admin Two days before Thanksgiving, Stavros Halkias sits at the dining table of his three-bedroom Astoria apartment, comfortably dressed in a lavender velour Sergio Tacchini sweatsuit, trying to bask in the excruciatingly limited downtime that’s become customary in his life. He’s only been back in New York City from a trip to Nashville for a few hours before I trek through a cold rainfall and holiday traffic to meet him there, interrupting his abbreviated solitude. When I arrive, there’s dinner waiting — he’s ordered us some gyros and Greek salad from SVL Bar, his favorite neighborhood spot. It’s the type of on-brand welcome one would expect if they’re familiar with Halkias’ comedy, which, in addition to featuring refreshingly dead-on appraisals of relationship dynamics and the precarious straight male psyche, is often concerned with his own detrimental love of good eats. And when you’re on the road as much as he’s been over the past 18 months, quick comfort food can feel like one of life’s few constants. “I’m literally in this house two days a week,” he says, with a chuckle that suggests genuine exhaustion. In late November, he inched closer to the end of his nearly two-year Fat Rascal Tour with a handful of shows at New York’s Beacon Theater, and last week he released his first special with Netflix under the same name — a feat that’ll likely prove worth pushing himself to the brink.
Since early 2022, the 34-year-old — whose sweatsuit top is unzipped just enough to display some layered gold chains resting atop his chest hair, like a real athleisure-loving wiseguy from the 80s — has been enjoying newfound and widespread recognition. Much of that heightened profile is due to non-stop gigging around the country and a constant flooding of his social channels with short clips from those stand-up shows and his own podcast, Stavvy’s World. But, as with many overnight success stories that’ve come before him, Halkias’ career has been a slow build for more than a decade.
He made his very first attempts at stand-up during his freshman year of college at the University of Maryland’s Baltimore County campus, where he majored in political science and media studies, with a minor in writing. He showed promise early on in the DC-Maryland-Virginia region, winning local competitions for rising comics that earned him guaranteed opening slots for bigger acts whenever they came to town. On that circuit, he also met comedians Adam Friedland and Nick Mullen. By the mid-2010s, Halkias, Friedland and Mullen had all moved to New York, where they came together to create the wildly successful and frequently controversial podcast Cum Town in 2016. Weekly hour-long episodes with no shortage of dick jokes, self-deprecation and cringey riffs on race and sexuality paid the bills and then some ($30,000 a month, he says), but the show eventually got in the way of the stand-up Halkias had been wanting to dedicate himself to since his late teens. So during the pandemic, he made a point to get back to his foundations, tirelessly performing to sharpen his craft and piece together his first special.
“I was pretty much going to get the Comedy Central Half Hour, but (then) the pandemic obviously happens and no one’s shooting shit. You can’t,” he recalls. “And I felt like I was overdue for that to begin with. I tried to sell a special and nobody gave a fuck about me. I had a few followers. I was on a pretty successful podcast before that, but it was real niche. And to me, I didn’t want to fucking do podcasting, you know what I mean? I love stand-up.”
Amid the twisted set of unforeseen circumstances that swept us all up in 2020, time to sit and strategize with his team proved to be the best thing that could have happened for Halkias. He’d already begun taping every stand-up gig he did for a year straight, in preparation for the special that never was. And he’d noticed that since people were stuck inside, fully engulfed in social media, TikTok and YouTube were becoming a legitimate means for comedians to get their own material out. He started posting clips of his crowd work, effectively redirecting the trajectory of his career by thoughtfully (and hilariously) unpacking the misfortunes of despondent men who are often the architects of their own downfall. In one video, Stavros completely fries a man for quitting his public-school teaching position to take a job at Costco, where their in-house hot dogs are his stress relievers. Another man shamelessly confesses to regretting the kid that he helped make during the pandemic, regardless of how bad it makes him look. At another show, Halkias uses his own struggles with weight and poor eating habits to lure in an audience member who admits to an extremely specific addiction to ordering Heath Bar blizzards from Dairy Queen on DoorDash. The diagnosis? “This is a man who’s spiraling.”
