Hyperbolic

Matthew Broussard has long leaned into his natural handicap: he looks exactly like a generic 1980s movie villain who owns a yacht. For Hyperbolic, his 2024 debut full-length special, he uses that clean-cut, slightly punchable posture to deliver highly structured stand-up that treats joke writing more like a math proof than a confession. His jokes are built with computational precision, leaning on diagrams and logical traps rather than standard setups.

Having started in comedy over a decade prior and released a Comedy Central half-hour back in 2016, Broussard spent eight years polishing this hour on the road before self-producing the special for YouTube through 800 Pound Gorilla Media. Directed by Jason Katz and James Webb, the show was filmed in a New York comedy club, capturing Broussard shortly after his engagement to NCAA champion swimmer Laura Sogar.

His relationship is the source of the show’s strongest material, particularly a centerpiece routine about the emasculating reality of being the ‘bread loser’ to a professional athlete with giant swimmer feet. Broussard also leans into his mixed heritage as the product of a Cajun chemist father and a Jewish microbiologist mother, detailing the quirks of his mother’s struggles with mental illness. Between family stories, he pivots to hyper-specific routines on the etymological origins of pharmaceuticals like Viagra, grammatical inefficiencies in the French language, and the statistical likelihood of who starts arguments in couples counseling.