The Big Fat Party Animal has been both a stock character and a known career path in American comedy for at least three generations. John Belushi provided an early example in “Animal House,” playing a frat brother whose heroic drinking and recalcitrant manners paralleled the persona Belushi had established in real life. Rodney Dangerfield went B.F.P.A. in “Caddyshack” and subsequent slobs-versus-snobs films of his Hawaiian-shirt era, while John Candy brought a gentle sadness to the archetype, the party animal without a party. And of course there was the heir to these past masters, Chris Farley, whose grasping enthusiasm and manic self-destruction brought the B.F.P.A. to its whirling apotheosis.
It was with this tradition in mind that I boarded the Stavros Halkias Dreamboat Tour bus on a windy April morning. We were in Farley’s hometown, Madison, Wis., where he was interred at the Resurrection Catholic Cemetery — a fact I noted aloud during the first natural pause in conversation. I admit that I had envisioned some telling reaction, and maybe even a graveside vigil that could be written up later. In the polite silence that followed, I realized Halkias did not aspire to join this lineage, and in fact hoped to escape it.
During an enthusiastically received performance at Madison’s Orpheum Theater that night, Halkias would joke that he had spent the past several years living each day “like the really good day you give a dog” before taking it to be euthanized. Now, at age 36 — three years older than Belushi and Farley ever got — he seemed to be thinking about his metaphorical appointment with the vet. Previous tours had exacted a nonzero cost in metabolic health, and his stated goal was to end this one weighing less than 300 pounds. He had committed to 10,000 steps every day, something he found most attainable first thing in the morning. So began a series of long walks.
That morning in Madison, we made it about 50 yards before a young man of college age stopped Halkias to say he loved him, an event I thought was kind of lucky from a reporting standpoint. In another half block or so, Halkias was recognized again. By the time we reached the trail along Lake Mendota that led to the University of Wisconsin, I realized that jotting down these interactions was like recording every time a bird flew overhead.
If you think you recognize Halkias, you probably do. At 5 feet 7 inches tall and about 300 pounds, he has a 95th-percentile body type that he does not try to hide. His wardrobe centers on loudly patterned shirts and European tracksuits. He is mostly bald above the eyebrows but lets what hair he has grow long, a look he complements with Dahmer-style aviator eyeglasses. His speech is loud and percussive, with the recognizable diphthongs of the Mid-Atlantic working class and enough Baltimore “eau” to make it particular. He sounds like how you would voice a cartoon that looked like him. There is also his laugh, which people often accuse him of faking, but which bursts forth so often that if it was ever an affectation, it seems to have become natural long ago. A high percentage of the people who approached him in Madison turned around after hearing this laugh.
His standard line in these walk-ups is “Appreciate you, brother.” It is an elegant solution, conveying gratitude while implicitly acknowledging the imbalance of the relationship — in which Halkias does not know his interlocutor, who in many cases knows an alarming amount about him — while minimizing that imbalance with a recognizable expression of shared humanity. The more I heard him say it, the more “Appreciate you, brother” seemed to encapsulate Halkias’s attitude toward his success, which he presented as inexplicable but lately seems more like the product of canny strategy.
As a stock character who amuses us by destroying himself, the Big Fat Party Animal makes an ideal friend and a suboptimal role model. This disjunction is in line with Aristotle’s description of the difference between tragedy and comedy: Tragedy is about important people, while comedy is about people of no consequence. A more cynical but also modern formulation of this idea is that tragedy is how we think of ourselves, while comedy is how we think of others. The B.F.P.A., with whom everyone wants to be friends but whom few people want to be, is particularly suited to the podcast-heavy comedy environment of the past decade, in which the social skill of being a good hang has been arguably more valuable than prepared jokes. This parasocial comedy environment got Halkias where he is today.
