You're Doing Great

Tom Papa wants to lower your standards. His 2020 Netflix debut centers on a simple, counter-intuitive premise for a modern stand-up set: you are actually doing fine. Instead of feeding into the collective dread of the era, he uses his stage time to assure a stressed-out crowd that they don’t need to be extraordinary to live a good life. It is a cozy, low-stakes hour of comedy that targets the exhausting pressure to perform happiness on social media, the urge to constantly check 24-hour news networks, and the bizarre guilt of eating ice cream on a Tuesday.

Filmed at the Victoria Theater at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, the special captured Papa at a highly productive moment in his career. Beyond touring, he was co-hosting a daily SiriusXM show with Fortune Feimster, contributing to NPR’s Live From Here, and preparing to release an essay collection under the same title. On stage, he mixes crowd work with signature observational routines about family life, the existential misery of waking up in Staten Island, and the quiet relief of setting more obtainable daily goals. Critics and audiences largely accepted the show as a comforting, gentle hour, though some found his polished, polite delivery a bit too safe for their tastes.