Over the last few years, comedy in the mainstream has turned toward the interpersonally brutish, the politically conservative and the offhandedly viral. At each of those turns, Stavros Halkias has blanched, and tried to intervene — while still, you know, being funny.
That’s made the joyously potty-mouthed and determinedly blue-collar Halkias an unexpectedly defiant — and popular — figure, mixing humor about the tragedies of American politics with self-lacerating bits about his body, drug intake and vast yet fragile ego.
It’s all on display in Halkias’s new comedy special “Uncle Stav,” coming to Netflix next month, in which the comedian known for cutting his lewd, every-millennial slacker humor with sharp, working-class insights reckons with the last couple years of growing success, and growing coping mechanisms.
The set was filmed at the Lyric Theater in his hometown, Baltimore, where Halkias, 37, once saw Chris Rock. “I’d seen small stand-up shows and was thinking about doing it,” Halkias recalled on Popcast, The New York Times pop culture chat show. “Seeing that level of mastery in person was a really important moment for me. I wasn’t even thinking, One day I’ll headline here.”
Halkias has been a working stand-up since the late 2000s, but came to subcultural prominence, and occasional infamy, on the sleazily witty, or wittily sleazy, podcast “Cum Town” in the late 2010s, alongside the comedians Nick Mullen and Adam Friedland. Since Halkias left the cult-smash show in 2022, his mainstream star has been ascendant. He hosts a wildly popular podcast, “Stavvy’s World,” that serves as a goofily humanist rejoinder to the fraught, post-manosphere shows hosted by some of his peers. And he’s an emerging presence in Hollywood, appearing in “Tony,” the new film that dramatizes Anthony Bourdain’s first job in a kitchen, as a festively foulmouthed line cook. (The “Tony” director Matt Johnson is also behind “Uncle Stav.”)
Halkias’s colorful supporting role is one in a set of recent film and television spots — including turns as a creepy police officer in Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Bugonia” and an exasperated shop manager on the Shane Gillis Netflix sitcom “Tires” — that allow Halkias to find new layers and audiences for the persona he wields in his comedy. In 2027, he will play a “scumbag agent” to Glen Powell’s country star in Judd Apatow’s next film.
“I got a lot of range,” Halkias joked. “I was once a beautiful little boy — what happened? Now I’m a bald pervert in the entertainment industry for money. How did this happen?”
In conversation with Popcast’s Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, Halkias spoke about how his weight has influenced his comedy; his preoccupation with the purity of stand-up culture; giving advice to incels; and how comedy’s rightward creep has created both an opportunity for resistance and frustration that he can no longer just work blue.
CARAMANICA I want to lead with a very obvious thing that I noticed right away in your upcoming stand-up special, which is that you’re wearing Nike Foamposites. A Baltimore classic. Talk a little bit about the sartorial choice.
HALKIAS You’re catching me at 37. My life is very dumb. I live this super Peter Pan lifestyle. There’s this little thing of, Should I grow up at some point? The all-red Foamies — I couldn’t afford that. The Foamposites were like $200 in 2007, which is like a $400 shoe today. We did not have it like that in the Halkias household. So I had to wear whatever was on the clearance rack at Shoe City at Eastpoint Mall, and do my best not to get ridiculed.
COSCARELLI So this was a moment where you’re back home in front of your people and you got to put it on?
HALKIAS I got Foams, dude. Check me out now, right? I really can’t believe what’s going on in my life, and I believe it will end any day now. So I was like, how many times am I really going to get a chance to celebrate Baltimore, to do this in my hometown?
COSCARELLI One of the main topics of this new special is your body — your health journey, which you’ve played off of, regardless of the medium. Did you come into this one thinking, this is where I have to really nail this stuff, now that people know me for it?
HALKIAS Yeah, culture caught up to me, because I’ve been thinking about this my whole life. There was no way I could do a stand-up special and not address this, because my philosophy is that I want to be as honest as possible — I want to be the same guy on and offstage. And offstage, weight loss, body-image issues — these are the things that have plagued me my whole life, without question. It was also a period of my life where I felt like my career was killing me. During my last special, “Fat Rascal,” I was in such bad shape. I was fat as [expletive], and so [expletive] up all the time.
CARAMANICA Did you know you were in bad shape at the time? Did you understand it?
