Adam Friedland’s Comedy of Discomforts

When CBS announced the cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” in July, a long-theorized concern came true: the late-night talk show was dead—for real this time!—its embalmed corpse receiving one last viewing before the burial. Colbert’s show is ending amid uniquely political circumstances, to be sure, with CBS’s parent company, Paramount, and President Donald Trump having reached a multimillion-dollar legal settlement while the company attempted to merge with Skydance Media. Had Colbert, a vocal critic of Trump, been axed because of a backroom deal between Paramount and the President? Many people speculated that this was the case. (Shortly after “The Late Show” ’s cancellation, the merger was approved by the F.C.C.) But the demise of the late-night talk show, writ large, was likely inevitable with or without suspected Presidential intervention. What the medium once exclusively produced in a single, glamorous package—standup monologues, current-events coverage, celebrity interviews, cheap pranks and game-show segments, live musical performances—can now be found in hyperspecific, often better-executed abundance on the internet. The variety show has less value in this marketplace of choice, where tastes and preferences can be algorithmically delivered to us at a moment’s notice. Why would an A-list comic even want to host a late-night show now, anyway? Operating under the umbrella of corporate cable television, resigned to presenting material within a narrow, formulaic model, and forced to interview industry-mandated guests—why not instead land some Netflix standup specials and host a podcast, avenues that offer similar salaries and far more creative license?

It’s telling that, in the wake of the past Presidential election, when the left scrambled to identify its own version of Joe Rogan—a comedic masculine voice who could champion progressive and Democratic interests to disaffected, apolitical audiences—no one looked to the late-night hosts. Were they not predominantly straight white men who told jokes and discussed politics on a national stage? Why were their voices not resonating with the desired demographics? Who were their voices resonating with? Were any of them actually funny? The obvious answer is that the late-night talk show, with perhaps the exception of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” has come to represent an odious strain of sanitized corporate liberalism. Colbert, the Jimmys—Fallon and Kimmel—and even the more laissez-faire Seth Meyers are critical of Trump, but they’ve also become, whether unwittingly or not, mouthpieces for monocultural conformity, and their humor and political commentary have suffered for it. Donald Trump is a Cheeto, they declare, in unison, before welcoming Benson Boone onstage to perform a backflip. The commercial realities of hosting a network television show seem to preclude the biting and incisive commentary, and boundary-pushing humor, for which audiences have turned to YouTube and podcasts.

Adam Friedland is not a late-night host, and he’s certainly not the left’s Joe Rogan. But could his YouTube talk show, “The Adam Friedland Show,” be the future of the form? At first blush, it appears unlikely. The thirty-eight-year-old Friedland is gawky and unpolished, an edgelord comic who used to co-host a podcast with Stavros Halkias and Nick Mullen called “Cum Town.” One of the most successful comedy podcasts of the past decade, “Cum Town” was rife with lewd conversational anti-humor and outlandish improvised scenarios where, for instance, Mr. Feeny, the principal from the sitcom “Boy Meets World,” seduces and sodomizes Ben Shapiro, the right-wing commentator. Everything was “gay,” everyone was a “pussy” or a “retard,” and no racial stereotype or accent was off limits. Yet, despite their vulgarity, the hosts of “Cum Town” were not—and I suppose you’ll have to take my word for it—hateful or violent in their politics. There was a Lynchian quality to the podcast, a fun-house-size absurdism that offset its overt offensiveness. Unlike many of the comedians in the Rogan-sphere, whose jokes about marginalized peoples tend to mask genuine bigotry, the “Cum Town” boys were Bernie Sanders voters who supported universal health care and trans rights, their indecent humor intended to rile up the stuffy suits who took everything at face value, unable to discern satire from hate speech. The podcast, though, despite the hosts’ clear leftist leanings, was decidedly apolitical, as Friedland summarized in a 2017 tweet: “Cum town is not a socialist podcast it’s not a fascist podcast it’s a podcast about being gay with your dad.”

Friedland’s role on “Cum Town” was that of the humiliated dweeb. “I was on a moronic podcast, and I was a nebbishy heel,” he said last year. “People called me a bug, and I had to tell my parents that that’s how I made money.” While Friedland may be overstating his subordinance—his meek, puppyish character added a crucial element to the trio—he did ride shotgun to Mullen and Halkias’s vibrant two-man game, often ending up as a crass punch line or the subject of a recurring gag. When “Cum Town” ended, in 2022, Mullen and Friedland launched “The Adam Friedland Show,” mostly as a bit: how funny would it be if “Cum Town” ’s quivering third wheel pretended to be a late-night host? They re-created Dick Cavett’s studio and outfitted Friedland in a loose suit, the program appearing as if it were taped on VHS. On an early episode of the show, Friedland opens with a wry, sputtering monologue. “Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to the future: the future of center-left late-night talk,” he says in a lilting, coy voice. “Fuck you, Stephen Colbert. Suck my dick, Jimmy Fallon. And why are you famous, James Corden?” Minutes later, Mullen interrupts the monologue, Bud Light in hand: “We fucking did it! We made a TV show. Fuck you! Fuck monologues, fuck late night. All this shit’s gay.” (Mullen left the show earlier this year.) The ensuing episode, which features an interview with the comedian Shane Gillis, includes jokes about an Emmett Till bio-pic and child molestation. Did I mention they’re all dressed in Halloween costumes?