Where Halkias is today, quantitatively: the Dreamboat stand-up tour, which hit dozens of thousand-plus-capacity venues in 2025; a recurring role on the Netflix sitcom “Tires,” starring Shane Gillis; the “Stavvy’s World” podcast, currently among the top 50 most popular U.S. comedy podcasts on Spotify; the hourlong special “Stavros Halkias: Fat Rascal,” also on Netflix; and a featured role as a not-totally-competent police officer in the new Yorgos Lanthimos film, “Bugonia,” which opens nationwide Oct. 31.
These career milestones came after he left the podcast for which he was and perhaps still is best known, “Cum Town.” Halkias announced his departure from “Cum Town” in June 2022, at a time when it was intensely lucrative; even after the hosts stopped recording new episodes, the archives made six figures a month on Patreon for more than a year. Although its hosts consistently expressed left-leaning political views, “Cum Town,” as its name suggests, was often irreverent to the point of offending listeners whose politics ran toward cultural liberalism. At the same time, it attracted a hard core of committed fans who reveled in the same transgressive material. As the show’s audience became larger and more voluble, its success increasingly limited its hosts’ ability to do anything else. It was a classic golden-handcuffs situation, and Halkias slipped out when the cuffs were at their tightest.
It seemed like a questionable move at the time. In the intervening years, however, he has gone on to greater success, financially and otherwise. At the same time, the censorious atmosphere that made “Cum Town” a forbidden pleasure has dissipated. The Democratic Party is out of power, and its parallel cultural manifestation, whatever its exact contours may have been, exercises less influence on entertainment. As the cultural pendulum swings back through saying whatever and into simpering cruelty, Halkias has become a mascot for a political tendency — puerile and horny, but basically empathetic — that has many adherents but few public ambassadors. More than one person has suggested that he is the spokesman a faltering progressive movement needs, which is a lot to ask of your funny friend.
Exactly who composes the Stavros Halkias audience is a question that has recurred throughout his career. It flared up again last November, when a clip from his appearance on “This Past Weekend With Theo Von” — in which he explains to the host, a political autodidact, that large corporations and the wealthy do tend to favor right-wing politicians — went viral, prompting commenters to opine that he understood political communication in ways many professional Democrats did not. The same people may have reached different conclusions during the run of “Cum Town,” whose recurring characters included a Greek teenager named Molestrios whose gimmick is addressing his mother with misogynistic slurs.
It is true that Halkias expresses many views that contemporary American politics calls progressive. At the same time, his contempt for certain elements of the liberal consensus makes it unlikely he will get D.N.C. funding anytime soon. At his show in Madison, he described France and its people as “gay,” going on to compare their willingness to riot over reductions in their paid vacation with the general complacency of Americans, who are heavily armed but accept a health care system that lets their relatives die of treatable conditions. Jokes like these, which make him an uneasy fit with Democratic politics as they currently operate, continue the pattern of provocatively phrased leftism that he established during his years on “Cum Town.”
Created in 2016 by the comedian Nick Mullen, who hosted the show with Halkias and Adam Friedland, “Cum Town” became extremely popular with some segments of the online left. The hosts expressed support for trans rights, universal health care and the presidential candidacies of Bernie Sanders, but they also delighted in the kind of language that many progressives have militated against, and their humor often turned on contempt for liberal pieties. Friedland did little to resolve these contradictions when, in 2017, he tweeted that “Cum town is not a socialist podcast it’s not a fascist podcast it’s a podcast about being gay with your dad.” This announcement, figurative though it was, neatly encapsulated the spirit of the show, whose hosts seemed to regard offensive content less as a means to advance a social agenda than as a comedic end in itself.
For example: Riffing on alternative villains for “Batman: The Animated Series,” they imagined a character whose name is similar to that of the Riddler but is derived from the verb “to niggle,” who taunts the citizens of Gotham by insisting “it’s not the same word.” This joke was an agile improvisation about the atmosphere of panic around not just racism but also anything that could be mistaken for racism; it might also accurately be described as three white men giggling about almost saying the N-word. Whether listeners experienced it as one or the other probably depended on how funny they thought it was.
