OG: Approved - Tony Dabas
Featuring the Next Generation of Storytellers Rising from the Creator Economy
Welcome to OG: Approved—where rule-breaking creators shape the future. Hand-picked by Open Gardens, they’re not following the playbook—they’re writing the next one.
Name: Tony Dabas
Instagram: 454K Followers
Youtube: 13.4K Subscribers
Tik Tok: 185.1K Followers
Who Is Tony Dabas?
Tony Dabas, known as Tony D, is a New York stand-up from Staten Island who has been working rooms for over a decade and quietly built a serious online following along the way.
The social presence did not come first. The stage did. He started grinding New York clubs and open mics in the early 2010s, and that live-room muscle still shows. The characters he plays online do not feel like digital inventions. They feel like people who existed long before the camera was turned on.
One week he is the guy in Arkansas who just won the Powerball. Another week he is every Florida HOA manager who treats grill usage like a criminal offense. He plays a Florida pool cleaner who thinks his rap career is inevitable, a construction guy who negotiates everything including tone, and a wise guy who owns a comedy club and runs it like a personal kingdom. The through line is not ethnicity or gimmick. It is behavior. Each character believes in themselves a little too much, and that certainty drives the comedy.
Tony draws from multiple cultural lanes. Arab-American family dynamics show up often, but so does Italian-American bravado and outer-borough New York energy. He moves between them naturally, not as costume changes but as variations on voices he understands. The dialogue has the rhythm of real argument. People interrupt, people double down and no one concedes.
The stand-up career matters because the internet is not the finish line. The clips create recognition, and that recognition fills clubs in across the country.
He has collaborated with the Scarlotta brothers and other comics operating in the same New York ecosystem, and those crossovers feel like shared territory rather than audience swapping. The tone aligns. The worlds overlap.
Over time what stands out is steadiness. The framing is tight. The production is stripped down. The voice stays intact. He is not reinventing himself for every trend cycle. He is refining a sensibility and letting the audience grow around it.
The internet may introduce you to the character.
The stage is where you see if it lasts..
Three Things We Love About Tony Dabas
The characters feel observed, not manufactured: There’s a difference between writing something for the algorithm and writing something because you’ve actually seen it play out in real life. His work falls in the second category. The arguments stretch in ways that feel familiar. The confidence feels earned. The laughs come from recognition, not from a twist designed to spike engagement.
He’s building a universe, not chasing a bit: Even when the characters change, the world stays consistent. Same sensibility. Same social logic. Same kind of power dynamics in the room. It starts to feel like you’re watching different people from the same neighborhood, not a creator trying on a new costume every week. That consistency is why the audience sticks around, because they’re following the voice as much as any one character.
Commits to the bit: There’s no smirk. No wink to camera. When he’s in a character, he stays there. He doesn’t step outside it to remind you it’s a joke. That commitment is what makes the escalation work. A lot of online comedy collapses because the creator can’t resist undercutting their own bit. Tony doesn’t rush to break it. He lets the character hang themselves with their own logic.
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