Red Blue Green

Drew Michael wants to talk about how much he struggles to connect with people, and he is willing to make his audience sit in absolute, uncomfortable silence to prove it. For his second HBO special, Red Blue Green (2021), Michael stands in a black T-shirt against a pitch-black backdrop, letting the camera linger in intense close-ups. He begins not with a quick volley of jokes, but with a somber confession about childhood hearing loss and his parents’ refusal to buy him hearing aids. It is a slow, deliberate start that feels more like an off-Broadway monologue than a Saturday night set, setting a heavy emotional baseline for the hour.\n\nWhen he does transition into standard joke structures, he targets the modern urge to turn personal trauma into public performance, skewering both social media and the trend of using comedy as therapy. The crowd-pleasing highlights are sparse but potent. He offers a sharp takedown of Jimmy Fallon, mockingly acts out self-aggrandizing celebrity award speeches, and spends several minutes meticulously dismantling the relationship between Jack and Rose in Titanic, pointing out that marrying an artist you slept with on a cruise after a suicide attempt is a terrible foundation for a marriage.\n\nFilmed in Michael’s hometown of Chicago, the special was self-directed with executive producers like Jerrod Carmichael and Christopher Storer. The visual design is intentionally deceptive. For most of the hour, the camera angles suggest a tiny, dark basement club of about two hundred people. The ending pulls back with two distinct structural tricks. First, Michael reads a final joke off his phone, a grim variation of “Why did the chicken cross the road,” before the camera pans out to reveal that the cozy room is actually a massive theater with a balcony full of hundreds of spectators. The performance earned Michael his second Writers Guild Award nomination, though it provoked plenty of online debate over whether his somber, therapy-heavy style belongs in stand-up comedy at all.