If this sounds offensive or unwatchable to you, then, lo, it likely will be. But since “The Adam Friedland Show” first aired, it has progressively matured from a scatological, bro-centric hangout to a somewhat serious, highbrow comedy exploit. Around the same time that Friedland gained national attention—in 2023, after the 1975 front man, Matty Healy, went on the show and laughed at racist jokes about the rapper Ice Spice—a change started to occur. (Furious headlines and a social-media frenzy followed the incident, aided mostly by the fact that Healy was rumored to be dating Taylor Swift at the time; Friedland says that Swifties sent him death threats.) Friedland’s pre-show sketches and interviews became more sophisticated but no less comical; his interviews took on a slightly more buttoned-up tone. In the past year, he’s interviewed an eclectic group of guests: the disgraced politician Anthony Weiner, the former N.B.A. star Blake Griffin, and the actress Sarah Jessica Parker among them. He still embraces the role of the nebbish, the doofus cosplaying as Dick Cavett, but his edgy, harebrained comedy is undeniable, steeped in an eccentric performance art that, once you’re in on the joke, becomes irresistibly funny. Unlike other talk-show interviews, which often center on a promotional peg and a guest’s biography, Friedland prefers a crude yet sneakily substantive discourse. He asks Griffin which N.B.A. players are Republicans; he pesters Chris Cuomo about whether the Sicilian Mafia put a hit on his father, the former New York governor Mario Cuomo; he probes the rapper G Herbo about how nerds are able to survive on the East Side of Chicago.

Perhaps the most significant evolution on “The Adam Friedland Show” has been the host’s increased interest in exploring the changing waters of contemporary American politics. In sit-downs with Weiner and Representative Ro Khanna, of California, Friedland inquires into a range of offbeat topics: Why are members of Congress allowed to trade stock? Why are politicians so ugly? Why did Bernie bend the knee to Joe Biden after being ousted in the 2020 Democratic primary? How do people of integrity survive in the corrupt ecosystem of elected office? Friedland has also smartly examined how politics has crept into unsuspecting corners of the internet and infected the minds of young people. He’s interrogated the streamer Hasan Piker about the echo chamber of live streams; confronted Destiny, a popular internet debater, about whether organized online arguments actually accomplish anything; and challenged Harry Sisson, the Gen Z political influencer, about his affiliation with establishment Democrats. “You don’t tweet like a twenty-two-year-old,” Friedland told him. “You tweet like a D.C. comms person. You tweet like a press secretary.” Together, they consider why so many young people flipped for Trump in the 2024 election, and the subtext is palpable: because Party hawks like Sisson, as Friedland subtly demonstrates, have traded curiosity for definitiveness, populism for pragmatism. For an irony-pilled comic like Friedland, the establishment Democrats’ didactic moralizing is as off-putting as the Republicans’ fascist flirtations. How could someone as young as Sisson already be brainwashed by big-money interests?

Another cause for the right’s recent cultural reign is the rise of content creators such as the Nelk Boys, pranksters turned life-style influencers who have made conservatism seem, to their audience, edgy and cool. On their popular video podcast, “Full Send,” the Nelk Boys have interviewed Trump, J. D. Vance, Elon Musk, and, recently, Benjamin Netanyahu, among other far-right voices, with the rigor of schoolchildren asking their friends’ dads what they do for work. To explore this phenomena, Friedland invited a member of the Nelk Boys on to his show: Aaron Steinberg, better known to fans as Steiny. Similar to Friedland in his once subservient role on “Cum Town,” Steiny serves as “Full Send” ’s hapless heel, fighting for airtime, and respect, amid his more alpha-presenting co-hosts. (Unlike Friedland, however, Steiny seems entirely unaware of this dynamic.) The interview is bizarre. Friedland calls Steiny’s dad, the prominent defense attorney Harvey Steinberg, and asks him how he feels about his son being affiliated with “people that are kind of ushering in this era of fascism.” It’s important, though, that Friedland treats Steiny as a person worthy of intellectual interrogation, not as a louche frat-bro or an idiot. “If you have a political guest, do you feel a need to, like, deeply understand politics before you have them on?” Friedland asks him. Steiny, drinking a hard seltzer, considers this. “I’ll tell you what—no,” he replies. Trump won the election, he argues, because viewers got to see him, on “Full Send,” “as a person.” Friedland doesn’t chastise Steiny for his perceived ignorance but instead explores the epiphanic nature of his observation. “It’s definitely true that [Trump] doing Nelk was more useful than Kamala having Oprah or Beyoncé onstage,” Friedland says. He doesn’t need to lambaste Steiny for our amusement; he lays him out bare before viewers, allowing them to draw whatever conclusions they may.