HALKIAS I knew [laughs]. I couldn’t go up a [expletive] flight of stairs, and going to bed I’d be like, “Uh oh, I hope I didn’t take too many pills.” It was my first taste of, Holy [expletive], are my dreams going to come true? And you don’t pull the hand brake because you’re morbidly obese and addicted to whatever. I had no tools to deal with it. I was completely like, what it takes for me to get through this is just leaning into my vices: Eating like an animal. It’s so hard to sleep when you’re on the road, so it’s a lot of downers, a lot of edibles, a lot of pills.
The same way the Foamposites were like, Well, I’m cool, it became, Well, now I’m famous, I get to do stand-up and girls are in my DMs … I’m a touring comedian — it’s the job. So, in many ways, this special is me dealing with the fallout of what it took to get to that first level of fame. This year, I’m really trying not to completely give in again.
COSCARELLI Did you have a wake-up moment?
HALKIAS I threw my back out the week before [filming Season 3 of] “Tires” — trying to get healthy, ironically. I was deadlifting and messed up something in my spine. What I should have done was extensive physical therapy for four months. What I did instead was go on tour and shoot a TV show and I had to get cortisone shots in my back just to do that. Then I broke my arm. I fell off a scooter. I should not have been on a scooter, I was rushing home to get my peanut butter Halo Top before it melted. It was truly a 7-year-old’s injury. It’s what I get for being a fat 37-year-old trying to do whimsical forms of travel.
COSCARELLI And where do the GLP-1s enter the equation? You joke in the special that you’re on Zepbound.
HALKIAS I’m not sponsored — though I’m open to it. If Serena [Williams] can do it! That pisses me off: One of the greatest athletes of all time is doing GLP-1s, and I’m over here, no check? That’s not an accomplishment. You gotta get me. The reality is, every time I go on tour I gain weight. So once I started touring again I got on the GLP-1s to try not to lose the progress.
COSCARELLI I had the thought while watching “Tony” that basically your job is to do what you do onstage and on your podcast: say dirty words and call people names. Improv?
HALKIAS Very improv. I don’t think I looked at a script — maybe the first day. And then I saw what was going on and I was like, I’m not learning my lines, they don’t care about these. I love the movie, actually. When I heard they were doing a Bourdain reboot thing, I was like, This is going to suck.
The first thing that made me think, Oh, they might be cooking here, was when they cast Dominic Sessa. That’s an interesting choice. I got a call from Matt [Johnson], he was already in Provincetown, R.I., working on the script. I think he realized they had the bones of a great coming-of-age movie. But the kitchen didn’t feel real yet — nobody was busting this kid’s balls. And if you’ve worked any blue-collar job, that’s the reality.
COSCARELLI You worked in kitchens?
HALKIAS My mom was a waitress at a Greek restaurant, and my dad was a contractor. I spent so many summers “working” with my dad, mostly in his break room watching “Martin” with the little aluminum foil on the antenna.
But the thing about this movie is, those guys could be in a kitchen, they could be hanging drywall, working at a tire shop — it doesn’t matter. I knew those environments, and that’s what they were trying to capture. The funniest people I saw were in kitchens, or contractors my dad knew. The first person I saw making fun of my dad was one of his friends. I was like, oh, that’s fun. You don’t have to respect an authority figure. That guy’s taking down my dad. Maybe I don’t have to respect him anymore. Those are your first comedic role models, whether you know it or not. There are people working in kitchens right now who are funnier than every stand-up comedian.
COSCARELLI And every podcaster. I’m curious what you make of stand-ups who are so much better and more successful at podcasting than they are at stand-up. Is that a dynamic you all talk about among yourselves?
HALKIAS Some people just are better at podcasting, and there’s nothing wrong with that — you find your little zone. But for me, podcasting was an afterthought — all I cared about was stand-up. Podcasting’s [expletive] easy. I don’t even use my brain when I podcast. The whole idea is, people like this, I’m not going to argue with them, I’m going give them what they like. Over time I’ve found some value in it, and my show is a call-in show — I love interacting with fans in a way that feels productive for both of us.
COSCARELLI You love connecting with sad men.
HALKIAS I love connecting with sad men, dude. As a former, sometimes current, sad man — even with the best life of all time, I get it. A lot of the podcast is incel outreach. It’s like, Fellas, we don’t gotta be this way, man.
CARAMANICA When I think of your appearances on certain podcasts that were more friendly to the right, is that a similar thing? Was there an interventionist quality going into those spaces?
