Andrew Schulz

Comedian · Verified

Stand-up comedian known for the Flagrant podcast and self-released specials.

#61Hub rank

4.8MTikTok followers

9.3MTotal reach

2Platforms tracked

About Andrew Schulz

Andrew Schulz is the comedian who fired the gatekeepers and won. When the industry wouldn’t give him a special on his terms, he self-released INFAMOUS on YouTube — and watched it rack up over 20 million views, becoming one of the most-watched comedy specials in platform history. The gamble proved the thesis he’d been building his whole career on: comedians don’t need permission anymore.

The stand-up is fearless in the literal sense — nothing is off limits, everybody gets these jokes, and the crowd work is legendary. Schulz built his name on viral “turn your phone” rants and a willingness to say the thing everyone’s thinking, delivered with the confidence of a guy who knows the audience is with him. The specials — INFAMOUS, then the Netflix debut Schulz Saves America — are the receipts.

Then there’s Flagrant, the podcast co-hosted with Akaash Singh that became a comedy institution in its own right — billions of views, a Patreon army, and a clip economy that keeps Schulz’s takes circulating across every platform daily. It’s part talk show, part fight club, part cultural barometer: the place where comedy, sports, and politics collide at full volume.

The career around the comedy is just as deliberate: acting roles in You People alongside Eddie Murphy and Jonah Hill, Netflix’s TIRES, the Brilliant Idiots podcast with Charlamagne tha God. Every move expands the footprint without diluting the brand — the brand being Andrew Schulz, unfiltered, at scale.

What he represents is the new comedy business model: own your audience, own your distribution, own your specials. A generation of comedians watched the INFAMOUS playbook and realized the old path — beg for a half-hour, hope for a special, pray for a sitcom — was optional. Schulz didn’t just succeed outside the system; he made the system come to him.

Why people watch: because it’s comedy with the safety off. Sharp, relentless, and genuinely funny — the rare comic who’s as good on a podcast as he is on a stage, and dangerous on both.

The New York roots run deep. Before the arenas, Schulz was a fixture of the city’s stand-up grind who broke out on MTV’s Guy Code in the early 2010s — and then, characteristically, decided the traditional ladder wasn’t for him. He built his name the hard way: relentless club sets, viral “turn your phone” rants that turned crowd work into shareable events, and a refusal to sand down his material for anyone. The industry wanted him to be a safer version of himself. He declined, publicly, and kept the receipts.

The receipts start with INFAMOUS. When a major streamer wouldn’t meet his terms for a special, Schulz did what the old system said was career suicide: he self-released the hour on YouTube, spending his own money to bet on himself. It racked up more than 20 million views and became one of the most-watched comedy specials in YouTube history — proof of concept for everything that came after. Then came Schulz Saves America, the four-part Netflix special that dissected the chaos of 2020, his first major streaming partnership. And then, in March 2025, Life: his most personal hour, filmed at New York’s Beacon Theatre after a sold-out 60-city world tour across North America, Europe, and Australia — back-to-back Madison Square Garden sellouts, the Kia Forum, the Crypto.com Arena, Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena on consecutive nights. Built around IVF, parenthood, and the beautiful chaos of starting a family, Life spent 15 consecutive days in the U.S. Top 10 and charted in 13 countries. Three specials, three distribution models, one consistent audience.

Running parallel to all of it is Flagrant, the podcast he launched with Akaash Singh in 2017 — originally “Flagrant 2,” a companion to The Brilliant Idiots, which he co-hosts with Charlamagne tha God. Flagrant outgrew the companion slot fast: 5 million weekly viewers, more than 1.4 billion total views on YouTube, and a Patreon army that funds the operation’s independence. The formula is total honesty with zero committee approval — culture, race, sports, politics, whatever happened that week — delivered to a genuinely diverse audience that showed up because the comedy never talked down to them. It’s the engine that sells out Radio City Music Hall and MSG without a streaming algorithm lifting a finger.

By 2024 the mainstream had no choice but to notice. His set at Netflix’s Roast of Tom Brady was one of the night’s most talked-about performances — Schulz walking into the biggest comedy room on earth and doing exactly what he does in a club. The New York Times’ David Marchese, perhaps only half-joking, suggested he might be America’s foremost political journalist; the line stuck because it contained a truth. Schulz’s stand-up and podcast content now reaches some 30 million viewers a week across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, and he talks about the culture — theology, sports, politics, all of it — with the fluency of someone who never needed a network’s permission to have a take.

The legacy is the playbook. Schulz didn’t just succeed outside the system; he documented the whole escape route in public — self-distribute the special, own the audience directly, let the podcast do the marketing the networks used to do, then make the networks come to you on your terms. A generation of comics is running that play now. Previously covers Andrew Schulz because he’s the living proof that the gatekeepers were optional all along — comedy with the safety off, and the box office to back it up.