When comedian Stavros Halkias‘s first Netflix special Fat Rascal debuted on the service on Tuesday, it marked the culmination of 15 years of extremely hard work, the last two of which have been particularly “wild.”
A Baltimore native with one of the most singular visages and voices of his generation, Halkias only secured his first bit of mainstream exposure at age 34, having set out to build a stand-up career at 19. Unlike some comics, who rose up on the back of a late-night set or a Comedy Central half hour, he’s among the young talents today who have leveraged the digital space as a means of building both a powerhouse brand and a loyal following. Such has been his permeation of pop culture of late, he says, that he’s begun noticing a difference in those attending his shows. Instead of “internet freaks” alone, he jokes, he now sees “nice older couples” out in the crowd, even if his material is famously profane.
The son of Greek immigrants, who on any given night can be found joking about anything from nightmare travel days to threesomes and the Big + Tall Store, Halkias is equally famous for his boisterous laugh, his comedic portraits of white trash residents of Southeast Baltimore (including the Ravens-obsessed character Ronnie), and his penchant for delivering a great metaphor. Certainly the only comic to both model at Kid Super’s Paris fashion week and put out his own holiday calendar, featuring tasteful nudes of his own person, the comic is coming off of a tour that has seen him sell more than 86,000 tickets to 74 shows, netting over $2 million.
Halkias established himself as part of a class of powerful up-and-comers out of New York City, after commuting between his hometown and Washington, D.C. for shows in the early days of his career. As he tells it, his “first little bit of notoriety” came as co-host, alongside comedian friends Nick Mullen and Adam Friedland, of Cum Town, a majorly popular, albeit low budget and “very niche online podcast” that ran from 2016-2022. Still, the process of breaking into the industry in a real way proved a challenge. “I had agents and managers, but you know how it is,” the Queens, New York-based comic tells Deadline. “Nobody gives a f**k about you when you’re not making them any money…Nobody wanted to buy a special from me.”
Ultimately, it was upon the 2022 YouTube release of his self-financed debut special, Live at the Lodge Room, which has thus far garnered over six million views, that he was able to take things to the next level. On the heels of the pandemic, he felt he was “overdue to put something out there,” hungry to establish himself as more than just “a guy on a podcast.” Stand-up, he says, is “the thing I’ve loved the most in the world. It’s all I ever wanted to do.”
Halkias invested around $40,000 of his own money in the Lodge Room special, traveling to L.A. for 6:00 and 9:00 p.m. tapings “in the middle of a f***ing coronavirus spike.” He was inspired to put it out on YouTube after seeing such comedian friends as Sam Morril, Mark Normand, Nimesh Patel go directly to the masses, garnering massive followings on social media, rather than waiting for an opportunity from a Netflix or HBO to land in their laps.
To get the word out about Live at the Lodge Room, Halkias began disseminating online clips of material that didn’t make the final cut. Additionally, he embraced the crowd work clip, the kind of video depicting an impromptu interaction with fans that has now become a staple for many a young comic in building their name online and getting the word out about upcoming shows. For years, Halkias had been taping every set he did, whether it be at a comedy club, a brewery or some other kind of low-rent venue — and after hiring Eldis Sula, a longtime friend with “no editing experience,” away from his low-paying media job, the pair began mining his old sets for clips to post online.
As much as the crowd work clip became a marketing tool for Halkias, his intention initially in making it a foundational element of his performance was simply to honor “what’s special about stand-up.” To him, it was about “being in the moment, making a connection with the crowd,” and showing that he’s “a human being,” rather than someone reading from a script. Little did he know that all this footage, recorded in an attempt to land a Comedy Central half hour, would quickly take his YouTube following from 20K into the hundreds of thousands, which in turn resulted in him selling tickets like never before.
“Every single [clip] was going viral. It was insane. I was like, ‘What the f**k?’” Halkias recalls. “I thought this would work, but I didn’t think it would be like this. We were growing at such an insane rate…It felt like I had just found an audience that I had no idea existed. And I was confused, more than anything.”
The irony, for the comic, is that people in general “have no control over anything,” in a tech-dominated world controlled by “like three companies” — and yet it’s by tapping the power of tech platforms that he’s garnered the success he has.
