Before Leo Reich takes the stage at the top of his new HBO special Literally, Who Cares?! we hear him introduce himself as the “youngest comedian ever.” As he explains in this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, “I try to really lean into a kind of self-appointed voice-of-a-generation or young genius vibe,” before making sure to add, “in an ironic way.”
That upending of expectations around the attitudes of a queer Gen Z comedian—or “rug-pulling,” as he puts it—are at the heart of Reich’s excellent new show, which first ran at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2022 and premieres on HBO and Max this Saturday, Dec. 16. Reich talks about writing the show while he was still living at home with his parents during the pandemic, why he prefers the connection of a live audience to being a slave to the TikTok algorithm, and the ultimate laziness of railing against “cancel culture.”
When Reich appears on Zoom from London, the magenta eyeshadow he sports on stage is conspicuously missing (as are, presumably, the short shorts). “It is me,” he says of the self-obsessed performer he embodies in the show. “I wouldn’t say that I’m doing character comedy. I would say I’m doing stand-up. But at the same time it’s obviously a manic exaggeration of my most insane thoughts and feelings. So I would hope that the experience of meeting me is really different to the experience of watching me on stage.”
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Reich was 23 when he wrote and started performing Literally, Who Cares?! And he explains that the version of himself in the show will perpetually be 23—even if he was actually 25 when he taped it. He’s well aware that, with relatively little comedy experience under his belt, he was an unlikely candidate for such a prestigious platform on HBO.
“The trailer for the show came out a couple of days ago and the top comment on the video was like, ‘This guy doesn’t even have 10K Instagram followers, why the fuck does he have an HBO special?’” he recalls with a laugh. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, absolutely, I could have written that. That’s so true.’”
Reich wrote the show, which includes several musical interludes, during the pandemic—Bo Burnham’s Inside served as one inspiration—when he had just graduated university, didn’t have a job, and was living at home with his parents. “I was just trying to get my comedy career off the ground before the lockdown happened”—inauspicious timing that ended up allowing him the “stillness and period of reflection” to fully craft the one-person show he had always dreamed about bringing to Edinburgh.
The dichotomy of being stuck at home during what was supposed to be the prime of his life helped inform the themes he decided to explore, including the idea he puts forward early on that there’s never been a harder time to be young.
“It’s totally a joke because, of course, in almost every way, it’s one of the easiest times to ever be young,” Reich tells me. “Especially for me, specifically, one of the easiest human lives that’s ever been in the history of civilization is my life. But at the same time you can’t help but focus on the specific ways in which your own experiences are harder than they ever have been. It is ironic in the sense that I know that I can order food on my phone to my door, or whatever, but it isn’t in the sense of like, will there be a world in 50 years?”
These types of jokes, including one where he says he thought he’d spend more of his twenties dating and less time Googling the words “death toll,” are “meant to give the audience a sort of insight into the deepest anxieties and fears, and the narcissism and navel-gazing” that has come to define his generation.
Another joke from the show that he sometimes uses as an opener to ingratiate himself with the audience goes like this: “I’m a comedian, but often when people ask me what I do, I say that I’m an activist. Because I genuinely do think they’re not going to check.”
“The mode of the show,” Reich explains, “is an earnest set-up, followed by a callous, narcissistic, rug-pull punchline.”
It’s a type of comedy that Reich has chosen to develop live on stage as opposed to on TikTok, where many of his peers have found an audience in recent years—most notably 28-year-old Matt Rife, who has become a problematic sensation thanks to his most recent Netflix special.
“I haven’t seen that special so I can’t really comment on Matt Rife specifically because I don’t really know his stuff,” Reich says, diplomatically. “But I think in general, [TikTok] does prioritize different skills, and a different way of writing and a different way of doing comedy.”
“If you wanna be successful on an app like TikTok, you really have to understand the algorithm and understand what section of the extremely atomized audience you are going to try and isolate and appeal to,” he explains. “And that’s almost the opposite of what performing in comedy clubs is like, which is really starting from your atomized little group of your friends who you make laugh and using that as a base to try and find some kind of universalism, or at least write toward a more universal sense of humor on some level.”
“I tried it out in the pandemic. I’d post clips and stuff of me doing stand-up and would occasionally attempt a character. But I’m so bad at it,” Reich adds. “And also the stuff that I liked just didn’t get good responses. And the stuff that I thought was terrible got amazing responses and I just went, ‘Yeah, I mean, I could lean into this and ruin my own ability to enjoy my own output, but that feels like a mistake at this juncture, and so I kind of backed off from the whole thing.’”
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
