Brandon Wardell on YouTube, Joker 2, the Podcast Economy, and the Perils of Virality

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OK, let's get into it—I'd been orbiting the idea of talking to Brandon for a minute now (about a year and a half actually), the arc of his career has fascinated me in the realms of comedy and online and it collides with one of my favorite regular topics on here, which is "how millennials survive waves of constant industry upheaval." Also, I just think he's funny, which is good because he is a comedian. The resulting conversation was both casual and engrossing, and I think his perspective on the topics I threw at him was really fascinating. Check it out:

How's your day going?
Pretty good. Just walking outside right now. Headphones on.

Are you making a direct Addison Rae reference there?
That was not an Addison Rae reference. But I understand how you can go from point A to point B on that one.

Good. I don't like being pandered to.
I just happened to be wearing headphones.

What headphones are you using?
AirPods Max.

How do you like those?
It's good—good noise-canceling, good on a plane.

I've been using Jabra earbuds for five years now, but the batteries are starting to weaken. I'll be on the market for new headphones pretty soon.
The wireless buds, it gets nasty real quick—the earwax of it all.

If you want to hear something horrifying, one of the cushions in my earbuds recently broke off and went into my ear canal. I had to pluck it out with a pair of tweezers.
That's terrible.

I removed one of the buds to place an order at the deli counter at the grocery store, and I felt the cushion start to work its way into my ear canal.
Oh my God, it just snapped off and went inside of your ear?

Yeah. I bought a pair of tweezers at the grocery store and removed it myself instead of paying urgent care $50 to do it for me. But I wasn't happy about the situation.
That's rough. I haven't had anything like that happen since my actual childhood. I had a pea stuck up my nose because I was trying to emulate Kel from Good Burger. Luckily, my parents had a doctor friend that was over our house.

I actually rewatched Good Burger pretty recently. I forgot that they get institutionalized in that movie.
Oh, they do. They're in the nut house.

When I saw it as a kid, it was one of those things where I was like, "I guess if you piss off the wrong people at your job, you get institutionalized."
Have you ever listened to Sinbad on Hollywood Handbook?

I have not.
It's one of the best episodes of that show.

I should check that out. I saw Sinbad at LaGuardia back in 2016 at the ticket desk. He was graciously taking pictures with every single person that asked him, and he was wearing three different types of hat on top of his head, too.
Oh, hell yeah. He seems like such a sweetheart. I hope he's doing alright.

I recently saw on Instagram that you caught Trisha Paytas' show at the Greek.
That was a lovely time. My gf was insistent upon seeing her live, and we weren't around for the Radio City Music Hall show. There's this fervor she has. She's great—a star, a singular voice, a journeyswoman. I was there for her gender reveal as well.

Really?
Yeah. She's having a boy. But yeah, she opens with the High School Musical stuff, the Disney Channel covers, and she closes with that "I Love You Jesus" song. It's crazy, thinking back to the days of her and Ethan Klein. Real divergent roads.

I forgot about that, honestly.
Yeah, they had a podcast together. I mean, she's married to [Ethan Klein's wife] Hila's brother. I don't know that much about the inner workings—but I do think that Trisha Paytas is quite the entertainer.

She's obviously better than Ethan Klein!
Did you watch that debate, by the way?

The Ethan-Hasan thing?
Yeah. It just felt so unproductive.

Honestly, I stayed away from it. It was one of those things where, for two weeks straight, I felt like I was constantly being subjected to every angle of it regardless. I didn't need to watch it—I somehow ended up absorbing it anyway.
Right, on your FYP.

Exactly. It did seem enormously unproductive. I don't think anybody got anything out of it, beyond some attention.
They were really getting into the weeds with all these proper nouns that I didn't recognize. "You played so-and-so's YouTube video." It was a whole ass mess.

What is your overall relationship as a consumer of media when it comes to YouTube? I've never really watched too much YouTube in general. I have some friends who watch a lot of it.
I'm always putting on YouTube video essays, like this morning as I was making eggs or whatever. "I guess I'll get informed in some capacity." I'll try to, like, look at some news—but very quickly I'm on whatever comes up on the YouTube recommended page. These video essays are made as second-screen content—to be watched in the background. It'll be some video on the dissolution of the Wonka candy brand, where I'm like, "Oh yeah, I guess Nerds doesn't say Wonka anymore." A lot of Beetlejuice clips will come up, a lot of Norm. I was watching the Nathan Fielder CNN thing.

I saw on Letterboxd that you liked Joker 2. I liked it a lot as well.
I like it more than Joker.

I didn't like Joker at all.
Joker is just a pastiche of The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver with DC IP slapped on—and I'd rather just watch one of those two Scorsese movies. But Joker 2...there's nothing like it.

Yeah, I was saying to my wife that, if Joker is Budget Scorsese, Joker 2 is kind of like Budget Lars Von Trier. You don't really see anyone trying to do that!
Yeah, I appreciate that it's inherently alienating. I like a big swing, you know? Tim Dillon in it, and he's kind of shit on it publicly on his podcast. He had a show at the Comedy Store last month that I did a set on, and I was telling him how much I love it versus Joker, which he was surprised by. It's not the commonly held opinion, but you share it.