Following the success of Live at the Lodge Room and materials put out to promote it, Halkias has doubled down on his digital presence with the podcast Stavvy’s World, a call-in show inspired by one he’d come up with during the pandemic, which debuted at #3 on the iTunes comedy charts and has garnered hundreds of thousands of subscribers in less than a year.
He attributes part of his success online to good timing. “Meta and Google saw that TikTok was eating their lunch, and they were like, ‘Well, anybody that does short form video content, we’re boosting the f**k out of their algorithm,’” he explains. “It just so happened that while that was happening, and YouTube Shorts was getting boosted, and Instagram was getting boosted, and TikTok was trying to boost people’s stuff so that more people would do it, I had like two to three years of the best crowd work interactions, and I think I just got really lucky…It just worked in a way that I could not believe.”
The extent of Halkias’s success, he says, is almost, at this point, to his chagrin. He’s now essentially become “a CEO…running a little media company,” with four people working alongside him full-time. “They’re some of my best friends; I trust them completely. But I have had to do a lot more business and a lot more work-work than actual stand-up,” he reflects. “I love the art form; I don’t love the business aspect.”
If Live at the Lodge Room was a bit topical — touching on life in the time of Covid, even as it honed in on Halkias’s lifelong struggles with “food, weight, addiction, dating and family” — his new special Fat Rascal affirms his commitment to comedy that is “super personal and super based in the truth.” The reality explored, he explains, is that even as his life has gotten “a little better” in success, his personal insecurities remain the same. “It’s an hour about, ‘I’ve gotten all this s**t, but my vices are really getting the better of me,’” the comic explains. “This has been a year where I lost to all my vices. It’s not even close.” Elsewhere, he finds himself looking at the reality of “dating when you’re never home,” and what one’s interactions become during life on the road. One major difference in subject matter this time around is that there’s less of a focus on family. “I really wasn’t around my family this year. I wasn’t thinking about them this year,” Halkias says. “This was a year of pure survival. This was a year of traveling, and I tried to put that forward.”
In addition to “this weird type of honesty,” what Halkias continues to value as a comedian is the notion of being funny “in a purely laughs-per-minute way.” Part of what he’s most proud of, when he looks back at the special taped at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, TX, is the way it reflects his efforts to continually improve as a performer, honing new skill sets in an effort to be “as good a comic as humanly possible.” Informing this drive is an idea he picked up from Bill Burr of working on a new skill with every new special.
On his first special, he explains, he really focused on storytelling, closing with “a 15-minute, embarrassing threesome story.” This time around, though, he looked to get “a little more physical and bring in more ‘act-outs,’” visual means of giving expression to a joke or story. “I still have to work on that,” Halkias acknowledges. “I’m still pretty rigid on stage.”
But Halkias’s ambitions don’t stop at comedy, as this was the year that he began the process of cementing a place in film and TV. Somehow, around the time of shooting his special, he co-wrote and starred in an indie called Exit Statement — and he was also notably brought on board for Steven Soderbergh’s sci-fi comedy webseries, Command Z.
The part there was “very small” — of the non-speaking variety — but nonetheless, he was able to enjoy the “insane” experience of working with “a legendary director,” which he never would’ve guessed would be in the cards. As with comedy, what excites Halkias about filmmaking is the prospect of incremental growth, as far as his skills of artistic expression.
Looking ahead, selling out Madison Square Garden is on the comedian’s mind. But truthfully, his plan for the near future is to slow down from his “go, go, go” lifestyle and take time to be “a human being.” He might’ve feared at one point that his “weird wave” of internet success would just suddenly dry up, but that’s no longer the case. At some point, he says, the recognition came that he had to be the one to pull back “because no one else is going to do it for me.”
As big as Halkias dreams, there’s no rush to get to the next big milestone, and at least within the world of comedy, he’d in truth be satisfied with remaining exactly where he is. “I don’t mean to get f***ing corny or anything, but I’ve achieved my f***ing goals,” he says. “I love stand-up…[but] as great as these last two years were, it was also the hardest [time] of my life in a lot of ways, where it’s like, ‘I don’t want my life to look like this.’”
“I have friends who are famous; I don’t want their lives. I don’t give a f**k about it,” he says in closing. “I don’t need to be more famous than this; in fact, I don’t want to be.”
