Comedians get serious: how the personal lives, loss and growth shaped their game-changing Netflix specials
Taking the stage at the Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip, Jamie Foxx took a long look around and soaked up the atmosphere of the legendary main room.
'I ain't been in this motherf--ker in 35 years!' he announced, noting that some people in the audience for "Netflix Is a Joke Presents: FYSEE L.A. Comedy Night" weren't old enough to remember comedy icons like Robin Williams and Richard Pryor, who trod the same stage and are immortalized with their photos on the club's walls.
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The 57-year-old Oscar winner was on hand for a Q&A with his influencer daughter Corinne to discuss his comedy special What Had Happened Was…, in which he triumphantly returned to the stage following the debilitating 2023 stroke that took nearly a year for Foxx to recover from.
But first, he grew a little nostalgic, recalling sneaking into the club as an underage aspiring comic in 1988 and being dumbstruck to find his idol Eddie Murphy performing on stage. 'That motherf--ker was still funny! And rich!' he laughed, describing Murphy's raunchy, indelicate material. 'I'm a little fella from Terrell, Texas, sneaking into the Comedy Store and seeing my hero Eddie Murphy talking some sh-t!'
Photo byfor Netflix
Foxx closed out a night featuring several fellow comics whose Netflix projects are vying for Emmy bragging rights this season, including Sarah Silverman (PostMortem), Mike Birbiglia (The Old Man and the Pool), Fortune Feimster (Crushing It), Michelle Buteau (A Buteau-ful Mind at Radio City Music Hall), Bert Kreischer (Razzle Dazzle), Andrew Schulz (Life), and Tom Segura (Sledgehammer). For Foxx and each of the participating comedians, their projects — often deeply personal, even existential in nature — proved to be game-changing for their careers, their lives, or both.
'It was tough because I couldn't almost eat it and then come out and say, 'Knock-knock, who's there?'' Foxx said of his ambitious, disciplined approach to crafting his special after months of intense physical rehabilitation. He had a stage built in his home and honed his material every single day in preparation for two taped performances in Atlanta, maintaining secrecy in the wake of his recovery.
'We couldn't take it out and let people hear it, because everybody was wanting to know what it was,' Foxx said. 'So in Atlanta, we just asked the audience, 'Man, give us grace. I ain't been on stage in a minute, but I got a story to tell.''
The actor-comedian bluntly revealed the internal struggles he faced in the wake of his stroke. 'They said, 'You can have a second chance.' I said, 'What the fuck was wrong with my first chance? I don't get this. Not me. I put the smiles on people's faces,'' he revealed. 'I didn't understand that part, and that's what I had to deal with inside — was being thankful.'
He admitted he used to envy the pantheon of comedy greats that lined the comedy club's walls, wondering why he wasn't listed among them. 'I think I've done some funny stuff, but I was never mentioned with the greats,' he said. But a personal conversation with a higher power, just as he was settling the challenging edit of his special, changed his perspective.
'God spoke to me and said, 'I used to listen to you when you would whisper that you wanted to be part of the great ones,'' Foxx recalled. 'He said, 'I had to put you through something horrible in order for you to see how great you could be. … Did you see your special? So what do you think?' I said, 'I don't ever have to be great again. If I gotta go through that, I'll just be cool. C-minus is all right with me!''
Photo byfor Netflix
Silverman's PostMortem, too, centered around loss and grief as she explored losing both her father and stepmother within a nine-day span. She never thought twice about building new material around such a deeply personal issue, complete with her signature, often scatological irreverence.
'I put very little thought into that stuff other than what's working, what isn't working,' she told Gold Derby. 'I always mine personal stuff; I've always been explicit and I am interested in mining the darkest corners of humanity. And I'm like, 'None of us are ready for it and it's going to happen to every single one of us, period.' So to have a special that's relatable was new for me.'
Silverman said that not only did viewers offer feedback about how healing her set had been for them, it was a balm for the comedian herself. 'It was really cathartic,' she said. 'At the beginning it hurt. I just dreaded it. I didn't know how to tell the story and I felt uncomfortable in places. And once I figured out the story and the shape of it, I really enjoyed it. And I had distance from it. It was so fresh, and by the end I had more distance from it, and I just feel like you're better when you have distance from something.'for Netflix
Birbiglia's experience with The Old Man and the Pool, which focused on family — particularly his aged dad's declining health — was both creatively exhausting and invigorating. 'This one is so personal that I feel like I have emptied the tank of all that I have,' he told Gold Derby. 'It's about my dad, it's about my daughter, and I feel like it's raw. It's this thing where now that I've shared it with people, I almost want to go to Hawaii for five years or something. Because I feel so exposed.'
