Stavros Halkias, the Baltimore comic who has sold 25,000 tickets in one hometown theatre

Stavros Halkias

Photo: Neal Brennan / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 11, 1989 Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Occupation	Comedian and actor
Known for	Bugonia, Tony, Unedited Footage of a Bear
Awards	Baltimore's New Comedian of the Year

There is a rug at The Lyric in Baltimore with Stavros Halkias’s name on it. The theatre gave it to him this summer to mark more than twenty-five thousand tickets sold in that one room over the years, most of them to neighbours, old classmates and Ravens fans who watched him grow up. It is an odd trophy and a fitting one. Halkias built a national career on podcasts, YouTube clips and Netflix, then got cast by Yorgos Lanthimos and A24, and the place that still measures him most precisely is the old opera house across town from the Greektown streets where he was raised.

His stage persona is a big, loud, self-mocking guy in a tracksuit who talks to the front row as if they owe him money. The engine underneath is more disciplined than it looks. Halkias calls himself a comedy nerd, and his sets depend on a skill most comics treat as filler: crowd work, the improvised back-and-forth with strangers that he turned into the core of his act and, eventually, into his most-watched material online.

Stavros Emmanuel Halkias grew up in Baltimore as the son of Greek immigrants, a Macedonian mother and an Athenian father who worked as a contractor, and was born in the city on February 11, 1989. He has talked openly about being bullied for his weight as a child. At Baltimore Polytechnic Institute he played football, and he still brings up the annual City-Poly game on stage with the accent fully engaged. He went on to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, interned at Marc Steiner’s Center for Emerging Media, and by his own account left a few credits short of a degree.

UMBC is also where the comedy started. Halkias began doing stand-up at 19, hosted a monthly showcase on campus and worked the circuit that runs through Maryland, Washington, D.C. and Virginia. In 2012 he was named Baltimore’s New Comedian of the Year, the kind of local honour that mostly tells a young comic it is time to leave. He moved to New York, where he picked up radio and podcast guest spots, wrote and performed for Adult Swim and IFC, and appeared on MSG Network’s People Talking Sports and Other Stuff. He played the New York Comedy Festival, opened for Tom Papa, Robert Kelly and the Baltimore collective Wham City, and in 2019 turned up on Comedy Central’s Stand Up Featuring.

The break came through a microphone rather than a stage. From 2016 Halkias co-hosted Cum Town with Nick Mullen and Adam Friedland, a podcast built on deliberately offensive riffing that grew a devoted paying audience without any help from the industry. He stayed until June 2022. Sports ran alongside it: White Chocolate NBA Pipecast with Friedland during the 2017-18 season, then Pod Don’t Lie with the comedian Sam Morril from 2019 to 2022. During the pandemic he started a Twitch show, Stavvy Solves Your Problems, which in 2022 became the podcast Stavvy’s World. It debuted at number three on the iTunes comedy chart and remains his home base, produced by his childhood best friend Eldis Sula, who also runs his tours.

What changed everything was a decision to give an hour away. In 2022 Halkias posted his first special, Live at the Lodge Room, free on his YouTube channel. It passed a million views in four days and two million in three weeks, and by 2025 it had gone past seven million. The self-release proved he could fill theatres on his own terms, and Netflix followed: Stavros Halkias: Fat Rascal premiered on the platform in December 2023. The same year he put out Four Nights in NYC, a half hour made entirely of crowd work, and walked the runway at the designer KidSuper’s menswear-and-comedy show at the Casino de Paris.

The acting arrived faster than anyone expected, including Halkias, who has said his only training was an after-school programme in sixth grade. Steven Soderbergh cast him as Baz Diamandis in the self-financed web series Command Z, released in July 2023. In 2024 he joined Shane Gillis‘s Netflix workplace comedy Tires as Dave, a role he has kept through a third season that premiered in August 2026, with a fourth already ordered. He had a small part in the Max romantic comedy Sweethearts and dropped by John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA. More revealing was Let’s Start a Cult, an independent comedy he co-wrote with the director Ben Kitnick and the comic Wes Haney. Shot in three weeks in the summer of 2023 for less than a million dollars, it casts Halkias as Chip Harper, a foul-mouthed cult member left behind when the rest of the group transcends without him. Dark Sky Films released it in cinemas in October 2024 and Hulu picked it up the following February.

Then the calls got bigger. In Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, which premiered in competition at Venice in August 2025 and later earned four Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, he plays Casey Boyd, a small-town deputy who once babysat Jesse Plemons’s conspiracy-minded beekeeper and now has to go looking for Emma Stone‘s missing executive. The part asks him to be gentle and slightly lost, a quieter register than the one his stand-up audience knows. Matt Johnson, the director of BlackBerry, then cast him in Tony, A24’s film about the young Anthony Bourdain’s formative summer in a Provincetown kitchen, with Dominic Sessa as Bourdain. Halkias plays a kitchen worker named Stavros. He told NPR’s Bullseye that he made the film without ever reading the script. Tony opened in US cinemas on August 7, 2026, to warm reviews.

The easy story is that a podcast comic went legitimate. It flattens him. The crudeness that made Cum Town a cult object also dogged it: critics lumped the show in with the so-called dirtbag left and questioned what exactly its audience was laughing at. His newer material keeps the filth and adds pointed jokes about money and health care, delivered between lines about his own body. The body-positivity that fans credit him with is also more complicated than the label: he has spoken about the pandemic pushing him to lose weight, and in 2026 he talks on stage about finally trying to take care of himself without dropping a single fat joke.

That tension runs through Stavros Halkias: Uncle Stav, his second Netflix special, which premiered on September 8, 2026. He taped it over four shows at The Lyric in July, directed by Matt Johnson in a reunion from Tony. The recording had been scheduled for April and was pushed back four months after Halkias broke his arm in a scooter accident. The premise came from real life: he had just become an uncle, and the hour casts him as a self-described dirtbag role model, riffing on aging, the American health-care system and the price of living your best life. He produced it with Ben O’Brien under his own banner, Stavvy Baby Entertainment.

Halkias still keeps a house in Baltimore’s Canton neighbourhood and splits his time with New York. He follows the Baltimore Ravens and the Greek club Olympiacos with the same devotion, and both show up in his sets. The Dreamboat Tour has carried him through North America and abroad and runs on into 2026, while Tires heads into a fourth season and Stavvy’s World keeps rolling. He is represented by UTA, and two of the most closely watched directors of the last few years now have his number. The rug at The Lyric suggests he already knows where he will tape the next hour.

Featured Films

Bugonia (2025) — Tony (2026) — as Stavros

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