Hopeful Romantic

Daniel Weingarten met his wife by calling the advice podcast she co-hosted and leaving a drunk voicemail about a broken cello on a bar wall. Most comics would bury that story under irony, but Weingarten leans straight into the earnestness of it, tracing a lifelong fixation with romance back to being a twelve-year-old who wrote poetry and watched every movie with a number in the title. His childhood DVD shelf, as he tells it, looked like a math equation whose answer was Matthew McConaughey.

He taped Hopeful Romantic on November 9, 2025, across two shows at Los Angeles’s Dynasty Typewriter, and co-directed the 69-minute hour with his wife, filmmaker Zoe Kanters.

By the time the special hit YouTube on May 20, 2026, Weingarten had built a steady Los Angeles resume as a stand-up, actor, and indie director, with appearances on Comedy Central’s Stand-Up Featuring, TruTV’s Adam Ruins Everything, and Apple TV’s Loot, plus a staff writing stint on Disney’s Ultra Violet & Black Scorpion and two feature films. Hopeful Romantic arrived without much press or distributor push, picking up roughly 14,000 YouTube views in its first five months. Two months after uploading it, Weingarten posted a three-minute follow-up video titled “Was My Comedy Special a Failure?” to talk through the quiet numbers.

The set itself stays small and domestic, moving from teenage rom-com devotion, counting 8 Mile alongside 27 Dresses and 10 Things I Hate About You, to marriage and pregnancy. One of the tighter late bits finds Weingarten admitting to mildly mirroring his pregnant wife’s fatigue and nausea, looking up a study confirming that partners actually do that as an empathetic response, and delivering the research to her with “Scientifically, this happens,” only to be told that scientifically he could shut the fuck up.