By operating in this vein, “Cum Town” developed a claim to being the most popular podcast no one would admit to liking. Its metrics provided quantitative evidence; anecdotally, I can think of four editors at major publications whom I knew to be regular listeners. Yet the podcast got little press. The name probably contributed to this phenomenon, but I think the more pertinent factor was the widespread belief that, while the podcast was not actually harmful, a supermajority of other people perceived it as such — or would perceive it as such if they actually listened to it — and that to praise it publicly would therefore be, if not exactly career suicide, at least career self-harm.
I submit that this perception — of a large and powerful mass of other people who misunderstand nuanced or ironic treatments of socially charged issues — is a workable definition of what was once called “cancel culture,” and the basically irresolvable debate over whether such cancellations really happened is orthogonal to the fact that the perception did. More than any actual canceling, it was this fear of being canceled and the anticipatory compliance it encouraged that was the essence of the culture. This atmosphere validated the basic project of “Cum Town,” which was to laugh at jokes no online backlash could punish because the podcast had no managerial structure above its hosts. The feeling that listening made you a participant in this project gave the podcast its parasocial appeal. At the same time, the idea that it was not safe to talk about the show from any public-facing position intensified the sensation of being part of a secret fraternity, which is of course also the kind of experience that keeps a podcast listener coming back.
“Cum Town” was paradoxically hip at a moment when large portions of comedy and media had turned against the kind of shock humor that was its stock in trade. There remained the question of whether its hosts were making fun of an increasingly censorious culture or laughing at the people that culture was trying to protect, which was complicated by the second, only partially related question of whether their audience fully got the joke. Some clearly did not. In 2020, Reddit banned the podcast’s subreddit (which was not started or moderated by anyone affiliated with the show) for violating its rules against hate speech, along with roughly 2,000 other forums that included subreddits devoted to Donald Trump, the podcast “Chapo Trap House” and Wojak memes.
This dilemma faces any comedian who purports to satirize bigotry by presenting it in absurd terms: By definition, bigots are insensible to the absurdity of their position, so they are likely to laugh at “It’s not the same word” for the wrong reasons. This phenomenon is especially problematic for chat podcasts that succeed by recreating the sensation of hanging out with their hosts. When the “Cum Town” podcast had, for example, 30,000 subscribers on Patreon, the odds that any of them would be as funny as Mullen or Halkias were low, while the odds that some fans would try to imitate them by saying offensive things in a public forum were depressingly high.
With low overhead and high revenue, “Cum Town” generated more income for its hosts than most comedians could reasonably expect to earn, but it increasingly limited other possibilities in their careers. In 2018, Mullen appeared in a commercial for IBM from which he was subsequently edited out, after large numbers of fans posted offensive material — many just the name of the podcast — in the comments section of the YouTube video of the spot. On a subsequent episode, he said that his removal from the ad cost him around $100,000.
Halkias described Mullen to me as the comedic engine of the show; Halkias would give him a premise, and then “here come seven punchlines.” He said there were episodes when the three hosts were not on speaking terms, but once recording started, they couldn’t resist riffing together. Despite Mullen’s talent, Halkias’s knack for drawing it out and Friedland’s willingness to serve as a kind of whipping boy for his snappier co-hosts, the dynamic eventually fell apart.
After Halkias’s departure, Mullen and Friedland started “The Adam Friedland Show,” a Dick Cavett-style interview show that Mullen left earlier this year. Through representatives, Friedland declined requests for comment, and Mullen did not respond. In a March appearance on “Stavvy’s World,” Mullen said that the “Adam Friedland Show” sponsor BlueChew, which sells erectile dysfunction medication, “got mad” at him for joking that Hamas took their product before the events of Oct. 7. Halkias laughed percussively at this story. If the popularity of “Cum Town” seems inexplicable, then perhaps it is best understood this way: as three friends who recognized one another’s maladaptive patterns and thought they were hilarious.
