Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Neal Brennan: Crazy Good’ On Netflix, Making The Case For Talented People To Be A Bit Twisted

In his first two hours for Netflix, Neal Brennan played with the structure of the stand-up special, whether by moving among three microphones for three different styles of jokes in 3 Mics, or by representing blocks of material thematically with actual blocks in Blocks. Both of those specials found Brennan confronting his struggles anxiety and depression. For Crazy Good, Brennan is no longer struggling, embracing crazy as a good trait for talented people, while also questioning why we look to comedians and influencers to influence them.

NEAL BRENNAN: CRAZY GOOD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Since his early work with Dave Chappelle on Half-Baked and Chappelle’s Show, Neal Brennan has gone on to collaborate with many top comedians, either as an on-air contributor for The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, or behind the scenes as a consultant, executive producer, writer, or director on projects ranging from the Academy Awards, the White House Correspondents Dinner and Saturday Night Live, to specials by Chris Rock, Ellen DeGeneres, John Mulaney, Michelle Wolf, Seth Meyers, Hasan Minhaj, Al Madrigal and more. You may even have seen him on your TV in commercials alongside Kevin Hart.

For this special, Brennan wants us to question the way we talk about mental health and comedians, how we respond to trauma, and what to do about social media influencers.

“I have some terrible news,” he tells viewers who may remember his previous specials. “I feel pretty great.”

Memorable Jokes: Brennan makes bits about social media hustlers more memorable by reframing them into a vertical format inside of an imaginary cell phone, and similarly takes his bit imagining religious attack ads and turns them into real TV commercials playing while he speaks in a small circle in the corner of the screen.

Brennan also wryly notes that when he pokes fun at his belief that women love to talk about trauma, he knows he also does, too, with a catch: “But when I talk about trauma in public, it’s different. It’s on Netflix, God damnit.”

When people claim that life is better now than when we had nothing else to do but watch a handful of TV channels, he counters: “Depression and anxiety are worse.” Why? “I blame documentaries,” he jokes. “We used to not know anything.” Now perhaps we know too much?!

On the 2024 presidential election: “As far as I’m concerned, the next president is either going to be Trump from prison or Biden from hospice.”

Brennan wonders why it’s so easy for us to crack jokes about murder but not rape. But he’s even more preoccupied with the notion that we’re now holding comedians to a higher standard than the rest of society, taking down Ellen DeGeneres for supposedly being a mean boss, instead of celebrating her for being a gay rights icon who got kicked off primetime TV only to come back and dominate daytime TV. Then there’s the handyman who likely saw Brennan’s commercials and wondered: Is Kevin Hart humble? Or people boycotting Spotify over Joe Rogan’s views on vaccines. Brennan quips the main problem with Rogan’s podcasts are that they’re too long. Keep talking for three or four hours uninterrupted and you’ll say stupid things, too.

If he were to go back 20 years to 2004, Brennan notes: “I would not have said the host of The Apprentice and the host of Fear Factor” would be leading political figures in 2024.

And as to the title of his special, Brennan goes through a laundry list of famous people, from athletes to inventors to rappers to comedians, noting how most of the greats were psychopaths, addicts, or “total sickos,” and says he doesn’t have the time to also include all of the alcoholic comedians who turned out to be great at comedy. Brennan believes that people with a uniquely great talent often are only great at that one thing.

“I’m good at this, and I’m not good at relationships,” he says of his comedy, “because I’m preoccupied with this.”

Our Take: Much like Demetri Martin, whose most recent Netflix special Demetri Deconstructed just came out the previous week, Brennan plays with the traditions and conventional forms of presenting stand-up comedy.

Here, for example, is how he literally reframes a joke he told the live audience about social media hustlers.

The bit in which he produces actual TV commercials for religions in the style of political election attack ads takes on unexpectedly different weight thanks to the timing of it all, since he filmed this hour in November, just weeks after the Hamas terrorist attacks triggered an all-out invasion by Israel into Gaza.

So Brennan carefully follows up his imagining of an attack ad against Muslims by saying: “I wrote this joke three months ago. Different world.” He similarly defends a joke about Jews by noting that they run show business precisely because they practically invented the industry.

He’s also quick to make fun of the comedy business. An opening gimmick finds Brennan asking ChatGPT to answer the prompt for “opening line to comedy show,” then marveling at the mediocrity of the results. “Isn’t that weird. That’s a trillion dollars in deep learning.” 

Even weirder for Brennan is finding himself having to answer questions about Chappelle for the past 20 years, and now fielding criticism on behalf of so many other peers, too. “It’s a weird time to be a comedian,” he says. “Like, I didn’t get into comedy to make grand moral judgments about my friends.”

The one place where we so far have agreed to disagree is on why comedians keep finding themselves in hot water in recent years.

Brennan’s claim: “Comedians get in trouble all the time for talking about transgender rights. Which is, How corrupt is the rest of society that we’re talking about a serious issue, and people go, ‘Well, what do the clowns think?’ Why are you bringing this up?”

While I agree that we shouldn’t be expecting comedians to have all the answers, I also have to point out that comedians can decide what they want to talk about onstage. Nobody is telling Chappelle to keep harping on trans issues in every special he puts out. Nobody is asking Rogan to bring up the same handful of issues in every episode of his podcast. They keep dedicating their stage time to arenas and podcast time to millions to focus on this stuff when they could be telling the silly, entertaining jokes that Brennan or any of hundreds of other comedians tell. But that’s neither Brennan’s fault nor his responsibility.

Our Call: STREAM IT. I wouldn’t necessarily call Brennan crazy or say that this special is indeed crazy good, but he clearly put a lot of thought and effort into actually making his comedy special special, and can appreciate what he says in provoking us into thinking differently both about social media and about the insanity that often goes into greatness. Although I would hasten to add as a public service announcement that you don’t have to be insane to be great. Please don’t romanticize addiction or mental illness.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.