I think it's going to age very well. It's not made for a big audience, but it cost, like, $300 million, and I respect using the money like that.
It's the most Joker move you can make.

You brought up Tim—I listened to the DJ Daniel episode of your podcast, which I thought was really funny. The way you and Jamel were talking about that entire situation felt like actual comedy. I'm curious to hear your perspective on approaching the political side of things compared to your peers. You've done DSA events too, and I feel like your comedy is very different politically from—and I'm just using him as an example here—Tim Dillon.
Well, Tim's a friend. But in terms of how I approach anything political, I don't think it's my place to be an ideologue or to do anything that's didactic. With the DJ Daniel thing, that was really fun for me because it was all ridiculous. I got really close to getting him on the podcast, which would've been huge. He gave out his phone number in a video, and I was texting it and I thought that going to come on the podcast. Maybe a parent intercepted, or maybe I was never talking to DJ Daniel at all. But I'm interested in the silly angle. There's a lot in the news right now that's disheartening that I just stay out of. But with something like DJ Daniel, I'm like, "Oh, there's a lot of meat on this bone."

But there is something happening in comedy right now where it's the least countercultural thing ever. There are certain people in comedy where it's like, "Oh, you're just doing state-sponsored media." I've touched on that a little bit. I tweeted something last month about that Andrew Schultz video where he was like, "The Democrats used to support hip-hop." But, the parental advisory stickers—wasn't that Tipper Gore? Then he's like, "Republicans be saying 'retarded'—they let you say whatever." That's not true! People are disappearing—being shipped out of the country—for speaking out about Israel.

There are definitely things happening in comedy that I don't love. Also, it's just a strange media landscape now. I watched Bernie on Flagrant—it was great, and he should do that. He should go on that show. It is funny that, if you are a U.S. politician, you have to go on Flagrant and talk to Andrew Schultz and three sycophants in Jordans. That's just a part of the job now. But I guess that's where the eyes are. Whoever they're running next should engage with that. That's where there's people. People don't pay attention to legacy media. They're not engaging with any of that, and they actively distrust it. So Bernie should go on that show, and whatever show he goes on, he's changing a couple of minds, which is the goal.

You're 32, and you've been doing comedy for almost 16 years at this point.
Yeah. I started doing stand-up when I was 17.

Tell me about that experience. It's a young age to put yourself out there.
It was just the D.C. open mic scene. My first time ever doing stand-up was at a mall. The venue doesn't exist anymore, but it was someplace called the Comedy Spot at Boston Mall in Arlington, Virginia. It was one of those comedy-sports-type spaces. I'd get a ride to the DC metro and it'd take me an hour to get to the venue, and then I'd get to the venue and they'd say, "No, you can't come in here. You're but a boy," and then I'd return home.

For the most part, a lot of the places would let me go in, do a set, and leave. But starting at 17 in D.C. in 2010, at that time, was good. I can't imagine what it's like starting now. I guess it was my first time being around adults unsupervised, but I was a comedy nerd before I started—and, you know, comics are inherently very bitter, I think because it's such am individualistic pursuit. There were definitely older guys that were a dick to me. They were antagonistic. "Who the fuck is this child?" But most of the people that I'm friends with now were very kind to me then, and there was enough support in the incubator that I think I turned out alright.

I started writing pretty young, and I had a similar experience with quite a few older writers—which was very annoying when they all started pretending we were cool the entire time a few years later. I'm curious to hear you talk about um if that experience of getting treated you know less than optimally by older comedians affected how you approach younger comedians today. Personally, for me, now that I know that people can be real dicks to younger people, I'm always like, "Well, whatever you need, I'm here."
Yeah, definitely. I'm old enough to be on the other side of that now, meeting young comics. I had a show in Boston and I was visiting the Harvard Lampoon, and there was some kid that was like, "I've been listening to your podcast since I was in high school," and that was the first time hearing that. You feel old, but it's nice to have been around long enough that you've impacted somebody during a formative stage of comedy.

The first time I ever met Tim Heidecker, he definitely would not remember it, but it was after a Comedy Bang! Bang! show that he was doing a character on. Him and a couple people that were on the show ended up hanging out at Adam Friedland's apartment, and me and Adam were big Tim and Eric guys, so we were nerding out. I remember telling him that the day I saw Tom Goes to the Mayor for the first time in sixth grade, I took a computer art class in middle school to learn how to make myself look like a Tom Goes to the Mayor character. He was like, "Oh, that makes me feel old."

Whenever I meet a young standup who's a fan, I feel the need to be encouraging. There's this kid Asad Benbow in New York—he's 21, and he's great. There's guys that I looked up to that showed me goodwill, and I try to repeat that versus these guys that were, like, bitter.

You gestured towards the changing landscape of things. You, personally, have probably seen a million years' worth of internet over the last 15 years of your life. You've had a few experiences in your career where you've gone relatively viral online, and it's broken through to popular culture at large. At one point, I think "virality at all costs" was seen as the goal, but there does seem to be a belief taking hold that going viral is inherently an unpleasant situation to be in.
I mean, I think that's why I had a posting gap for a period. I wanted to take a step back for a while. But now, if you're doing standup, you kind of can't afford to be elusive.