HALKIAS It’s not calculated. It’s just that a lot of stand-up comics happened, in the last couple years, to have some of the dumbest opinions on earth, and they are my friends, and I’m like, all right, guys, can we [expletive] talk about this?
COSCARELLI You get the “comedian pass” — you like an offensive joke as much as the next guy. I think that makes you an acceptable vessel for these political conversations, especially because I think the main thing a lot of comedians were reacting to was the feeling that people were trying to silence them.
HALKIAS And it’s so clear they were wrong.
COSCARELLI You were one of the comedians who came out and said “I’m not going to perform in Saudi Arabia” last year, when the Riyadh Comedy Festival offered what I can only assume was boatloads of money. When you see people like Dave Chappelle, or Louis C.K., titans of the field, who took the money, does that make you doubt yourself at all?
HALKIAS No, [expletive] no. And look, let’s be honest: When you’re at the top, you think that’s the most evil place some of these guys have performed? On record, I would never do any of that [expletive]. But I think when you’re at the highest levels, you probably start to get a little comfortable with pure evil, because that’s where all the money leads, right?
You can’t wash your hands of it if you exist in this society. And the more successful you get, the closer you get to whoever the Illuminati is. I could see how it just becomes normalized. But it doesn’t make me doubt myself at all, because I know it was wrong to do that. I don’t care what the counterarguments are.
COSCARELLI Is this a remaining divide in your community — is it a red line and some people are on one side of it and some on the other? Or was it an isolated event?
HALKIAS I’m curious to see how it goes. Look, Dave Chappelle is the GOAT, and he can have any opinion he wants; I’ll look up to Dave Chappelle until I die. And it’s not just Chappelle, but it’s like, you guys got enough [expletive] money. At what point do we have a responsibility to just … isn’t that the whole thing with stand-up? Speaking truth to power? Which I found corny. Isn’t that supposed to, theoretically, be part of it?
CARAMANICA I wonder — looking back at 2024 and the run-up to that election, you saw how the right was activating, maybe weaponizing, comedy and the podcast space — did you feel like you had to issue some kind of corrective in what you’re doing?
HALKIAS I do kind of resent it, because I do feel like a lot of my contemporaries have forced me to be explicitly political in a way I’m not interested in doing. I don’t want them to know I have a poli-sci degree.
But I think the most charitable reading is that some people thought their platform was important enough to host either the president, the vice president, whatever, and they want to do a public service. That was naïve, which I think some people were, or you’re so arrogant that you think that’s true.
Or cynically — wanting to be as famous as possible — thinking, This will get clicks. Some people thought culture was going to go to the right. It did feel that way. And I think if the Trump Administration hadn’t gone full-blown fascist right out of the gate — if ICE wasn’t murdering people — I think that is the way things would’ve gone. Whatever the answer is, I think it was a mistake.
COSCARELLI Would you have someone like that on your own show?
HALKIAS I’m not interested in debating people. I am a comedian. I also love stand-up comedy more than anything, in a sometimes pathetic way, and I don’t like that the thought process of a lot of people is that this is a right-wing art form. That’s really new! Being friends with authority sucks. You want to have the president on your podcast? The [expletive] president? No president is good! You can’t be the president and be a good person — it’s impossible. I don’t [expletive] want the president on my podcast.
You think I like doing political jokes? They [expletive] suck. Some people are good at it, but I don’t want to be Lewis Black. I want to do dick jokes. I wanna be doing jokes about eating mushrooms and busting fast. I don’t wanna do stuff about like, tax rates. They [expletive] made me do [expletive] like this and I hate it. I [expletive] hate it.
Credits
Popcast is hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli and produced by Sophie Erickson, Kate LoPresti and Felice Leon. This episode was filmed by Bernardo Garcia Elguezabal, Dave Mayers and Pat Gunther and edited by Mark Zemel with help from Rebecca Blandon. Our theme music is by Elisheba Ittoop. Nick Pitman is our audio engineer and Amanda Webster is our photo editor. Brooke Minters is our executive producer. Header video cinematography is by Avery Munson Clark.
Special thanks to Sarah Bonn, Dahlia Haddad, Mike Cordero, Nicole Huber, Aaron Byrd, Carl Mazurek, Zach Caldwell, Maddy Masiello, Brad Kimbrough, Craig Hettich, Andrew Wilcox, David Malitz, Elena Bergeron, Sia Michel, Nina Lassam and Sam Dolnick.
The post Stavros Halkias Never Wanted to Get Political appeared first on New York Times.
