedy Store at night. He runs the Simply Don the Podcast Network on YouTube and Twitch, and he has turned up on Kill Tony, WTF with Marc Maron, Ari Shaffir's Skeptic Tank and Felipe Esparza's What's Up Fool?

Ask him about the business and he'll tell you the biggest mistake new comics make is fake confidence that's really just insecurity. He told a 2015 interviewer the first cut of Windy City Heat ran twelve hours.