The F-You ‘South Park’ Episode and the Precarious State of Comedy in 2025

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1:51For as long as we've been doing this show, it's been a pretty depressing conversation around comedy in film and TV. The studios don't think comedies are theatrical anymore, and the streamers don't make that many because they're global platforms, and the genre doesn't travel as far as drama as an action does. In TV, pilot season is dead. The broadcast networks are barely making scripted comedies. I counted six total comedies on the entire fall schedule across the four networks. Maybe seven if you include Ryan Murphy's 911 show, which is unintentionally funny. And many of the shows that are considered comedies, like The Bear or Shrinking, aren't all that funny.

2:26That, combined with the ongoing implosion of late night and the broadcast TV model in general, the proliferation of comedy on social media and YouTube and podcasts, means it's pretty scary out there for traditional comedy writers. But lately, I've noticed a slight difference. A few more comedies in the mix. Tires, the Shane Gillis series that he self-financed and sold to Netflix, that popped up on the Nielsen chart of most watched originals. In movies, we've got three big comedies about to come out, Naked Gun, Theaters, and Freak Your Friday, also in theaters, and Happy Gilmore 2 on Netflix, though all of those are based on pre-existing IP.

3:02The number one movie on Netflix for the first half of 2025 was Back in Action, an action comedy with Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx. Ryan Gosling and Will Ferrell are doing a big action comedy called Tough Guys at Amazon. And slowly but surely, I'm seeing more trade announcements for script sales or interesting castings for studio comedies. So is comedy creeping back? Is this all cyclical and comedy is poised for a comeback? I'm skeptical, but our guest today is more optimistic. Michael Lasker is a big comedy manager. He's got tons of director, writer, clients like Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stavnitsky from The Office and No Hard Feelings, Humail Nanjiani, Jake Szymanski, who's done a bunch of TV, a bunch of others.

3:42He's talked Oscars with us before. And today, Michael's here to talk about the state of the scripted comedy business, what the studios and networks are buying? And is there a slow but sure comedy comeback in the offering? From The Ringer and Puck, I'm Matt Bellany and this is The Town.

4:02All right, we are here with Michael Lasker, manager, helps run one of the bigger talent shops around town, Mosaic, specializes in comedy, which is why we want to do here. Welcome back. Thank you. I'm so, I mean, I'm just honored to be here not for an Oscar-related episode. I know. I thought you go into a hole for six months outside of the Oscar season and then come back. It's the only way I can prepare. Although an agent who is involved with one of the big shows that was nominated for an Emmy was like, I need you to go on Belony and talk about the Emmys. We need to get some good vibes out there.

4:37Oh, no, no, no, no, no. You cannot start taking pitches to promote certain people. We will ban you if you start doing that. I couldn't agree more. This is a no spin zone. All right. So we're going to talk about the state of the comedy market right now. But I want to start just with the news because last night, I mean, this South Park episode, everybody is talking about it. It is kind of amazing that these guys, 27 years into the show, have that in them. And it is such an F you to Trump, to Paramount, to Skydance, to basically everyone that has been negotiating this$1.5 billion deal that they closed in anticipation of this season.

5:26Have you ever seen a flex like this in the comedy world where you sign a deal that big and then you just shit all over everybody involved in that deal? No, and it's funny. I was at a dinner last night and I got several texts from friends being like, you need to watch South Park tonight. And I don't remember the last time I watched South Park in linear fashion. And I turned it on at 10 o 'clock and I couldn't stop laughing and my mind was blown and I felt how you felt. Yeah. If you haven't seen it, it goes after Trump. There are multiple references to Trump's micropenis. You see Trump's micropenis multiple times.

6:04There's an AI generated PSA ad at the end that is like it's hard to even describe the whole plot centers around them paying off a lawsuit by Trump. It's basically ripped from the headlines, which South Park often does. And they work on these episodes right up until airing. But the fact that this whole deal was such a contentious back and forth for months and they were at each other's throats. And finally, these guys got a five-year deal that is going to pay them$275 million to write and produce the show. And then they got a$300 million a year deal with Paramount Plus to air the show. And they get 50 % of that revenue.

6:51I mean, we're talking like just to them. We're talking so$1.5 billion for the streaming deal. They get half of that. So$750. then 275 times five. So what is that? 1250. They get$2 billion to share. So not bad, right? And then they just go out and absolutely firebomb everybody. Is there anyone else in comedy who could do this? Well, no. I mean, those guys are, you know, they sit above the fray in very rarefied air and they've, you know, they've been marching to their own, you know, beat for literally 27 years and this is what the show is supposed to do and and my takeaway watching last night was just frankly being thankful that there's people like this that can still do this trust me there's dozens and dozens of other people working in comedy who want to be able to do this but they don't quite have the power to do it right now and they don't have the platform to do it but this is why comedy is important and this is also why frankly you know we don't have to dwell on it but it's like, it is also just comedy.

