Pulp Comics

Bobcat Goldthwait gets to indulge his love of early physical comedy in a hybrid format that breaks the standard stage setup. Pulp Comics was an experimental Comedy Central series. It took comedians’ routines and adapted them into literal short films. For a comic whose frenetic persona always threatened to spill over the microphone stand, the mixed format made sense. It provided a perfect venue for highly visual, slapstick-heavy translations of his material.

Airing in December 1996 as the show’s second episode, the 20-minute broadcast caught the comedian during a major career pivot. He was transitioning from a 1980s stage act into a working director. The filmed segments served as an early playground for that shift. Riffing on his divorce, politics, and his own Hollywood trajectory, the live segments anchor the chaos of the cutaways. Finding the episode today requires some digging. It has become a holy grail for archivists on lost media forums, surviving mostly as faded VHS rips.