All My Friends Are Dead
Comedy Dynamics · 2024 · 23 min
A twenty-minute club set finding jokes inside heavy personal loss.
Released , on Comedy Dynamics.
Drew Landry turns severe childhood grief into lean club comedy, refusing the solemn, TED-talk posture that usually creeps into sets about mortality. The premise is stark: his childhood best friend Tucker died in an elevator accident when they were eight years old, and twenty years later, Tucker’s twin sister Ellie died too. Rather than building a theatrical one-man show around the tragedy, Landry treats the subject with the economy of a working comic who has been telling jokes in clubs since middle school.
He gets right into a bipolar diagnosis that put him in a psychiatric hospital as a child, recalling his mother trying to reassure him by reading off famous figures who lived with the same condition: Kurt Cobain, Robin Williams, and Anthony Bourdain. The set pivots between early trauma and the awkward reality of processing grief as an adult, puncturing morbid premises with straightforward, punchy setups.
Recorded at the LA Connection Comedy Theatre in Los Angeles and running barely twenty-two minutes, the set was self-released on YouTube before receiving distribution through Comedy Dynamics in 2024. Landry, a Baltimore native who started stand-up at thirteen and later opened for Carlos Mencia and Dana Gould, picked up Best Stand-Up Special at the 2023 Laugh After Dark Comedy Festival for the release.
Notable bits & set list
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Being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and his mother trying to reassure him
His mother Googles famous people with bipolar disorder to comfort him, naming celebrities like Kurt Cobain, Robin Williams, and Anthony Bourdain, all of whom died by suicide.
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The deaths of childhood best friends Tucker and his twin sister Ellie
Recounting Tucker's death in an elevator accident at age eight and later Ellie's death in her twenties, examining the unnerving and lasting ways grief manifests.
How it plays
- Tone
- Life-affirming, frank, dark, and humorous.
- On stage
- Unassuming, no-frills, candid, and deeply empathetic, exhibiting natural on-stage ease while sharing intensely vulnerable and dark personal experiences.
- Pace
- Launches straight into the set without an introduction, maintaining good timing, cadence, and delivery with gusto.
- About
- death, grief and trauma, mental health and bipolar disorder, loss of childhood friends
What the critics said
Praised by Paste Magazine as a streamlined, life-affirming, and hilarious showcase of comedic talent grounded in deep empathy and on-stage ease.
In the room: An intimate room dynamic where the performer attentively gauges emotions and grants the crowd permission to laugh at discomfiting topics.
Backstory
A retrospective mini-special and tribute dedicated to his two childhood best friends, Tucker (who died at age eight in 2001) and Tucker's twin sister Ellie (who died in her 20s in 2021), exploring grief, trauma, and Landry's bipolar disorder diagnosis.
Details
- Released
- Taped
- 2022, LA Connection Comedy Theatre, Los Angeles
- Runtime
- 23 min
- Where
- Comedy Dynamics
- Director
- Kandice Martellaro
- Honors
- Best Stand-Up Special - Laugh After Dark Comedy Festival
- Topics
- After
- 10 Things I Hate About Drew (2025)
More from Drew Landry
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10 Things I Hate About Drew
Comedy Dynamics
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