David Liebe Hart

61-year old David Liebe Hart is an actor, a comedian, a ventriloquist, and an artist. The earnest performer is as eager to sing the unironic praises of Betty White (whom he praises in song) as he is to tell kids to stay in school and stay focused.

He’ll also tell you that he was abducted by aliens and was raped by a polar bear.

Hart, who’ll be appearing at Songbyrd on Thursday night, claims that he auditioned for The Andy Griffith Show and was picked to play Opie’s black best friend, but that his mother didn’t want her son to be a child actor. After moving to Los Angeles in the ‘70s, he was an extra on shows like Good Times, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Golden Girls.

Does any of his story check out? At least one piece seems to: a clip from Good Times shows an end-credit sequence with a group of extras, among them a man who indeed looks like Hart.

On the surface, Hart comes off like an outsider artist; look at the cable access show he hosted with a strange panda puppet. There are other Christian ventriloquists, but there is no one like David Liebe Hart. Bits like “Father and Son” play on an uncomfortable family dynamic, but he (or his video editor) reveals a keen sense of comic timing.

The performer has become a favorite on the Tim and Eric show. Having also championed the likes of Tommy Wiseau, they seem to have a fondness for the sincere outsider. But is this more than just a persona? At one point in our discussion, Hart brought up Neil Hamburger, the Bosrcht-belt comic persona created by Gregg Turkington. Is David Liebe Hart a creation of David Liebe Hart?

It’s hard to tell how much of Hart’s personality is delusion and how much is an act, and at moments during our conversation, I start to worry that he is being exploited. But is he exploiting himself for attention?

Hart’s publicist-collaborator Jonah Mociun tells me in an email that, “David wants and needs someone like me or Tim & Eric to help him connect with people, make a living, and have a livelihood, and even though it can be very exasperating working with him, I get a lot out of our relationship too. As a musician and visual artist it’s very cool for me to collaborate with David because he’s open to my ideas, has a large following to appreciate our creations, and I feel like we’re presenting unique and challenging entertainment that pushes boundaries.”

Mociun has worked closely with Hart for two years, but even he isn’t always sure where the character ends and the man begins. “It’s very strange the way he blurs fantasy and reality, and what he actually believes is sometimes a mystery to me. As far as his mental state, I’ll just say that he’s the strangest man I’ve ever met, and I don’t completely understand what’s going on in his head. He tends to exaggerate or distort the truth to an extreme, and I’m often not sure whether he believes what he’s saying or not.”

Our conversation with Hart may best be shared in selected highlights.

From Hart’s website

DCist: Tell me about Bigfoot.

David Liebe Hart: I had a weird experience. I was fishing with my dad at the Douglas River when I as a kid in Michigan. This huge thing that looked like a monkey came out of the water and broke my dad’s fishing line. We were scared and ran back to the tent where we were staying. Another Bigfoot was there and took our food and destroyed our tent and everything.

I had experiences with a reptile ghost. I had a lot of fish tanks. When my parents moved to Park Forest Illinois (that’s where I was abducted by extraterrestrials), that’s where I saw a frog ghost. I belonged to the 4-H club of Wisconsin as a child. I forgot to feed my frogs and they died in the fish tank. I told my sister to feed it but she didn’t. Then this huge green frog appeared before me and said, “Why didn’t you feed me? Why didn’t you take care of me? You used to feed me every night. You used to sing songs to me like you cared about me and now you don’t care about me at all !”I told the frog I was sorry and he just stared at me and was very upset. It was like something out of Alice in Wonderland.

DCist: Do you have any pets today?

Hart: I do. I have four sharks. I went to the Filipino pet store and they sold me some sharks. One is a hammerhead. I have one piranha and four sharks. They eat minnows.

DCist: Do you have any theories about comedy?

Hart: I make comedy about natural things that people can relate to, like politics, like different people I know and different food people eat. I make comedy about everyday things that happen to people. I joked about the horrible transportation in Los Angeles. [in voice] ”Los Angeles is like Heinz Ketchup. You have to wait three hours for a bus and it doesn’t catchup!” Now the MTA, they don’t know how to run transportation, they’re in competition with snails and turtles that have to wait for them.

DCist: Tell me about polar bears.

Hart: I was going camping with my dad. We canoed all the way to Alaska. It was very scary. I was ice fishing with my dad. We had taken a boat all the way from Michigan to Alaska and we saw big ships push aside our small boat. I was on the ice and this huge polar bear came up to me and it looked like to was going to eat me. Luckily it was a lady polar bear so I got raped by a polar bear. Because it made the polar bear feel so good, it didn’t eat me up.

[This story changes; in another interview (NSFW) , he explains this happened when he was stationed in Greenland, and it was a male polar bear. Mociun told me later that Hart admits this story is not true.]

DCist: Do you plan to do any sightseeing when you’re in Washington?

Hart: I need one of my fans to drive me around to restaurants. And drive me to a train hobby shop. And to drop off my sheet music to different churches in the area – I write contemporary Christian music. Me and Jonah are single, so if there are any single women out there who are sincere and not flakes, I’m looking for a girlfriend to spend some quality time.

David Liebe Hart performs at Songbyrd Music House on Thursday, May 16. Supporting acts will be Cartoon Weapons and Jack on Fire. Doors open at 7:30, show starts at 8:30. Tickets $10 in advance, $12 at the door.