On Friday night, in the premiere of his appealingly chaotic livestreaming variety show “Everybody’s in L.A.,” which runs every night this week, John Mulaney delivered a monologue about his adopted city next to a map that broke it down into a crooked jigsaw puzzle of neighborhoods.
In his distinctive staccato cadence that could sell steak knives or a card trick as convincingly as the premise of a joke, he said, “One thing that unites every part of Los Angeles is that no matter where you go, there is zero sense of community.”
For comedy fans, this past week felt different, because everywhere you went in Los Angeles, Netflix was there, blanketing the city in ads and shows for its Netflix Is a Joke Fest, running through May 12. It’s the biggest comedy showcase of the year (with more than 500 offerings, a 40 percent increase from the festival’s already mammoth debut event in 2022) but also something of a corporate flex. Who else could get Hannah Gadsby and Shane Gillis in the same festival or draw the talk-show titans Jon Stewart and David Letterman to host events? Or recruit Chris Rock to play the Billy Crystal role in a reading of the screenplay for “When Harry Met Sally,” with, as Rock introduced it, “an all-Black cast, like it was originally intended.” (Tracee Ellis Ross doing Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm, but louder, received standing ovations from the audience and onstage participants, too.)
The most newsworthy shift this year was the aggressive move into livestreaming events, following the blockbuster success of Chris Rock’s 2023 special, “Selective Outrage,” about being slapped at the Oscars. (One of that ceremony’s hosts, Wanda Sykes, returned to the place it happened, the Dolby Theater, for a festival show and began by saying this time no one would get assaulted).
For the live events, Netflix picked stars with current buzz. Along with the Mulaney variety show, Katt Williams followed up his viral “Club Shay Shay” interview with a new hour, “Woke Foke,” on Saturday, and Kevin Hart, whom Williams singled out in his interview for criticism, tried to bring back the dormant genre of celebrity roast on Sunday with “The Greatest Roast of All Time,” starring Tom Brady, widely considered the GOAT of quarterbacks. (After livestreaming, the shows can be watched on Netflix, sometimes in edited form.)
As the last half-century of “Saturday Night Live” has proved, there is an undeniable excitement to live comedy, an irreplaceable energy that can create a sense of event. But there are significant dangers, not the least of which is that you can’t cut the boring or unfunny parts. Netflix built its comedy empire on elevating the standup special as an art form to rival film or TV. Highlighting live comedy represents a commercial move for Netflix, spotlighting events that promise unpredictability more than refinement, mess instead of polish.
You saw both sides over the weekend.
In a revealing new interview for “My Next Guest With David Letterman,” released last week, Mulaney said that his favorite project ever was “The Sack Lunch Bunch,” a variety show for kids. His love for the form is evident on this new show, an even more anything-goes production that feels a little bit like a rollicking cable-access show from the 1980s, but with famous people.
“We’re only doing six episodes, so the show will never hit its groove,” Mulaney said early in the premiere.
This isn’t just setting expectations. It’s part of the charm. The start of every talk or variety show has problems, but it also tends to be when the most interesting and experimental work happens. And while Mulaney organized the first episode around coyotes, the show does not stick closely to a theme, and its structure here was very loose.
There was a long and aimless interview with the singer-songwriter Ray J, a disruptive appearance by Will Ferrell having a ball playing the music producer Lou Adler, a spoof of “House Hunters” with a battalion of comedians (including Chelsea Peretti and Stavros Halkias), and guest appearances by a coyote expert and Jerry Seinfeld. Mulaney also took live phone calls from Los Angeles residents, including a woman talking about microdosing. The whole thing was bonkers.
What held it together was a certain 1970s showbiz mood and Mulaney himself, who has the alien confidence, affect and skills of a talk-show host from an older showbiz era. Dressed in a slick brown suit and tie, he anchored the show with an outsider’s attitude that teased a highly specific insider perspective. In a historical interlude, he joked: “The city of Los Angeles was officially founded in 1842 as a place for improv students to go hiking.”
In an interview with The New York Times, Katt Williams said that he had plotted out many of his answers in his “Club Shay Shay” podcast appearance, a window into his unique skill set. Who else could make such pinpoint beef-starting seem so off the cuff? The popularity of that interview shadowed his new special, which struggles to live up to expectations of his previous score-settling.
He referenced his new fame upfront, pointed to his reputation for telling secrets and reminded the audience that there’s a chance he could get in more trouble than usual for saying the wrong thing.
And yet, he seemed more guarded here. The title “Woke Foke” suggests he would talk about wokeness much more than he did. While he suggested to The Times that he might joke about Israel, he didn’t mention it. In a theme of this festival, he poked fun at the ages of Joe Biden and Donald J. Trump. (Of the three comics I saw who brought this up, only Sykes said she was sick of hearing about the president’s being old.) Williams got off a decent Nick Cannon joke — comparing the size of his family to that of Abraham — and another on Ozempic. (“They said Oprah took so much that Gayle lost 12 pounds.”)
Williams can make so-so material sing better than just about anyone, with a musical cadence that shifts rhythm and volume so dramatically that you don’t need to understand English to be entertained. What came through here more than usual was the optimism of a comic whose worldview mixes dark conspiratorial musings with the upbeat bromides of a pep talk. He can be a bracing critic of this country but also repeatedly described it as the greatest in the world. In such a wonderful place, he said, 50,000 people kill themselves every year. He marveled at that fact, adding: “Not one of them was the right one.”
The roast of Tom Brady had more punchlines than the other two live events put together. Nikki Glaser’s dynamite set alone was an absolute highlight that laid waste to everyone onstage. At times, the retired Patriots quarterback, about to enter broadcasting, looked more dazed after jokes about his ex-wife’s romance with her jiu-jitsu instructor than he did after a sack. This was part of the vulgar, boozy fun of the show. Kim Kardashian got booed. When Jeff Ross told a joke about the owner Robert Kraft visiting prostitutes, Brady got up and whispered that he should not say that again, which got picked up by the microphone.
Hart tried to keep the event moving, but a few of Brady’s former teammates, especially Rob Gronkowski, rambled tediously, making loud, dumb jokes that suggested what it’s like to be an outsider in an N.F.L. locker room after a game.
The three-hour roast will be catnip to die-hard N.F.L. fans, especially revenge sets by Drew Bledsoe (whom Brady famously replaced as quarterback) and the coach Bill Belichick (whom he butted heads with). Ferrell showed up again here, this time as Ron Burgundy from “Anchorman,” and Giants fans will love how he goosed the crowd into mocking Brady for losing to Eli Manning, who got in another lick on X.
In far too many of these sets, you could feel the presence of the teleprompter. You don’t go to a roast to see people read. And there was easily an hour of weak material that could have been cut. But watching noncomedians tell jokes off teleprompters is instructive.
Brady clearly prepared and adopted a heightened version of the character that others already ascribe to him, that of the arrogant, aloof jerk. It sort of worked for him. Not so much for Ben Affleck, a Boston fan whose train wreck of a set aimed for a cartoonish attack on fans who criticize the quarterback but felt real and mirthless.
It reminded me of a joke in another festival show, by Kumail Nanjiani. He began by making it clear that he was a stand-up who went on to act for years and was now returning to comedy, not, he insisted, an actor doing standup. Then he flashed a look of horror. “I’d rather be known as a pedophile,” he said.
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