Last year, comedian Andrew Schulz made waves when he joked around with Donald Trump on Schulz’s own podcast just a month before the election. But that might not have been the biggest thing to happen in Schulz’s own life, as he has devoted his first full solo stand-up special on Netflix to telling us how he became a father for the first time. Schulz shows a different side of himself (and his personal LIFE) here, but can it co-exist with the stand-up persona that made him famous in the first place?
The Gist: Schulz previously hosted/starred in a four-part Netflix series, Schulz Saves America, in 2020, inspired by and prompted by his growing success through YouTube clips and his podcast.
Last year, Netflix viewers saw him showing up to show up his fellow comedians and pro football players at the live Roast Of Tom Brady.
Now you’re more likely to see Schulz roasting himself, or at least portraying how doctors, nurses and his partner ribbed him during the IVF process as he tried (and ultimately succeeded) in becoming a father for the first time. But there are other non-parenthood jokes along the way, too, as the teaser clip he released demonstrates.
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: How many millennial male comedians have issues with their sperm in 2024-25 that it’s becoming a trend and/or an epidemic in becoming parents and the topic of comedy specials right now, anyhow? Do we need to launch an investigation? We’ve already seen a handful of specials in the past three months about this!
Memorable Jokes: Schulz jokes that girldads inherently have more pressure on them than the fathers of sons do. Why? “No mater what happens to them, it’s my fault,” he claims. Girls with problems get tagged as having “daddy issues.” Not so for sons with deadbeat dads. “You could not love your son, and he’ll be greater,” Schulz boasts. “We don’t like to admit it but that is the key to having a successful male: just remove the dad completely.”
This leads Schulz down a dick-joke rabbit-hole pondering the religious and cultural traditions toward circumcision, where you’ll hear how he credits/blames Jews for that. He also wants you to believe that any sex is safe sex, unless you’re with a Latina?! Moving on.
This is all to set up his main theme and narrative arc for the hour, which is how he thought it’d be easy to get his wife pregnant, only to learn the intricacies of in vitro fertilization.
Schulz takes us through his side of the process, as other male comedians have before him. Schulz’s version includes a “meatball” nurse who not only recognizes the comedian in the clinic but also zings him each time (albeit via roasts at the expense of gay men and racial minorities), and a “Latina” nurse who makes him horny and confused.
There also are aa couple of sentimental video montages that break up the routines.
Our Take: The first montage arrives after his opening joke, which is part of a trend brought over from YouTube specials of the past year or so, as comedians have learned they have to grab viewers right away with a joke, lest the opening credits and introductions lose viewers who may click away to find something else to stream.
Both the opening and closing montages also soften Schulz’s image; the latter eliciting audible AWWWWWs from the audience.
We’re seeing two different versions of Schulz here.
Remember: This is the same guy who boasted that his previous stand-up special was too hot for Netflix, Amazon or any other streamer to handle, so he himself decided to self-release it, only to then level up from theaters to selling out arenas, whereupon Netflix was more than happy to welcome him back to their platform.
He’s also one of the leading alpha-dog, macho men of podcasting comedians, which got him the sit–down with Trump last October. And yet, we also learn in one joke here that Schulz is the very same type of macho men who takes the kind of insecure male medications that those podcasters are selling. When Schulz is having trouble with his sperm count, he casually reveals that he has been “taking hair pills for 15 years.” Instead of feeling ashamed or insecure about his hairline, Schulz cracks that he wishes he had known that the hair medication not only made his “hair beautiful” but also came with a side effect reducing his chances of getting someone pregnant!
At one point, though, he also wonders aloud: “What would the streets say?”
Which feels like a central ethos not only to Schulz’s comedy, but also to men of his ilk.
Schulz has hustled hard to generate an audience that would support him to this extent, ahead of the social-media and crowd-work curves that also have made Matt Rife rich and famous. But both of them (and others like them) have largely done so by preying upon divisive stereotypes and hack jokes. Here’s the thing you have to remember: comedians consider stereotypes and hack jokes hack precisely BECAUSE THEY WORK. It’s easy to get an applause break for a new father to note that they weren’t the ones who actually gave birth, and then to make fun of men who do take credit for childbirth. It’s also why someone like Rosebud Baker got such deeper laughs in her Netflix special last month by approaching the subject from a more meaningful perspective.
So when Schulz wants to let us believe, if even for a momentary giggle, that he confused an OB-GYN for the acronym for homosexuals, or wants to tell his future child that they cannot ever transition because they paid $30,000 to pick the gender, or even makes an off-hand transphobic reference to the Algerian woman who won an Olympic medal in boxing last summer, it doesn’t matter if Schulz actually believes any of these things himself. That he’s choosing to tell these jokes says a lot more about what he does care about. He cares about the laughs and applause more than who he may hurt.
Which makes him stopping his stand-up near the end to play such a warm, fuzzy short film so striking. Or that he also gets big applause breaks along the way in talking about him and his wife going through IVF, even though he already told the audience in the very beginning that they successfully became parents.
I know the critic can only write about what the performers deliver, and not what the critic wishes they’d delivered instead. In this case, I can only hope this special marks a turning point in Schulz’s career. But I’m not going to bet any of my own money on it.
Our Call: Schulz claimed his sperm count received a grade of C+, and that sounds about right in describing the quality of his stand-up as well. Hey, it’s still a passing grade! Is that enough for you to STREAM IT?
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.