Will Durst

In 2016, he updated his Elect to Laugh show and has performed a Post-Trump one-man show called Durst Case Scenario every Tuesday at the Marsh (a theater complex in San Francisco) since July. He has also taken the show to many Northern California theaters and venues in Wisconsin, Washington, Nevada, and Colorado. He is now working on an updated version of the show called Durst Case Scenario: Midterm Madness.

Will premiered his one-man show The All-American Sport of BiPartisan Bashing"at the New World Stages Off Broadway in New York City August 2007 to rave reviews from both the New York Times and the New York Post. In 2012 he premiered his one-man show focused on the presidential election, Elect to Laugh, which ran for 41 weeks at the San Francisco Marsh Theater. In 2013, Durst wrote a show based on being an aging baby boomer called BoomeRaging: From LSD to OMG. Since then, he has performed it in over 50 different cities, mostly in Northern California.

On February 24, 2000, Durst was used as a phone-a-friend lifeline on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire by contestant Rudy Reber. The question, worth $500,000, was "Which Hollywood figure directed Michael Jackson's 1988 video Bad?". After hearing the choices, Durst said "Landis," as in director John Landis. Reber locked it in as his final answer, which was wrong. (Martin Scorsese was the correct answer). As a result, Reber's winnings plummeted from $250,000 to $32,000, a loss of $218,000. Host Regis Philbin later explained that Landis directed the music video for Jackson's earlier 1984 song "Thriller". Durst later wrote an article for TV Guide on the incident.

His pilot A Year's Worth with Will Durst was nominated for a CableACE Award after airing on the A&E network on New Year's Eve in 1994, but was never picked up.

He has performed at events featuring Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Al Gore. He also performs stand up comedy at many events as a keynote speaker including a Governors Conference and a Mayors Convention. He was a correspondent for The Comedy Channel during the 1992 political conventions. His humor and commentaries emphasize his view of illogical and absurd aspects of politics, leadership, and human behavior. In 1987 he ran for mayor of San Francisco.

Durst has written 3 books, including Elect to Laugh and The All-American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing. He has also released 5 audio recordings, None of the Above, You Can't Make Stuff Up Like This, Warning, Raging Moderate and Elect to Laugh, the last 2 on the Stand-Up Records label. Along with Larry "Bubbles" Brown and Johnny Steele he is one of the titular characters in the feature documentary 3 Still Standing directed by Robert Campos and Donna LoCicero, which focuses on the San Francisco comedy scene of the late 1980s and beyond.

He started performing stand-up comedy at a weekly open mic at a bar in downtown Milwaukee called the Rusty Nail in 1974. He also gained onstage experience performing with various sketch groups such as "Same Player Shoots Again,' "Better Than a Sharp Stick in the Eye," and "Will Jon Rip Marian?" After studying with famed director Paul Sills in Milwaukee for two years at the Century Hall theater complex, Durst moved to San Francisco in 1979.

Will Durst (born March 18, 1952) is an American political satirist; he has been called a modern mix of Mort Sahl and Will Rogers.