The Dreamboat Tour bus reached Chicago in the early hours of the Saturday before Easter, and Halkias and I set out on a walk along the shore of Lake Michigan. He repeatedly described the tour as a “rolling slumber party”: a group of guys watching movies, sleeping in bunk beds and otherwise living out the merger between friendship and professional life that is the stuff of adolescent fantasy. This group included Halkias’s friend George Himonas, who seemed to be there mostly to make sure Halkias stuck to his diet-and-exercise regimen. Halkias said Himonas qualified for this position because he used to be fat, describing his own approach to staffing as “oligarchic European dictator.” Not everyone was the best at their job, but he could trust them. Halkias seemed to consider this method a necessary safeguard against the perils of success, which included but were not limited to a loss of critical perspective on one’s work and personal behavior, as well as the disconnection from ordinary life that comes from being surrounded by employees. “That’s fake,” he said, “and that’s bad for you.”
As Lake Michigan slapped the concrete wall below the trail, Halkias returned to the problem of comedians who achieve success and stop being funny. It seemed to haunt him. “I just see it as a hazard of the job,” he said, “where if you want to make movies, you want to do stand-up tours, you want people to see your work. … ” He trailed off. “Unfortunately, I have to get a little famous.” Not long after we returned to the surface streets, a father approached and introduced Halkias to his 8-year-old son, explaining that he was on a podcast whose name Daddy couldn’t say right now.
It was easy to imagine this man as representative of the audience Halkias has managed to retain from “Cum Town,” partly through his knack for channeling the internet zeitgeist. After he left the podcast, he released a series of viral crowd-work TikToks, at a moment when videos of improvised (and staged-to-appear-improvised) interactions with audience members became central to how comics marketed themselves. These videos subtly recontextualized the quick and charismatic persona Halkias had already established, moving it from the podcast studio to the club. They culminated in “Live at the Lodge Room,” a half-hour, crowd-work-only special that Halkias produced at his own expense and released on YouTube, where it currently has 7.8 million views.
“Most people just thought of me as a podcast guy, as the second mic on ‘Cum Town,’” Halkias said as we worked our way back to the bus. “That’s why I felt like I really needed to put out ‘Live at the Lodge,’ because I was like, No, this is my life’s work.” While he focused on stand-up, however, Halkias continued to feed his internet-first fan base with viral podcast appearances, a fitness vlog called “Stavvy Gets Ripped,” sketch monologues in which he pretended to have an emotionally unhealthy relationship with the Baltimore Ravens, etc. This content, grounded in his knack for improvising and connecting a variety of subjects to his own life, preserved the persona Halkias established on “Cum Town,” even as he directed his career toward 20th-century markers of success: an hourlong special based on prepared material, as well as film and television roles and the Fat Rascal tour of comedy clubs and theaters. It seemed he was methodically assembling the career he had planned, using the resources from the success he found by accident.
That night Halkias did two sets at the Chicago Theater, which seats twice as many as the Orpheum. A heckler near the stage kept up a running dialogue for the first few minutes of the late show; alcohol appeared to be a factor, and conditions looked right for some of Halkias’s signature crowd work. Instead, he told the heckler only that he needed to “shut the [expletive] up,” before returning to his prepared material. It worked. It also seemed to reflect a certain fatigue with the whole project of post-internet fame, the stubborn condition of being known by thousands of strangers who had listened to his voice for so long that, viscerally if not consciously, they thought of him as their friend.
If Halkias has consciously steered away from crowd work, he has also developed the material to justify his choice. The hour he presented on the Dreamboat Tour is funnier and more organized than the “Fat Rascal” special, even as it carries forward one of his greatest strengths as a joke writer: his ability to combine the blunt instrument with a more complex social critique. After a long period when many comedians took recognizable political positions that provoked applause, Halkias’s politics emerge from his own experiences in surprising ways.
