Comedian Lucas Zelnick Is Huge on TikTok—But Don’t Hold That Against Him

TikTok has a mixed record when it comes to comedy. The app helped launch the beloved Brian Jordan Alveraz—but also the controversial Matt Rife. Meanwhile, it has given rise to the 20-something crowd-work comedian, much to the chagrin of the old guard who spent their 20s working empty clubs.

Lucas Zelnick looks a lot like a viral TikTok crowd-work comic. In one of his clips, which has been viewed 6.7 million times, he earnestly—at times compassionately—parries a growing number of hecklers at one of his shows. In another, he banters with a person integrating back into society after a stay at a psychiatric facility. In yet another video, he stumbles into a conversation with a drug dealer who winds up delivering a sales pitch.

But Zelnick isn’t merely an online phenomenon. The 29-year-old has been doing standup for five years, and he has the confidence, and tact, of a comedian who’s endured many more years on the road.

“I grew up in Manhattan—rich kid, Jew,” he says moments into our conversation (his father is Strauss Zelnick, the former chairman of CBS). “Everyone was going into business and being a CEO and consulting in fancy schools.” Zelnick chose comedy instead, founding Sesh Comedy, a Lower East Side club that he eventually sold to tour across the country. He just embarked on his third run—a 30-plus-date tour that kicked off in London and goes until the end of December. “Year one was about figuring out what even the show I'm giving is; year two was about making that show better,” he says. “And now year three, I'm looking at it as coming into my own of who I want to be as a comedian.”

Zelnick doesn’t identify as a crowd-work comedian, though he’s not offended if other people use that term. It’s just that social media requires comedians to regularly put out content, and Zelnick doesn’t want to give all his jokes away at once. “I probably won't put out any more material until I'm ready to release an hourlong special,” he says. “Stand-up has changed so much, but by most definitions I'm very new.”

Zelnick and I talk about using sensitive topics as material, punching across instead of down, and—someday—abandoning the crowd-work label.

Lucas Zelnick: I would say very little crowd work. A lot of people who come to the shows can even be surprised by how little crowd work. The length of my set on tour sort of accordions because I'll try and build a new chunk of material, which will make it longer, but then if I don't like it, it'll get pulled out. Or once I do like it, I'll pull out something old that I don't like. Longer and then shorter, and then longer and shorter, as it hopefully improves. So towards the end of the tour last year as I was writing new material for this upcoming tour, sometimes the set was like an hour and 10 minutes or an hour and 15 minutes. And of that, probably 15 minutes would be crowd work and an hour would be jokes.

I think the biggest thing is to stay in front of people's faces. You just have to put out so much content. Jokes take so long to write. I will put out chunks of material but very selectively, and, frankly, I probably won't put out any more material until I'm ready to release an hourlong special, which I think I want to give that a few more years. Stand-up has changed so much, but by most definitions I'm very new. I'm about to hit my five-year anniversary, and I would say for most people to be getting the opportunity to perform for my own audiences, that's very rare. I think in the past it used to be maybe twice this amount of time to get to this point. I'm less experienced than a lot of people who've gotten seen in the past, and so I wanna give it more years before I put out a special. But I put out 10 minutes of material with Don't Tell Comedy, and then I put out 10 minutes of material with Comedy Central. So I've put out 20 minutes, and then the rest has pretty much been crowd work.

What I feel is overwhelmingly grateful for the fact that I can perform for crowds of people who come to see me, and the notion of sitting in my house resenting who my fan base is or how I'm referred to is pretty insane to me given that it's enabled me to do my passion, get overpaid for it, and be here at 12:13 p.m. on a Thursday talking to you. So I hope when people watch my comedy, whether it's crowd work or material, I'm able to convey what I'm trying to convey, which is who I am. And I hope that comes off as someone who's intelligent, thoughtful, not too frequently leaning into hacky things or trite ways of making people laugh, subverting the expectations of where people typically make jokes, whether that's in their written material or in crowd work.

The cool thing about stand-up is you could say whatever you want, but it's all in the room. If you're good or you're not good, it's self-evident pretty much based on how it's received. I mean, sure, you could do some really lame stuff and still get very cheap laughs, but for the most part, night after night doing the act is what will make people refer to you a certain way. I try to do crowd work in a more long-form way that is more informed. I don't always meet that goal. Sometimes it is easy enough when there's a girl and a guy and they're saying they're just friends to be like, "Are you sure you're not boning?" Sometimes that's the easiest thing to do, but I just try to be myself onstage, and hopefully that looks different than what other people are doing, even if it's in the same genre.

Good comedy can, if at the very base level, summarize and make people feel seen for the collective but unsaid things that everyone in a room is feeling. And if you can articulate that very well, sometimes, before you even say a joke, just articulating and seeing people for that is funny in itself. Comedy's about tension and release, but sometimes relieving that tension means just addressing it in a way that's not making anyone feel bad. But it's like, if I'm talking to a trans woman in the audience, there is an inherent tension in that this person is part of a group that is punched down upon by many people. We are in a live setting. I'm clearly a straight man, so I'm not native to [their] community. And if people in the crowd are liberal, predominantly, which is many of the rooms I play in, they probably don't want this trans woman to feel bad in my audience. And that is a scary moment. Like even me saying “trans woman,” I think like a lot of people are like, what's gonna be the end of the sentence? Is he gonna say “shouldn't be in women’s swimming” or is he gonna say “are beautiful?”