7:57I mean, people should have a thick skin. Oh, wait, have you ever met the president or heard him speak? I'm aware. I'm aware of how he views the world. But that's why, you know, when, you know, it's like what's happening with Colbert, what can happen with other people, you know, are they making a difference? I hope so. But they obviously all are in a bit of an echo chamber themselves. And so why should they be penalized? You know, so I felt a, I felt really some relief and I was excited and I had some gratitude, honestly, of like, I'm glad these guys are still out there doing it. And it's really funny.

8:30I watched the episode. It was hysterical. And it was also, what the episode was really doing is it was talking about religion in schools. And it, as always, had a brilliant take on why, you know, on what the issue is and what the different sides of it are. So I thought it was hilarious. I've seen the clips of it pass around like 100 times today. Well, those guys are the best to ever do it in terms of poking people. It's amazing. All right, so let's talk about the bigger issue here, the comedy market, because since we launched this show, we've been talking about how comedy is in the crapper. Nobody wants to make theatrical movies because comedy is not perceived as a theatrical genre.

9:10We've been talking about how the market for comedy in television is so down because most of the streamers are global. They don't want shows that have American-centric comedic sensibilities in them because they won't play overseas. The definition of a comedy has been kind of changed, I think, especially when it comes to awards. Most of the shows that are nominated for comedies are not that comedic. And the broadcast model, which supported the comedy sitcom genre for 30, 40, 50 years, has basically imploded. So where is comedy now? Because I've seen some headlines lately and I've been hearing around town that comedies seem to be not hot, but at least lukewarm these days.

10:03Everything you just said is correct as far as like the trending patterns. but I am a big believer that like all things in this business, it's cyclical and it's really funny because some clients of mine sold a pitch to New Line. I can't talk about what it is yet. We still have to actually make the deal. We sold it to New Line and the lawyer for the clients is a lawyer that works a lot of my clients, a guy named Jeff Frankel and he was talking about in some of the emails, we were coming back and forth to New Line execs about the time he had sold a movie called American Pie. He sold a movie called Wedding Crashers and my point is I was in college with American Pie came out, there hadn't been a movie like that since Porky's, right?

10:40And then the irony is we now know Porky's was really like a B movie. American Pie is a really, really well-done movie to like my parents saw that movie and loved it because of the themes it had about growing up. And then mid-2000s, you get the amazing R-rated rush of Wedding Crashers, old school, and then you have the massive explosion of Will Judd, Jay Roach, McKay, Todd Phillips, and on and on and on. And my point is, it was cyclical. It was just time for it to come. You didn't have any of that in the 90s. In the 90s, you just had like rom-coms with Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock. And so my point is, this stuff always has a way of bouncing back.

11:15You think so? I do, I do. Because the model changed. The difference between the 90s and 2000s was just a trend piece. It wasn't a business piece. And the studios have decided that certain genres are not theatrical. They should go to streaming. and comedy is among them. Yes and no. Because, so it's funny, I got to Mosaic in 2008. And so that was a year after, you know, our client Judd, you know, had produced Superbad. And then a couple years later, we made the movie Bad Teacher, which was written by my clients, Lee Eisenberg and Gene Zimnitsky. Bad Teacher we made for 20 million bucks. It was this new type of deal.

11:52I think they paid Cameron like a million dollars and then she owned a huge piece of the movie. And so my point is, there was this moment, and I think, and it's coming back, I'm seeing it in comedies that my clients are making at the various studios where the studios want to make the comedies. They want to prop up all these people in the next stars, Shane Gillis, Nate Bargatze, all these people, obviously Seth Rogen. They want to make them at smaller budgets because that's how they were doing it in the 2000s. Even if you look at Will and Adam, what they made Anchorman for was not nearly as much what they then made Talladega for.

12:23But Talladega was their big win because Anchorman made like$80 million and then they took out this big pitch. it was the right timing because of NASCAR and they got more money to make it. And it was going to be a bigger movie. But you can't make a Talladega Nice because it's not going to gross to$300 million. I don't agree. Really? Okay. But you see the market. You're seeing the spec market right now. Spec is a script written without any attachments or anything. It's just a script that you sell to a studio, original. Are studios buying more specs for comedies? They are. I think this will be in the trades in a couple of days.

