This Is What Daniel Tosh Was Doing Before Comedy

Daniel Tosh can be found these days standing in front of a green screen, starring in several old standup routines on YouTube, or standing on a stage with a microphone in hand. All with the purpose of drawing laughs from his friends. He's had his controversies in the past, but he also found success with Tosh.0 and much less success as an executive producer for a show we all could've lived without. We're not going to say which show that is exactly, but it might rhyme with "Tickle Terry." You know the one.

Anyway, Tosh.0 ran from 2009 until 2020, when it was announced the show would be canceled. That means Tosh was barely over 30 when he was broadcast to millions of teenagers who would use his style of humor to horrify their parents. There wasn't a whole lot of time between college and fame in the comedian's life, but somehow, Tosh managed to find time for a few things before getting into comedy. Those things were pretty mundane in the overall scope of things, except when they were scams. "It's sad that telling potty jokes in smoky bars for the past 15 years of my life has been the most honorable thing I've ever done," Tosh admits.

Before chasing his dream career of being a professional jokester, Daniel Tosh did what every other confused young person does: he pursued a degree in marketing. As Tosh says in an interview with The Cornell Daily Sun, he only went to a single job interview after graduating. It was for a marketing firm, and he fell asleep during an intro video. The job world as a whole wasn't a great fit for Tosh, as it goes for most creatives. Writers, comedians, artists, they just aren't cut out for boring office work. It provides no material.

Tosh worked at a slew of places in that short period of adulthood where he wasn't a professional comedian, and a lot of those jobs, in Tosh's words, were "a bunch of scams." Okay, okay. He does admit to waiting tables, which is solid work, and a short stint at a Best Buy, but there's not much more than that. His two most prominent jobs are the ones that annoy the crap out of everyone. Telemarketing and door-to-door sales. Why these jobs exist, no one knows. Tosh's time telemarketing amounts to little more than telling blatant lies, and his door-to-door knife selling wasn't a whole lot better. Though, as far as scams go, that one might be his fault. He admits to giving one large presentation in his college dorm and collecting signatures so it looked like he did a whole lot of work. But hey, he got paid.