I realized that crowd work doesn't just have to be a joke written about the content of what someone does or who I am. It can be a narration of the heightened emotional state that everybody is in.

It's sort of alienating to not.

My sister has special needs. It's hard to describe the nature of disability, but she won't ever live independently. I'll be her legal guardian, as well as my brother, when my parents die. But I think what you learn growing up in a house with someone who has a mental disability is part of the joy of caring for someone with a mental disability are the legitimately funny moments that occur with someone who doesn't have a mental disability. And that doesn't mean you're laughing at them, you're just laughing as part of who they are. And they're as much able to be a source of joy as anyone else. And I think that's a good metaphor for how I approach comedy, which is to say the belief that there's something funny about everyone and that there's nothing insane about pointing it out. But also that you should be aware of why certain people are less comfortable laughing about things than other people and why certain things feel more tense than others.

When I do find those moments of tension, they actually do go quite well because I feel quite comfortable playing in that space. I think the best description that I've found about the kind of satire I do in those tense moments in crowd work is making fun of allies while being one. I'm playing upon the expectation of what others would have of a straight white guy while trying to be decent, but break down the kind of ridiculousness of how high certain people go with it.

Without a live audience, satire can get lost. I have a podcast called Can I Go Home Now with my friend Jamie Wolf and we're now shifting to more of an interview format, which we think of more as long-form crowd work, but we used to do a lot of satirical rants. Without a live audience it sometimes can be hard to clarify [the intent]. When I'm in front of a live audience, I can figure out where the line is and where to stop. I think it's when they stop laughing and/or I can just feel that with other people in a room. I think sometimes on a podcast it can be a little harder.

I don't have a great frame of reference ’cause the social media comedy takeover happened very early into my career. But what I will say is, especially in my first year of touring, I felt that there were a lot of people there supporting something they just came across. And I think they didn't know what to expect and I didn't know what to expect. And I think there were a lot of people just showing up for various reasons, whether it was like, they thought it was very much a drunk, wild, anything-goes experience. Certain people I saw dressed up in really nice outfits, and I'm like, “You're going to a comedy club where there's a drink minimum and you're gonna have to eat fake nachos. You shouldn't be dressed so nicely.” But people are chatty sometimes and I try to have a clear moment of when I shift from like, “We're having fun” to like, “Hey, this is disruptive.” Sometimes I have to kick people out, but I really try not to.

I would say Jamie Wolf. KC Shornima, who's a really funny SNL weekend update writer. John Kennedy, who used to be on my podcast. Sureni Weerasekera, who just did Netflix’s Introducing…. Some people I would say that are around my class whose comedy I really respect are Maddie Wiener and Emil Wakim. I was mentored by Ashley Gavin, who is also big on the internet, and I love the comedy of Geoffrey Asmus and Jordan Jensen.

It's a mix of those two things. Because of TikTok and the internet, everyone who's young is so similar it's kind of frightening. I went to play the University of Arkansas, and based on my elitist New York Jewish upbringing, I pictured the kids in Arkansas to be wrapped in Confederate flags holding AR-15s, riding warthogs or you know, whatever. And they just look like Gen Z kids from anywhere. Everywhere I go, the young people dress the same, come off the same, have very similar political beliefs. But then when I'm in comedy clubs, especially five-show weekends where there's thousands of seats available, my shows don't sell out till pretty close to the showtime, and [local] people who are older will come. Plano, Texas, for example: It'd be a bunch of young people who found me on the internet and are left-leaning as well as, like, eight 64-year-old Republicans sitting in the back having a straight-up bad time.

I'm developing two film projects right now that are very, very early stages, and then I've also worked on some TV stuff. I pitched a TV show unsuccessfully last fall, and I look forward to future unsuccessful TV show pitches as well. I think there's so many ways to get a show, but knowing that standup is my primary thing, I think it'll be unlikely to really see a TV show or movie get made in an immediate term. I think it'll be years of hopefully raising my profile and developing the skills, making the relationships, and hopefully creating something that's really good.

Well, I've always said I'm sort of a vessel for other people's money. In that regard, I'm sort of optimizing for the best thing that comes my way. But no, I think in a perfect world my career could look like something like John Mulaney's career, which is to say involvement as an actor in TV while still always doing standup and touring. Mulaney is very much primarily still a stand-up, but touring's just personally very challenging, traveling as much as I do. So I think in the full course of time I would have different outlets. My view is everything that you say really should be funny and you shouldn't be making points to make points. But I have points I wanna make. I just think I'd rather make them in TV or film rather than be onstage and be like, “Now let's get real for a second.” I just don't wanna be that guy ever. I'm not looking to be staffed in a writers room right now, but if the SNL cast decides they want another mediocre white guy who's decent looking, I'll give you my phone number and you can have them reach out to me.