In a larger chunk of jokes about how America treats fat people, he imagined the internal monologue of Jared Fogle, the former Subway spokesman imprisoned for sex acts with minors and receipt of child sexual abuse imagery. “Oh, man,” his Fogle complains, “nobody takes me seriously. I’ve got to change the worst thing about myself: I have to lose 300 pounds and continue to be a pedophile.” This joke is a kind of triple: It’s a classically structured misdirection gag, and that misdirection delivers an efficient commentary on the gap between meaningful ethics and what American culture actually values. These pleasures arrive only in retrospect, however; in the moment, the joke turns on the comically dumb construction “I have to … continue to be a pedophile.” It is possible to read this joke as an expression of Halkias’s fundamental theme, in comedy and in life: the desire to keep changing, to become better than you are, even as you remain comically and perhaps tragically yourself.
In New York City on an unusually merciful evening in August, Halkias and I reconvened for a protein-intensive tour postmortem at the Bowery Meat Company — maybe more of a halftime report, as the Dreamboat Tour was going on to Britain in September, then returning to the southern United States and continuing into the new year. Halkias took some time off in July, but auditions and travel had whittled down the 10 weeks off he had initially planned to about 10 days. He had booked a role in the upcoming Anthony Bourdain biopic, which was nice. He continued to seem pleasantly surprised by the trajectory of his life and the string of fortunate events that had arranged it. He weighed less than 300 pounds and was up to 20,000 daily steps, and he looked healthy. But he was tired.
“I don’t really like being famous — I don’t really like seeing people, like stopping me on the street,” he said, adding that he might need to adopt a more discreet look. The question of how was not resolved. If Halkias’s performance on “Tires” is any indication, he is not disappearing into his roles; like many comedians who transition to acting, he seems to have been hired to play himself on a TV show, a thrill for fans who previously knew him as himself on a podcast or himself on a stage. While this work model is efficient, it comes with subtle drawbacks, not the least of which is the worry that success in your career is predicated on stagnation in your personal life. Every comedian is, to some degree, trapped by what their audience has come to expect; ask Jim Carrey. But the podcast comedian, who is invited into listeners’ homes, cars and ear canals for multiple hours each week, is especially likely to evoke a sensation of familiarity in thousands of people he has not met. These people may not want their imaginary friend to change.
As soon as he mentioned his ambivalence toward fame, Halkias again expressed gratitude for the many opportunities he had been given and the people who supported his work, acknowledging, as one does, that it could all fall apart at any moment. My impression, though, was that such a collapse seemed more appealing in August than it did in April. Halkias had already purchased a home in his native Baltimore. It would be good to own a place in New York, he said, and maybe something in Greece. As the bind became apparent, he joked that he was a humble man: All he wanted was three houses, a few movies and to be able to sell out any comedy club on a Thursday night. And there is how your 10 weeks off become 10 days.
At the next table, a young woman lectured her date about the importance of closing a real estate deal despite certain unspecified obstacles, repeatedly saying they needed to “call Mar-a-Lago.” When we stood up to leave, her companion came over to introduce himself. “I love ‘Tires,’” he said, shaking Halkias’s hand before we went outside. The Bowery was lively, and Halkias seemed restless. He walked me 10 blocks or so uptown, and in that distance a half-dozen more people stopped to talk to him. Finally we reached my hotel. Looking up at the milky city night and tugging on his Hawaiian shirt, Halkias said he might try to do a surprise set at a comedy club somewhere. As I passed through the lobby doors, someone up the street yelled, “Hey, Stavros!”
Dan Brooks writes essays, fiction and commentary from Missoula, Mont. He has written about the Italian rock band Maneskin, the pro wrestler Danhausen and the comedian Norm Macdonald.
Stylist: Alison Hernon
Prop stylist: Oscar Sanchez
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