Name: Mark Normand: Out To Lunch (2020)
Rating: 5

In Mark’s third comedy hour he covers it all: Drinking, anxiety, gays, naughty words, trans, race and the ladies. I don’t know if he’s right about any of it but he is completely out to lunch.

Mark Normand is an American stand-up comedian and actor. He began performing stand-up in his hometown New Orleans in 2006. He has performed across the United States and abroad and has appeared on Conan, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

This is one of the strongest specials I’ve seen. he has some serious hard hitters that take rough topics and make a killer joke out of it. He has 6 to 7 seven jokes on the same topics yet never seems to overstay on a topic. He has some well threaded topics that would be hack in another comedians set but builds them into actually making a point on them.
Seriously stellar work. This blows so many specials on Netflix out of the water it’s an absolute outrage that he isn’t on there.

I was blown away that none of the streaming services would buy this! It’s insane. Maybe he was telling the truth when he said they don’t need another straight white male, I honestly can’t see any other reason.
Probably a combination of: it’s not new material for him, none of it is really groundbreaking subject matter that they would take a big chance on, his following is relatively small so there’s a lot of competition at that level, he’s not super tight with a lot of big comedians so he doesn’t get that boost (I think Ari Shafir benefits a lot from this, though I do like him), he doesn’t have any sort of big project coming up to generate a lot of buzz. And yes, there is definitely a degree of “oh he’s just another acerbic straight white male, we have plenty of those on the lineup already, let’s try somebody with a different audience demo,” without recognizing the canyons of difference between many of those acerbic straight white guys.
To be clear: I think this special was incredible, I’m just spitballing potential explanations for why Netflix didn’t go for it.