Can Netflix, the King of Stand-Up Specials, Be Dethroned?

Imagine Netflix died. What happens to stand-up comedy?

This may seem like an outlandish hypothetical since Netflix is the most powerful player in comedy today. But in the current media landscape, when major new streaming services will be entering the market in the new year including Disney and AT&T (which owns HBO), uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. This quarter, for the first time ever, Netflix lost American subscribers and its stock price plunged. Meanwhile, entertainment companies including HBO and Amazon Prime are positioning themselves as alternatives with new specials from Jim Gaffigan and Julio Torres that signal two very different strategies.

Considering its major resources, Amazon Prime always seemed like the biggest potential threat to Netflix’s stranglehold on stand-up, and this month it presents its first original stand-up special, Jim Gaffigan’s “Quality Time,” which premieres next Friday. The streamer, which already has a sizable library of specials produced by HBO, Showtime and others, will release four more original specials next week, and it recently shot the inaugural hour from Ilana Glazer (“Broad City”). These are all from Comedy Dynamics, the behemoth producer and distributor behind the recent boom in specials.

Debuting with Gaffigan is a savvy choice: He’s no next big thing: “Quality Time” is his seventh special and he’s one of the most broadly popular comedians working today. But he can get a bit lost on Netflix because his family-friendly material can seem too safe to make news or stand out in a crowded screen filled with big names.

Gaffigan, supremely assured and reliably funny, begins his 75-minute special characteristically, with some self-deprecating lines about his weight, weaving together a collection of jokes about the untucked shirt, or as he calls it, “the fat man’s last hurrah.” Then he moves on to standby subjects like kids, the weather, in-laws and the necessity of lying in specific circumstances, which include the need to “spare someone’s feelings and to cover up a murder.”

He delivers his punch lines at the end of patiently established premises, and then doubles down on them using a second voice, higher-pitched and quicker in cadence. This is his inner critic, which provides a running commentary on his show.

This device has become fairly common in stand-up, turning a solo art into a double act, but no one does it better than Gaffigan.

Where his comedy excels is not in his insights, but in the densely populated world surrounding his material. In the highlight of the special, he does 10 minutes of jokes about horses that he pulls off by mocking his indulgence, parodying himself, in his own voice and his critical one, while also shifting to the perspective of an audience incredulous at the number of jokes about equestrian life. It’s stand-up that feels like a crowded scene, a series of one-off jokes that somehow manages to achieve a kind of bizarre suspense. Will he keep going? Why do we care? Why not?

In contrast to the scale of Amazon, HBO has traditionally been a prestige niche. There is much speculation about whether that will change in response to streaming-age competition, but you wouldn’t know it from its stand-up, which has remained tightly curated, ambitious and rarefied. Just as HBO had the most formally daring special last year with “Drew Michael,” it will surely have the most experimental special of 2019 in Julio Torres’s “My Favorite Shapes,” which premieres Saturday.

For some, watching this deliriously dry special will be the comedy version of going from a lifetime of paintings of representational art to suddenly discovering Mark Rothko. It’s jarring. And Torres will not be for everyone. Expressing shock that he has been called “too niche,” he adds, “I have purchased chairs for all of my crystals.”

After an introduction in which Torres, a slight blond in a silver costume, speaks to his mother in Spanish, he appears sitting in front of a conveyor belt on a starkly abstract set that seems designed by Pierre Cardin. Small objects (figurines, jewelry, simple shapes) roll up. Picking each up, the camera so close in that you can see the glitter on his hands, he turns each into a bit, Torres dances nimbly from the purely conceptual quip (musing on a square, say) to more elaborate vignettes like an imagined scene between Fred Flintstone and Betty Rubble turning “The Flintstones” into a melancholy slice of life.

As he has on “Saturday Night Live,” where he works as a writer, Torres puts you in the most unexpected perspectives, doing an impression of a Brita filter or explaining the inner thoughts of a tiny cactus in a container. The way he lavishes attention on even inanimate objects is not just silly and surreal, it makes the case for radically empathetic comedy without a trace of didacticism.

Torres can seem like he is from another planet, one where reruns of “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” play on a loop, but if Jim Gaffigan’s conventional stand-up hides some clever conceptual tricks, the experimentalism of “My Favorite Shapes” hides what is actually the meat and potatoes of comedy: setups and quick punch lines, personal revelations through mockery of popular culture. It’s a stand-up set deconstructed and rebuilt in a style that seems too strange to be a reaction to anything so much as its very own, distinctive thing.

In showcasing Torres, as well as Ramy Youssef, the Hulu series star who also released a very funny debut this summer, HBO has fashioned itself as a home for promising young comedians. But it hasn’t tried to match Netflix in star power or volume. The greatest rival there might be YouTube, where many younger audiences discover new work, whether from the site’s own celebrities or the old-fashioned kind whose work gets repurposed on the vast service.

The savvy comic Andrew Schulz has built up a fan base outside the traditional media by putting himself in opposition to a politically correct entertainment industry but also dispensing with the old hourlong show and releasing his content in a multitude of bite-size forms. Appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast, he predicted Netflix’s downfall, pointing out that the streamer doesn’t own many of its most popular shows, like “The Office” or “Friends.”

Rogan seemed skeptical, but Schulz’s suggestion that the future might not be bright for the zeitgeist-defining company has moved from the margins and become common speculation among industry types. Last month, when Netflix tweeted it was sorry that “Friends” would leave its service in 2020, the comic retweeted it, with a pointed message: “Tick tock.”

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