'Certainly the response to it has been pretty extraordinary,' he added. 'It's the amount of emails and messages I get a day from people who are struggling with their parents going through strokes and heart attacks and all these things that are so hard. And my goal with The Old Man and the Pool, more than any of my other specials, is to take this thing that's so awful — my dad and the final stages of his life — and how do I find the funny in that? If I can find the funny in that, that's my gift to the audience: 'This is my coping mechanism here. You can try this too.''
'I kind of got out of my comfort zone and tried to tell more of a personal story that drew out emotion,' said Kreischer, who pivoted a bit from his party-guy persona in Razzle Dazzle and told revealing tales about his family, including his wife's experience with menopause. 'I knew it worked on the road, I knew it was going to work on television, and the feedback was kind of overwhelming. It went viral and I was really happy about that, so it was really rewarding.'
'The more time you spend in comedy, the better you get and you start being able to do tricks — I say tricks, but things you couldn't pull off when you were younger,' he added. 'Also you get to a point where you're like, 'I've written all the jokes, told all my stories, I'm seeing a format in what I'm doing — I've got to break it up.' I got to really stir the pot a little bit.'for Netflix
For Feimster, Crushing It offered a chance to showcase the maturation and evolution of her increasingly honed comedy style. 'I felt like this is my third hour [special] and I wanted to show people I'd kind of grown up, and I felt like my voice had evolved and my stories had, so I wanted the look of it — and my look — to kind of match that,' she told Gold Derby. 'So we just tried to elevate, and I'm glad that that came across, because this is my third tour that I'm on right now, as far as a hundred cities, 150 shows, so I worked these sets out! And I rocked that little pink suit!'
Her ongoing connection with Netflix and the faith the streamer has shown in her has provided an immeasurable boost to her comedy profile, she added.
'To be in that family certainly helps tremendously — it's that sort of stamp of approval that you have arrived, because they are selective about the specials,' said Feimster. 'It just feels like I'm a real professional comedian. And I've done so many acting things with them too. I have Fubar coming up with Arnold [Schwarzenegger], and I think I've done 20 Netflix shows, so at this point they're paying my bills and I very much appreciate them!'
'Every comedy special feels like the comedian's wedding: 'What's it going to be? Who's going to come? What is my material going to be like?'' Buteau told Gold Derby, describing her mindset in shaping A Buteau-ful Mind at Radio City Music Hall. Her ultimate goal: level up.
'When I was shopping venues in New York, I found out that no other woman had filmed a special at Radio City Music Hall,' she said. 'I'm like, 'Girl, why are you doing this?' Then you have to push yourself. You have to believe in yourself that you could do this. I'd never even played Radio City Music Hall as an independent artist — I've always opened for someone there, and so I'm like, 'Oh, the bigger picture is when you're not doing this anymore, how are other people inspired? How do you leave the world better than you found it?''
Buteau, too, discovered that fulfilling her personal vision resulted in a deeper connection with her audience. 'Between the internet, social media and then also being in public, whether it's America or Europe, the feedback has been amazing,' she said. 'It's not just 'You're funny,' it's like 'I'm inspired by you and I feel better about my body,' or 'I feel seen,' or 'Thank you for this material because I have a non-binary child and now we can watch something together and know that the world's going to be a better place,' or something. It's insane!'
Realizing his comedy series Sledgehammer was 'creatively the most fun I've ever had, because we essentially just got to make what we wanted to make, which is kind of unheard of,' Segura told Gold Derby. 'It was a total freedom, and it was so fun to make these, basically, 15 short films. It was a huge undertaking, everybody busted their ass, but it was always super fun.'
'I think it's one of those things that's either going to scare you to go, 'I don't want to do this' — maybe not scare you, but just turn you off,' he added. 'For me, it excited me.'
The impact of his special on Schulz, whose Life chronicled his experience becoming a father, was profound — so much so that he's yet to return to performing live comedy as he continues to soak up more of what his personal life has to offer.
'I haven't even been on stage since I put it out, so I don't really know the effects of it,' he told Gold Derby. 'I think the only reason I was able to do this one, outside of the circumstances, is because I took time off and I let life affect me. What I feel. Oftentimes if you tour relentlessly, you just kind of do a different version of the same jokes you are already doing, and I just never want to do that.' Taking a step back allowed him to reframe his humor around genuine experience.
'So this was really cool,' he added. 'I've never been personal about my comedy. I thought my life was kind of boring, and then this thing happened and I was like, 'Whoa — this is not boring!''
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