Stavros Halkias Can Tell When You're Lying
Jordan Ashleigh
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 this 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.”
It’s in these instances that Stavros presented himself as more of a conversationalist who happens to be really funny rather than a comedian mining his audience for potential viral moments. At his shows, he’s usually having as much — if not more — fun than the people he’s entertaining and cracking on; his shouting laughter appears to work itself through his body, usually ending with his head fully cocked back, sending sound waves to the ceiling. That eye-level human connection helped grow his online following almost immediately after he started posting clips. “I do think crowd work is overplayed. Too many people are doing it. People that aren't good at it are posting it,” he admits. “The reason I still feel good about posting crowd work is because I'm not looking to get anybody. I'm looking to discover stuff about the audience and then I'm looking to analyze it and I want to empathize with it, because I want it to feel the way it does when your friends roast you. Like, ‘Stop lying to yourself. I am your guy. I love you, bro– you're lying.’ I do think I have a skill for just reading people. Each person is endlessly fascinating.”
By the time Halkias finally got around to releasing his debut special on YouTube in June of 2022, he’d already racked up over a hundred thousand subscribers from those viral clips. The special, Live at The Lodge Room, was his introduction to the wider world as the comic he wanted to be, beyond podcasting and crowd work. In it, he provides his origin story of being the oldest child of Greek immigrants growing up in the Southeast Baltimore clash of people from his home country, poor and working class white Americans, the city’s Black majority, and the Salvadorian immigrants that Greeks delusionally feel are intruding on space that isn’t even theirs. He did impressions of the (maybe) subconscious racism of working class whites in his neighborhood, placing an emphasis on their wonky Maryland drawl (he posts reactions to Ravens games every week as his alter ego Ronnie, who has that signature accent). He reminisced on how impossible it felt for him to consistently keep weight off during the pandemic. And he opened up about how his father’s infidelity made him wish that his parents would have just gone their separate ways.
After a week on his Youtube channel, the special amassed over three million views and currently sits at just over six. Immediately after its success, he announced his official departure from the Cum Town podcast, which he says was already scheduled to dissolve by the end of 2022. He’s often persecuted online by fans of the show for switching up on Adam Friedland and Nick Mullen but to him, it was a natural progression to move on. In its place now is Stavvy’s World, a podcast that’s literally handled in-house — filmed in the spare room of his apartment, in front of a vibrant mural that calls back to ancient Greece; a small replica of a Greek statue with added belly fat usually sits at his feet. Guests so far have included fellow rising comedy stars like Sam Jay, Connor O’Malley and Brandon Wardell. When he gives me a tour of the DIY studio, there are huge bowls of coffee grounds on all the guest chairs. “We were smoking cigars to celebrate the holidays,” he explains. “This takes the smell out.”
On Stavvy’s World, similar to how crowd work functions as a small, but exciting part of his live show, a segment is dedicated to answering voicemail messages that fans leave. They range from admissions of infidelity, requests for advice on how to navigate the dating world after getting out of a long relationship, and the occasional query about whether or not it’s appropriate to romantically pursue the guy who draws your blood at the local clinic. Hilarious as these reactions are, they also emphasize that part of Halkias’ appeal is that he actually does give sound advice. His comedy — due in part to how transparent he is about his own dating woes, past and present — is in service of those who are in need of some emotional guidance.
“I'm very open, and it's okay to be down bad. That's the thing: I was that guy,” he says. “I really was broke as shit. No bitches. I'm fat. Just living in my friend's spare bedroom because he liked me. Because I was a good hang and I was honest with myself. I do feel kind of a weird goal of almost like doing the reverse of the Andrew Tate shit. Of all that toxic masculinity. And I get it when you're 11, it's like you want to be jacked and fuck people up and get pussy but it’s not real life. You don't have to be some crazy version of what you imagine [it means] to be successful. I've been a 20-year-old loser. You can find a way out.”
In the Fat Rascal special, Halkias spends less time tending to the love lives of his fans and instead, shows his penchant for cultural analysis. He walks out to the Mighty Mark-produced Baltimore Club track “Let Me Show Em” and rocked New Balance 990s as a nod to his hometown. He taped the show in Austin, which gives him the perfect opportunity to air out his grievances with how Big Tech ruins the distinguishable quirks of medium-sized cities by completely boxing locals out of the economy while preying on consumers. In the bit, he dreams up a company called Harvest that, with a jolly commercial voice, manipulates you into thinking there’s no need to have two kidneys. “With Harvest, your second kidney could be your first step to financial freedom!” He ponders on the potential dangers of Elon Musk’s Neuralink, if it actually worked: “Your childhood memories are going behind a paywall…To unlock Amanda’s breasts, please update your debit card information.”
He uses the personal experience of a white dude in Arizona telling him Greek people’s whiteness isn’t legitimate to relent that they are closer to Arabs than Europeans and that white people moved fast to incorporate his motherland into their empire so they could claim the rights to democracy and the Olympics. He shines talking about getting over the shame of shopping at the Big & Tall store, where he’s the daintiest customer.
The challenge of watching a Stavros Halkias stand-up special is that his online output is so centered around direct communication with audience members or Stavvy’s World callers that I tend to wait on the edge of my seat for when those extemporaneous moments are going to happen. It’s not that he isn’t skilled at constructing potent, punchy jokes or well thought out bits — he succeeds on those fronts. But there’s more electricity when he’s engaging with folks, even though the success of his shortform videos now occasionally affect how that plays out. At one of the six shows he did in Baltimore back in October, he had to quickly pivot from crowd work because each person he called on was so obviously making up a bullshit, sensational scenario in hopes of making his YouTube channel that it felt corny.
At his first Beacon Theater show in late November, that was less of an issue, likely because he made his prompts more New York-centric. At one point Halkias attempted to bond with audience members about how much of an accomplishment it is to have no roommates in New York City (the three-bedroom he has to himself in Astoria was once manned by four people; Halkias made a makeshift situation out of the living room.) One audience member gloated about living alone, only to later mention that they live in Virginia. “Virginia?” Halkias asked. “A three bedroom for $1200 in Virginia doesn’t count, motherfucker.” But where Halkias excels is in creating the feeling that he’s directly engaging with just a handful of people, even when he’s performing to 2500 folks inside of a performance hall that was constructed for opera. That illusion of intimacy is what makes him the draw he’s become.
“The better I get at comedy, I don’t know if I really believe all of it has to be dialed in,” he says. “If you’re telling a story, or you’re just trying to make it feel like, ‘I’m just talking to you how I would talk to anyone else’— that’s what I’m trying to get my stand-up to feel like. We’re having a fun conversation and I’m taking you through my world.”
Originally Appeared on GQ