12:56There's a television writer who wrote this great script that's a very high concept comedy, kind of in the vein of like Liar Liar Groundhog Day. And the guy took like 25 producer meetings the last two weeks as the script went around town and all the studios already had it anyways. And a client of mine, who's a director, read it and thought it was great and thought he could help develop it even more. And so a studio bought it at a really, really big sale on Monday. So another client of mine, this guy Ryan Engel, he has a movie that's shooting right now. Yeah. Didn't he do Rampage? He did. He did do Rampage.

13:24That's right. And he has a movie shooting right now for Universal called Italiana. This was an idea that his wife gave him a couple of years ago. He wrote it on spec, and then we set up a Universal with Will Packer. And the executive, Eric Byers, who's a good friend of mine at Universal, had said to me, you know, we're really trying to buy more specs, frankly, from the perspective of if you have a spec that's pretty good, you're like halfway, you know, down the road, already ready to make the movie. The pitches, especially if you don't have big pieces of talent, the thing you have to understand, you read about these giant pitches selling with giant movie stars.

13:55Most of them become nothing. You know, most of them are just these like fast kind of heat-seeking missile, you know, sales. How dare you suggest that an article in the trades doesn't end up coming true? Well, but like, so Eric said to me, you know, they're making Italian in Italy right now and they're making this movie called One Night Only with Will Gluck, I think in the fall. That was also a spec they bought. And then there was a spec that, I believe the Shipley brothers, really talented writers who did this show, Wrecked on TBS years ago. There's something they'd set up over at Sony a couple months ago.

14:24So here's my point. The studios really, really want to be buying specs right now. They will buy pitches from the right people. If Seth and Evan went in with their next idea tomorrow, if my clients, Anders and Morris, who have made a bunch of comedies, went in with a pitch, that's going to sell. You have to be proven. So it is. So the market is picking up. People are buying this stuff. Why? Why are they buying it now? Let me go back a step. I'm going to give you my theories on why we have been in these doldrums. If you go back and you look at the explosion of the mid-2000s, and you look at who really led the charge, you know, Judd, Adam, Will, Jay, Todd Phillips, most of those people migrated out of comedy.

15:03They got old. Well, maybe, but also they had even bigger aspirations. And so you and I are old enough to remember when like Bill Murray was doing like The Razor's Edge and Mad Dog and Glory. I mean, he won an Oscar nomination, which came with Lost in Translation in 2003. So you're saying there's a hole that's been opened up. Exactly. Even look at Ross and Thurber. He did Dodgeball and Where the Millers, two of the more successful comedies of that era. I guess it turned out he wanted to be a huge action director. Good for him. You know what I mean? That's what he does. He just made Voltron for Amazon.

15:32So it's like a sports team. The town has to replenish all these directors and writers to want to tell these stories. Yes, but you talk to studio executives and they say two things. There is no up-and-coming class of writers for whatever reason, whether there's no training, whether there's just a different sensibility in the air where comedies that were outrageous and fun are now considered offensive and inappropriate, or there is not a business model to support those kinds of films because the bottom has fallen out of theatrical and DVD. Yeah, Michael, you say all of these specs are selling and a lot of stuff is going on, but are these movies going to be in theaters or are these going to be on streaming?

16:16Because that's the difference. All the ones I'm talking about are all theater movies. You know, these are movies that are selling Universal, Sony, New Line. Look, I'm one of the few people, I never understood during the strike why people were so mad at Netflix. Because it's like, well, they only brought like$100 billion into our business. And so the streamers play a vital role in all of that. With all that said, I still believe fervently that you want to see a comedy in a theater. When I think about if I had to name my top 10 like movie-going experiences of my life, never laughed harder than the first time I saw something about Mary.

16:50or Old School or Wedding Crashers or Borat, right? And so the executives of these studios, I think are very smart. And what they have realized is comedy can come back if we nurture it enough, but we have to make it at a budget. And the way to do that is to build the next wave of stars. And that's my other kind of theory, Matt, which is that if you also go back and look at the explosion in the 2000s, so many of the men and women who were in those hit movies, for whatever reasons, decided not to stick around and do comedies. Because when you think about like the biggest comedy star of our entire era of the modern modern era is obviously Jim Carrey.

17:26Right. And Jim Carrey made all these huge comedies. He definitely dabbled in dramas. He wanted to be, you know, do that stuff, too. But you knew that he was good every couple of years for like a Bruce Almighty, a liar liar. Right. Yeah. But Jim now is doing comedies, but he's doing them under the guise of Sonic the Hedgehog. And that, to me, is where comedy has evolved. You can do a theatrical comedy, but it has to have IP attached. You can do a gross out comedy, but it's got to be called the naked gun. You can do these things, but there has to be a plus on top of it. And that's what studios have said for the past couple of years.