I've been on different cycles of the internet. Stars are not being created on X. Maybe Jaboukie was the last one, or Zack Fox. But it's weird when something goes beyond your control and it's not yours anymore. The original source code sometimes gets lost. Sometimes, being first, you don't really get rewarded. You just look like one person in a line of people doing the same thing. The "sheriff of sucking you off" tweet, are you familiar with that?

Yeah.
That was an interesting moment, because all of a sudden, it was Wendy's tweeting, "I'm the sheriff of burgers." There were government agencies doing it. But there's no clout residuals. I remember being really broke while that was a moment and not seeing any real dividends from it on a personal level.

I don't know. We all have to be on there. I like to pop out and show them that I've still got it. But I try to use it as a tool and not place my entire self-worth around it.
That's the growth cycle of a poster. I also just can't post as much as I did. In your Pitchfork review from 2018, you quoted something I said two years prior in Rolling Stone that I don't believe now. I was like, "Twitter is the purest form of communication." I couldn't feel further from that now, but it was true back then.

Well, Twitter was just a different medium back then.
Yeah. I was super active on it in pre-Trump 2016. That era of the internet felt sillier and more frivolous, versus these $8 a month verification guys that are posting all day because they're saying things they don't believe just to get the money. I think I was just really online in my early 20s, and it didn't feel dark at the time.

I'm still very reasonably online, but I don't feel nearly as bad about it at this point because I kind of know what the game is. I'm like, "This is just being online. I'm not taking this seriously." But there was this period of time where, for better or for worse, you could get a staff job at a media company from posting.
Oh, for sure. I think I kind of missed out on that era. I got work from Twitter, for sure—but there was a couple years prior where people were getting good TV staff writing jobs, which is crazy. You could go on Twitter and be like, "Why don't they call jet skis 'boulder cycles,'" and a horny guy with a beard would give you a fucking tv writing job. There was this bubble, and it's good that bubble burst, because it was a false metric. Now, when something pops off, you're kind of like, "What have I done?"

But also, I look at numbers on TikTok, and there's so many things that casually have a hundred thousand likes. Six years ago, that's a game changer. Now it's like, "Okay, we saw that." The way TikTok is set up, everybody's emulated that. Even if you're not on TikTok, every platform has their own TikTok. If you watch a video on X, there's a TikTok-ification of it where it just presents you the next video. Shit done changed.

To talk more about missing out on a time in which virality could lead to career success, I do feel like people who benefited from that period of time are also now dealing with—from where I sit, at least—something akin to a midlife crisis.
Oh, for sure—because the bottom fell out of everything. I remember the first time I felt like I had motion in L.A., I had a couple of jobs where it was like, "Oh great, I'm in Comedy Central, MTV, and Vice. This is gonna last forever." Then, immediately, all those things basically disappeared. I started doing my old podcast Yeah...But Still in November of 2017, right after I saw the writing on the wall where I was like, "I can't really rely on any of this." There's a couple people who were able to get grandfathered in, but now you really can't.

I've been around for multiple cycles, I feel like. One of my first real jobs was doing a Snapchat show.

That's some prime 2010s real estate right there.
You've just got to be adaptable and figure out how to ride the wave and not compromise your soul.

As you mentioned, you also got into podcasting a few years before the practice became Schultz-ified. Tell me about how your approach to podcasting has evolved.
When we started, it was way different. You could just post a photo and be like, "I have a podcast." There was Cum Town, Chapo, all the WTFs of the world, Bang Bang. It was just an audio platform—nobody really cared about video, it didn't feel like a prerequisite.

When Yeah...But Still ended and I had to start a new podcast, there was an adjustment. I was kind of limping at first, because I got grandfathered into an old system where all the people that bought in had done so during a previous media landscape. So I was like, "OK, like I can just keep doing the same thing." Then I started making less money, and I was like, "OK, interesting."

We've figured out how to put out video clips for the new podcast, because you just have to. That's the only way you're going to get new eyes, and it's the only way to make people care. But it did take a couple years of being thrust into a new landscape, not adjusting, and falling off to get it figured out. There's a certain amount of pride-swallowing that has to take place, and anyone who has achieved greatness has had to make through the cringe desert.

That's real. I want to hear you talk about your very brief Curb Your Enthusiasm appearance. I remember when I watched that episode and I was like, "Oh, that's Brandon Wardell. That's crazy."
It was very brief. Cazzie passed my name along and I got like a call about it right when I thought DoorDash was arriving. I picked up the phone and it was somebody from Curb. I did not talk to him long, but Larry was very nice. That moment feels like good lore, you know? And it's a clip that comes up a lot. Every couple months, that clip will get reposted, and then I have people in my mentions that are like, "Is that you?" My mom has asked me, "Do you think they're gonna they're gonna bring the character back?" [Laughs] I was on set for maybe an hour, but I was grateful to be a very small piece. For people that care about me, it's a, strange little Easter egg.