Dan Avidan

Leigh Daniel Avidan, known professionally as, and prefers to be called, Dan Avidan and by his stage name Danny Sexbang, is an American musician, internet personality, singer-songwriter, comedian, and actor, although he doesn't consider himself one.

Early Life

Dan was born on March 14, 1979, and raised in Springfield, NJ as an Ashkenazi Jew. Now he is non practicing and is also agnotic. He is the elder of two children from Debra Schwartz and Avigdor Avidan. His father was born and raised in Israel, and served in the Yom Kippur War before immigrating to America where he met Avidan's mother. His younger sister, Dana Avidan Cohn, is the executive style director of PopSugar. His maternal grandfather, Bernard Schwartz, assisted in inventing the body electrode.


After graduating from Jonathan Dayton High School in 1997, Avidan pursued advertising at Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts. In his freshman year of college he was moved out of his dorm by administration for “threatening a student” when he and his friend Greg hung their study friend Kelly’s Kermit the Frog doll from the ceiling fan with a noose made of socks, put the fan on slow rotation and wrote on the whiteboard “It’s not easy being green.” He eventually entered a student exchange program during his senior year of college, attending a Tufts University satellite campus in Talloires, France to study botany.

Music

Ninja Sex Party's Music
In response to a Craigslist ad in late 2002, Avidan joined the indie rock band The Northern Hues, a Philadelphia-based group composed of Aron Brand, Jeff Rains, Alex Yaker, Justin Earley, and Ian Creech. Avidan acted as the group's lead singer, and provided most of the band's lyrics, having recently moved to Philadelphia. They released one self-titled EP and one live track recorded in early 2005, at World Cafe Live in Philadelphia. In mid-2005, the band split up; Avidan attributes the separation to personality conflicts and creative differences between the band’s members, as well as a collective inability to gain greater recognition and success.

In the winter of 2006, Avidan teamed up with Peter Lennox to form a Brooklyn-based alternative rock duo named Skyhill. Again, Avidan acted as lead singer and lyricist, and the group released one full album, Run With The Hunted, on May 16, 2007. They toured New York in early 2008, before eventually separating due to differences. On October 7, 2015, Avidan and Lennox returned to release the single "Firefly", acclaimed for the band's "maturing in both lyrics and sound" over their previous album. Avidan has stated that Skyhill may start new projects in the future, but as of July 2018, nothing has been announced, nor is in the works.

In 2008, Avidan began studying storytelling and improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York, under the guidance of Zach Woods and Margot Leitman, and had conceptualized the possibility of a new musical project. In need of another band member, Avidan was introduced to Brian Wecht, the musical director of another troupe, by mutual friends at the theatre in early 2009.

Avidan had already chosen the name "Ninja Sex Party," after "everybody's three favorite things," and worked together with Wecht to create characters to represent the band. They eventually settled on "Danny Sexbang" as Avidan's character, and "Ninja Brian" as Wecht's. The duo first gained popularity by performing as a musical guest on Leitman's improvisational comedy show Stripped Stories. Inspired by The Lonely Island and Flight of the Conchords, the band is about "a Jewish superhero who wears a unitard, with his best friend who's a ninja, and together they sing songs about dicks, and try to hit unsuccessfully on women."

The group has released several studio albums and singles, many of the latter of which have charted on Billboard. As of 2018, they have released four studio albums: NSFW, Strawberries and Cream, Attitude City, and Cool Patrol, two cover albums: Under the Covers, Vol. I and Under the Covers, Vol. II, and are producing a third cover album, Under the Covers, Vol. III. On September 17, 2018, the band, along with another musical group named Tupper Ware Remix Party, performed a censored version of their song "Danny Don't You Know" on the late-night talk show Conan as a musical guest, making their first live television debut.

The band has also appeared in various film festivals, including SXSW, Dragon Con, the now-defunct LACS. The band has gone on 2 seperate tours in venues all around the U.S, the first being the Rock Hard tour in 2017 and the Tour de Force in 2018. And they have released 40 music videos on YouTube, the most recent being for their song Danny Don't You Know. The video featured actor Finn Wolfhard, known from Stranger Things, as a younger Danny Sexbang.

Youtube

Game Grumps Youtube Channel

In mid-2013, Jon Jafari left his position as co-host of the Let's Play webseries Game Grumps. Arin Hanson, co-creator of Game Grumps, brought Avidan on to replace Jafari as co-host, after being introduced to Ninja Sex Party's content by fellow animator Ross O'Donovan. Avidan would also join O'Donovan as co-host of the Game Grumps spin-off show Steam Train, where both hosts play PC games, as opposed to console games. Avidan has remained the co-host of the show since. In addition to this, Avidan has acted as a co-host of other shows from the Game Grumps platform, including Grumpcade, Table Flip, and Steam Rolled, as well as providing narration for Hunting Monsters.

In late 2013, Avidan teamed up with Wecht and Hanson to announce a side project band named Starbomb, with Avidan as the lead singer. The band writes parody songs about video games, bringing together the sexually provocative music stylings of Avidan's Ninja Sex Party and the video game-based humor of Hanson. As of 2018, the group has released two albums, both of which have placed on various Billboard charts.

In 2015, Internet personalities Jesse Cox and Michele Morrow began developing an untitled comedy webseries for YouTube Premium, casting Avidan in a lead acting role as eSports coach Alex Taylor, alongside Hanson's character, Ryland Smith. After Dan Harmon joined as an executive producer in 2016, the project gained media traction, and was formally announced at VidCon 2017 with the title Good Game. Six serialized episodes were uploaded to the Game Grumps YouTube channel, with the first episode being free-to-view, and concurrent episodes requiring a YouTube Premium subscription. Avidan's performance was well-received by critics, cited as "truly fun, believable," and "[shining] a light on the potential of other projects."