18:05What's the plus that makes the comedy theatrical? I think you're right at a certain budget level. And don't forget, you know, the hangover, I don't know the exact number, but I mean, they paid the three guys nothing. Todd gave back a bunch of his money, which became the biggest payoff of his career. They made that movie relatively cheaply. So that's all I'm saying. And if you, all the execs I talk to every week, they feel the same way. They want, like, I know at New Line, they've realized that one of their old bread and butters had always been these rom-coms. And I believe there's an exec there that they basically just designated that she's going to basically oversee doing the rom-coms.

18:38So everybody on that side of the aisle believes this is possible. We've got to find the right stories and the right people. And again, you go back to the actors outside side of you know will jim and adam and obviously adam and what might turn out to be one of the most brilliant business moves of all time migrated to netflix so you know what happened is adam sandler excuse me is that we didn't have enough people staying around i mean remember when it was like it's going to be steve carell right and i love steve carell but now all of a sudden steve carell is doing foxcatcher being nominated for an oscar he's doing the big short okay it's going to be jonah hill nope now he's in moneyball oscar nomination wolf of wall street oscar nomination Well, because they know the career longevity comes with prestige and drama.

19:18It's tough to be a 50-year-old comedic actor. Jonah's a good example, right? I mean, if you go back to the late 2000s and you look at, you know, Superbad and some of those movies, everyone had their money on Jonah. He's brilliant. And then you look at the 2010s, he made like two comedies. He wanted to do other things. He directed a movie. He just directed another movie that's coming out from Apple next year, I think. So my point is, when Jim Carrey hit, Jim Carrey was like, give me all the comedies. I'll do them back to back to back. When Will Ferrell hit, how did he use his capital? Okay, I've made Anchorman.

19:48Now I'm making Talladega. Now I'm making the other guys. Now I'm making Step Brothers. And so we have to get back to that. And the other thing about all this, I don't know how anybody could think comedy is dead when stand-up comedy has taken over the world. And, you know, Nate Bargazi just made his movie at TriStar. He's setting up stuff left and right. Shane Gillis, whenever he wants to be in a movie, could go be in a movie. He's on the road and focusing on his show. Well, but a generation ago, Shane Gillis would have gotten a big studio movie and they would have tried to Kevin James him and he's not doing a big studio movie.

20:20Probably by his choice. Probably because he makes way more money touring. Yeah, but I think there will be a meeting in the middle where because Shane Gillis has his crew of guys who make stuff with him, he'll come with his own idea and they'll have a story. I mean, it's funny. You made a good point about TV comedies that are not comedies, right? Here's another perfect example. I'm not just saying this because I'm from Tulsa and Bill Hader's from Tulsa, But there were times on SNL where I thought, oh my God, Bill Hader, he's the goat. He might be the best one who's ever done it when he was doing Italian Charlie Rose.

20:48He was amazing. He leaves SNL. He's been in Superbad. He's in Trainwreck. And it turns out he wanted to go make a Coen Brothers film for four seasons on HBO called Barry. And it was brilliant. Same thing with Donald Glover. He's on a huge NBC hit. Turns out he wants to go make a tone poem for four years on FX, which was brilliant. And so my point is, these were the people, men and women, that we were looking at as like, oh, they're going to go become the thing. But they didn't all want to do it. And I think that's okay. You know, yes, I think some of this stuff feels a category fraud. There are shows not to be named that are not funny that are being nominated for nominees.

21:22The Bear. The Bear is not funny. Didn't say that.

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22:05It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. All right, so you're getting into TV. And I want from you, insider, comedy person, what is the market like for actual television comedies that are funny and are not trying to be a tone poem? Is the market good, bad?

22:48Where is it? No, it's really good. And I'll tell you exactly why. First of all, Netflix on the streamer side, I mean, they're really leading it. You're saying the comedy market is good. I think a lot of people are going to spit in their coffee when they hear that. Here's why people think it's not good. Because they're equating it to the old network system where the four broadcast networks bought 80 comedies every summer, right? So that was 320 slots that people could sell comedies. And Matt, if you were a comedy writer, you'd walk in and you would say, my wife and I got into an argument over the weekend about Toast.

23:19And they would buy that idea. That's how easy it was in 2005. That doesn't exist right now. But with that said, the streamers are desperate to do comedy. And so what's happened is that it's just migrated. And it's just harder to sell things. Are the streamers desperate to do comedies? Really? The streamers, as you know, specifically Netflix, they want to do everything. As you guys pointed out in an earlier episode this week, that's why they do the Mulaney show. They know people aren't watching it as much as they watch some of their other shows, but they want to support Mulaney because he's a genius and because Ted loves comedy and because why not?