When my friends and I first discovered Caleb Hearon’s front-facing Twitter videos in early 2020, I knew immediately I was going to follow him wherever he went for as long as I could. The contents of the videos themselves — I still drop a “I would rather die than wake up more dead” into casual conversation here and there — were incredibly funny on their own but what made Hearon stand out so quickly was his matter-of-fact delivery, the range of facial expressions and vocal tics he used to emphasize certain words and phrases, and his ability to craft narratives and scenarios that felt simultaneously too real and too ridiculous. A couple years later, in 2022, Hearon was featured on Comedy Central Stand-Up’s tenth season, and the way his feature moved seamlessly from giving a blowjob to someone on Lexapro to loving “bad” students to how being gay isn’t “cool” anymore cemented what I already suspected: Hearon’s comedic voice is one we desperately need right now.
Since 2022, Hearon’s popularity has rightfully been on a nonstop upward trajectory. He’s managed to amass a huge social media following, launch his highly-listened to So True with Caleb Hearon podcast via Headgum, star in MUNA’s “Silk Chiffon” music video, become a Ziwe interviewee, and gain both acting and writing credits in film and on television. And he’s done it all without losing one of the qualities that makes him so distinct from many people working in show business right now — fame hasn’t made him less of the people or less willing to be vulnerable for the sake of connecting with his audience. If anything, it seems to have brought the importance of speaking up for others, never being afraid to criticize even the most powerful among us, and using comedy as a force for good in the world to the forefront of all the work Hearon is doing.
This has never been more obvious than in his new, hour-long HBO comedy special, Model Comedian — the title of which comes from a hilariously misguided comment posted by one of his followers in response to an online troll. “The primary culling factor we used toward the end to figure out what jokes we wanted to include was thinking if this goes beyond the target audience, which it will because it’s HBO, I just wanted it to be introductory,” Hearon tells me in an interview prior to the Model Comedian’s release. “I wanted people to walk away from it first and foremost having laughed but also just having a better understanding of who I am and why I see the world the way I do and where I’m coming from. And maybe there’s something they can relate to. But primarily, I wanted to introduce myself to people who may not know me at all or who may just know me as the gay guy in their phone screen they scroll past sometimes.”
Hearon opens the special with an admission that might be startling to some: “I’m so randomly happy to be alive. I’m delusional, you know? I do feel good…the world’s on fire but I’m like ‘Let’s get silly with it,’ you know? I do. I wake up every day and feel good despite…everything.” It sets the tone for an hour of stand up that vacillates between keen and incisive observations on the nature of our online lives, the realities of being gay and growing up and living in the Midwest, the villainy of Republican lawmakers, drunk interactions with straight men, being an “uptight” kid and his journey to becoming “more chill,” a surprising visit to a concentration camp, and working through his feelings about his relationship to his late father with the trademark joviality and lighthearted sarcasm Hearon has become well known for.
Although the entire special brings that non-stop laughter Hearon was hoping for, there are a few stand out moments. One of the funniest bits features Hearon talking about what it was like to grow up as a fat kid who was bullied incessantly by his peers and about how ridiculous it is that adults expect kids who are bullied to respond with “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” As the bit comes to a close, he invites the help of audience members to help him enact the “speech [he] wrote for little fat kids today” and sends the crowd soaring into some of the loudest convulsions of the special.
Later, in the most vulnerable part of his set, Hearon jokes about his “mentally ill” family and discusses his experiences with his “hermit absentee father” who he largely stayed in touch with via phone calls and didn’t feel truly connected to until after his death when Hearon had to help his family take care of his father’s belongings. Through these difficult recollections, he never misses the chance to point out the absurdity and irony of being the child of someone who didn’t “want to be a father” while also giving incredible grace to the man his father was despite the pain caused by their relationship. The ending of this part is particularly prescient as Hearon astutely highlights the way people with complicated relationships to their parents have to grieve after that parent’s death. Hearon says, “When you have a complicated relationship with someone you love and you lose them, you have to mourn kind of two relationships. You have to mourn the actual one that you had, which was complicated and fraught and sometimes fucked up, but it was the one you got. And then, you have to mourn the second relationship, this kind of like hopeful relationship that you’ll never get now.” But his striking ability to blend humor and heartache comes to a hilarious close when he says, “If any of you have ever been through anything, this part will probably be hitting like crazy. But as the only person who’s ever been through anything, you’ll have to just take my word for it.”
This also launches him into an explanation of “redneck progressivism,” a term he’s coined to describe and explain the way people in the Midwest (and the South) often have good intentions for everyone around them — even people who are distinctly different than them — but can’t seem to talk about those beliefs and differences without stumbling into some problematic territory. Together, these two pieces become a beautiful testament to the unique balancing act Hearon has become so skilled at employing in both his comedy and commentary. In Hearon’s world, nothing is truly black and white and no one is truly “evil.” There is always something else to be excavated from our interactions and connections with others even if they seem at odds with who we are, and we’re allowed to make fun of how we make our ways through those interactions.
“I think our national conversation about so many things is lacking. And one thing that I think is really unfortunate is that conversations around queerness, specifically, really veered into this ‘precious objects’ territory where we were incorrectly made out to be these sensitive, precious people,” Hearon tells me. “It’s just really not reality, and I hope we’re — queer and trans people and our allies and people who don’t understand us yet but will at some point — moving towards a conversation that’s less about policing and being sensitive and treating us different and special and holding us up and just going like ‘No, we actually just want you to treat us like your neighbors. We actually just want to be joked around with. We have the same wants and desires you have. We want to make a living wage and take care of our families and have a good time.’ And I think it’s so unfortunate that the conversation has drifted into this psychotic fearmongering about trans people.”
Of course, Hearon doesn’t veer away from skewering the far-right lawmakers who are making our lives a living hell right now. “My favorite straight guys out right now are conservative Republicans. I don’t care, I love them. I love them. I think they’re so funny because they all hate gay people so much and they’re such faggots,” Hearon says before hysterically pointing out the ridiculousness of men like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, J.D. Vance, and Ron Desantis worrying about masculinity and scapegoating trans people while wearing “bespoke little bowties,” “so much mascara just to be compelling,” and having the vocal inflections of someone he’s seen “do Cher at Hamburger Mary’s Maryoke.” When I ask Hearon about this part specifically, he says outright: “I’m not ceding home to anybody. I’m not scared of these motherfuckers. I am from this place just as much as anybody else is, and they don’t get to tell me that we’re something that we’re not or that we don’t belong where we’re from because we do.”
As Model Comedian comes to a close, it’s clear Hearon manages to not only accomplish his goal of thoroughly introducing himself to people who aren’t familiar with his work but also provides a reminder of something we should be clinging to in this formidable and fatiguing moment in our history. Everything might seem like it’s closing in on us, yet we have the remarkable ability to seize the absurdity and incongruity we’re witnessing and turn it entirely on its head if we want to. Model Comedian proves once again that for Hearon, writing and performing comedy isn’t just a tool to get through the most grueling parts of living in this intense moment of anti-queer and anti-trans backlash, it’s a tool we can use to start breaking through it and breaking it down entirely. And we should wield it as often and as audaciously as we possibly can.
Model Comedian is now streaming on HBO.
lesbians love caleb hearon!!!