The five best bits we saw at Netflix Is A Joke. Festival
Of the some 500 shows of what Netflix calls "the largest comedy event in history," here are five we loved
Photo: Rob Latour (Shutterstock)
Victor, the Just For Laughs Festival’s little green monster of a mascot, is dead, buried, and forgotten. Long live the anthropomorphic Netflix block.
Billed as “the largest comedy event in history,” Netflix Is A Joke. Fest shut Los Angeles down for two weeks with more than 500 shows across roughly 40 venues. Casting a wide cultural net, the streamer put on a festival where almost anyone could find something worth checking out. From mainstream comics to up-and-comers, the streamer found a way to please everyone without stepping on the third rails that have made its comedy arm so fraught with controversy.
Of the 500 shows, we only attended a small sliver—still, though, the most live comedy we’ve seen since March 2020. Rest assured, we’re exhausted. Our knees are raw from slapping, and our sides need stitching from splitting. We didn’t attend everything, but where we went, we laughed. After two weeks, here are the five hardest laughs from Netflix Is A Joke.
John Mulaney’s Exorcist chunk
John Mulaney was all over Netflix this week. With the premiere of the short-lived talk show Everybody’s In LA, he had one of the festival’s centerpiece positions, a Saturday night slot at the Hollywood Bowl. Mulaney was hilarious for precisely one hour, but during one chunk about the devil’s fixation on fellatio, he outdid himself. Mulaney notes that in every movie about exorcisms, the worst thing the devil can muster is growling, “You suck cock” at priests. Everyone was waiting for him to comment on his year of scandal, but his high-brow comedy remains the star.
Nick Kroll’s David Guetta impression
Opening for Mulaney was Nick Kroll, who treated the audience to a public screening of one of the internet’s strangest new classics. Kroll took audiences back to 2020 when French DJ David Guetta paid bewildering tribute to George Floyd and his family. While impersonating Guetta, Kroll played the still-jaw-dropping video of Guetta sending a “shout out to George Floyd’s family” during a remix of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream Speech.” Hearing Guetta’s ill-advised “shout out” on the Hollywood Bowl’s speaker system isn’t an experience we will soon forget.
Comedy Bang! Bang! Live: Tim Baltz puts Scott’s foot where his mouth is
Celebrating its 15th anniversary, the Comedy Bang! Bang! is embarking on a nationwide tour, starting with this show in Los Angeles. The show didn’t disappoint, with an all-star panel of guests, including Lily Sullivan, Claudia O’Doherty, Carl Tart, Andy Daly, and Paul F. Tompkins (via satellite uplink). It’s a delight to see host Scott Aukerman react in real time to his guests and the audience. When Tim Baltz’s character Harry Footman talked a big foot fetish game, Scott ripped his sock off and put it to the test, hovering his foot inches from Baltz’s mouth. Seeing CB!B! forever changes listening to it.
Chris Fleming’s Gandalf material
Chris Fleming nailed the vibe at Hollywood Forever’s Masonic Lodge: Sinister. It’s the only way to describe a comedy show taking place in a weird temple at the center of a celebrity cemetery. But amid the red lights, Fleming, one of the Internet’s great comics for the past decade, sped through one bit after another, complete with songs and dips into characters. Fleming moved a mile a minute, stopping at one point to describe Gandalf’s glow up from “Gandalf The Grey” to “Gandalf The White” as a side effect of “getting Queer Eye’d.” We’ll never look at Gandalf or his mediocre blowout the same way again.
I Think You Should Leave presents the return of Santa
For the last stop on the I Think You Should Leave tour, Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin packed the Greek Theater with fans in Dan Flashes shirts and treated them to unaired sketches, new arrangements of the show’s hit songs, and special guests. On stage, Sam Richardson, Blink 182’s Mark Hoppus, Brooks Whelan, Witmer Thomas, Patti Harrison, first-year improv student Bruce Buckles, and Vanessa Bayer played a game of “Jack It or Jizz It” to determine whether a cut sketch should’ve made the show. The night’s highlight was Biff Wiff, a.k.a. Detective Crashmore star Santa Claus. After a year of health issues, he was in fine form, presenting an unaired sketch in which he plays a diner owner hoping to boost sales with curse-word-laden dishes. Biff Wiff certainly earned his two mil.