Dan Rosenberg will be opening for himself when he comes to the Funny Farm Comedy Club on Oct. 9.

It’s a lot of Rosenberg.

Before the Beaver Falls, Pa., native performs, he will screen the pilot for the television series he wrote and stars in called “It’s a Lot.”

“We show it, we show the blooper reel right after it, and then I just come out, and I’ve got three or four stories, you know, about the filming of it … and kind of tie it into my act,” Rosenberg said during a telephone interview. “Then I do another 15, 20 minutes of my act, and then we do a Q&A. The Q&As are actually the most fun, because every time we’ve done a screening, we get a question that I’ve never heard before.”

Rosenberg, 55, grew up in a funny family but never considered standup comedy until one of his college instructors encouraged him to use his sense of humor to get over his fear of public speaking. He quickly discovered that talking in front of people wasn’t so bad when they were laughing.

After a year of doing comedy in Pittsburgh, he decided to go to Los Angeles in 1993 to “get famous.” After the earthquake the following year, Rosenberg decided Pittsburgh looked pretty good. An unexpected side benefit of his return home is that he now could be billed as a “L.A. comic,” which helped his bookings.

He moved to Orlando, Fla., in 1997, New Orleans a couple years after that and back to southern California before settling on an island near Seattle, where he’s lived since 2009.

The pilot the audience will see next week is far different than what he first conceived in the mid ’90s.

“I was like, ‘I don’t need LA. I’m going to do a Pittsburgh-based sitcom, and I’ll find local investors, and we’ll just buy air time on one of the local stations,”’ Rosenberg said. “I love Donnie Iris. I went to high school with his daughter. He actually played at our prom. And I’m like, ‘You know what? I’m gonna write a sitcom called ‘Love Is Like a Rock’ about this guy who can’t get over this girl named Leah, based on the (Iris) song, ‘Ah, Leah.’ So I wrote this whole sitcom idea. Of course, it was horrible.”

Years later he and a friend took dates to see Rick Springfield in concert.

“They ran down to the front of the stage, and he takes his shirt off. This was when he was in his 50s. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this guy’s so old. He’s old enough to be my dad, but he’s hot and women are going for him.’ Wait a minute, that’s a sitcom idea, because the dads on sitcoms are always overweight and bald. What if the kid’s overweight and bald but the dad’s skinny and has a nice head of hair?

“That’s where the concept came from. I was too lazy to write a brand new script, so I took my old ‘Love Is Like a Rock’ script and kind of merged it and added this character of the hot dad.”

The script got another rewrite during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the post #MeToo era, they realized the dad as originally written was a bit slimy and unlikable.

“He was always stealing my girlfriend and hitting on every woman. And Rick was in his 70s. No one wants to see a 70-year-old guy hitting on 20- and 30-year-old women.”

In the current version, Rosenberg plays an unhappy used car salesman still pining for Leah, the woman who got away. His father is a well-known rock star, but six failed marriages have left him still better looking but not much better off financially than his son.

The pilot was shot in 2023 and originally ran about 35 minutes. Rosenberg pared it down to less than 23 minutes after test screenings and on the advice of his executive producer Barry Katz, a producer and former talent manager who helped launch the careers of such comedy stars as Dave Chappelle, Louis CK, Bill Burr, Mark Maron, Wanda Sykes, Dane Cook and Darrell Hammond.

One person who ended up on the cutting room floor is 1980s pop star Tiffany, who played Rosenberg’s ex Leah in a dream sequence that originally opened the pilot. When they were sitting with the editor following one of the test screenings, Katz suggested starting the pilot with Rosenberg waking up.

“He said, ‘Just delete everything before that.’ It’s like three-and-a-half minutes. The whole opening scene gone. He goes, ‘Trust me.’ And the next time we showed it, people didn’t know that scene wasn’t there, and the pacing and everything was better. That scene was just clunky.”

When their initial efforts to sell the pilot didn’t attract significant interest, they decided to go the film festival route.

So far “It’s a Lot” has won best TV pilot at the Los Angeles Comedy Festival and Indianapolis Independent Film Festival and awards at the Portland and Georgia comedy festivals and the Seattle Filmmaker Awards. Two days after Rosenberg’s Funny Farm appearance, it will screen at the SOHO International Film Festival in New York City.

Rosenberg said they’re hoping the festival success will generate more interest. If not, they might proceed on their own.

“The networks aren’t really in charge anymore,” he said. “They can still put a show on the air and pay you a lot of money. But if you can build a fan base online, there’s so many small streamers and all these little TV networks now like Tubi and Roku … they just want content. So if we don’t find a home for it, hopefully we can maybe find another group of investors and do five more episodes and have a nice little six-episode season. You shoot that next spring, and then shop that — ‘Hey, Netflix, here’s a completed show. All six episodes are done. So there’s no expense to you, just a licensing fee. Give it a try.’ And if not, we can always go the YouTube route.”

If you go …

WHO: Dan Rosenberg and screening of the television pilot “It’s a Lot.”

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Oct. 9

WHERE: Funny Farm Comedy Club, 1201 Youngstown-Warren Road, Niles

HOW MUCH: $25 reserved and $22.50 general admission and are available online at funnyfarmcomedyclub.com and by calling 330-759-HAHA.