John Mulaney<\/a>\u2018s work. I think he\u2019s so meticulous with his words. I\u2019m a little more free-flowing and story-based, but I really respect all of it, and I enjoy the different ways that people approach it.<\/p>\nWe have this whole community and culture and this thing that feels very special. What drew me to being an entertainer in general is I was an undergrad studying to be a lawyer, I was really bored, and I was like, I don\u2019t want to do one thing forever, I want to have a kind of life where I can jump from this to that and the other thing. This career has been so good and exciting for me so far because I get to direct a music video one weekend, and then act in a movie, and then be off writing a script, and then stand-up, and then podcasting. I just think all the different ways to connect with people and entertain really excite me.<\/p>\n
What was so special about setting the event in Chicago?<\/strong><\/p>\nHBO has been such a dream to work with. I think sometimes, as artists, we have this default setting of like, \u201cOh, the company is going to try and beat my thing into something it\u2019s not.\u201d We have this kind of weariness and this combativeness that we can come in with, and I had a real hope that working with HBO would be different, and it was. They\u2019ve been so awesome, and they let me do it my way. I wanted to build a set. I didn\u2019t want to do a theater just to prove that we could do a theater. I wanted to be in a small room. I wanted to be in Chicago because, to your question, that\u2019s where I started up when I finished college, and I had been doing improv and stand-up for a while. It\u2019s where I learned how to write jokes and tell stories and figured out my voice and what I even think is interesting, and it felt obvious to me that it would either be in Kansas City or Chicago, and because Chicago had so many early performance memories for me, that seemed like the one.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>
\nCaleb Hearon for ‘Model Comedian’<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Emilio Madrid \/ HBO<\/p>\n
How do you toe the line between addressing darker subject matter, like bullying and death, while maintaining the comedic tone of the special?<\/strong><\/p>\nFirst and foremost, across the board, I try to make people laugh. One piece of deciding how you approach heavy content, which is a lot of the special, is, are you too raw to be talking about this? And I\u2019m not. I\u2019ve processed all those things. I know where I stand on them and so, I\u2019m not up there doing therapy, and I think that\u2019s a really important part to me of the way that I approach stand-up.<\/p>\n
I think that\u2019s one part, and then the other part is you\u2019ve got to build credibility. There\u2019s a big, long bit at the end of the special, that I\u2019ll let people go and find out what it\u2019s about, but I think you have to put that bit in that place because ideally you\u2019ve spent the rest of the hour leading up to that building credibility to let people know, \u201cHey, this is the kind of person I am, these are my values, and this is why it\u2019s OK that I\u2019m joking like this about this stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t really believe in punching up or punching down as a rubric. I think there are some people without power who deserve to be made fun of, and I think there are some people with power who deserve grace. I think the rubric is way more, are you doing the right thing? Are you saying something that is ultimately kind and correct and based on what is true to you? And I think that\u2019s how I tackle more serious stuff. But the fat kid bit just really came from a place of me thinking about how crazy it was that growing up, adults would just acknowledge that you were going to get picked on. It just didn\u2019t feel powerful enough. I think I wanted someone when I was a kid, to say, \u201cNo, f**k those people, you\u2019re good.\u201d<\/p>\n
You open up about your father in the special. What did it mean to honor him in that way by joking about the grief you experienced over his loss?<\/strong><\/p>\nWe all deal with this at some point, and if it\u2019s not us dealing with our parents\u2019 death, it\u2019s our parents dealing with our death. It\u2019s like, at some point, we all have to deal with this thing, and my family, we just laugh at everything. I know that when I die, my family is gonna be cracking jokes within an hour, and that brings me a lot of peace, actually. I come from a very funny, dark, sardonic kind of family, and we laugh about everything.<\/p>\n
So, crafting that material felt like \u2014 my dad was an extremely funny guy. It did feel like an incredible way to honor him and our relationship, and also hopefully, if I\u2019m doing anything, I\u2019m just trying to connect. All I want to do with my time on Earth is connect. I want to feel seen, and I want you to feel seen, and I want to just spend this time that I have here trying to connect and make this whole thing more worthwhile. Part of getting up on stage and talking about yourself can be a little masturbatory; it can be about you, but in a bigger way, I hope that it\u2019s about us and that it\u2019s about you also feeling seen by the stuff that I\u2019m going through.<\/p>\n
How did you land on Model Comedian<\/em> for the title?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nI got to choose that, and [HBO] was cool with it; they didn\u2019t have any notes on that. One thing about choosing the title process-wise is that you know, in the bit, it\u2019s \u201ccomedian not a model\u201d and I thought about calling it \u201ccomedian not a model,\u201d but then I was like, I don\u2019t feel that way actually. I don\u2019t even want to accidentally traffic in self-debasing humor about me being ugly because I don\u2019t think I\u2019m ugly, I think I\u2019m really, really hot, and I think I\u2019m hyper conscious sometimes as a fat person with a public image that I don\u2019t even accidentally play into that, and so\u00a0Model Comedian<\/em> felt way more like me, and I\u2019m really happy with that.<\/p>\nCaleb Hearon: Model Comedian<\/strong><\/em>, Friday, September 19, 9\/8c, HBO and HBO Max\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nRead the latest entertainment news on TV Insider<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Caleb Hearon is putting it all out there in his first HBO stand-up special, Caleb Hearon: Model Comedian, but the comedian, actor, writer, and director isn\u2019t a stranger to opening up as his star continues to catapult with his various pursuits, ranging from his popular podcast\u00a0So True with Caleb Hearon to his upcoming role in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2035597,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[355881,21917,372746],"class_list":["post-2035596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-caleb-hearon","tag-hbo","tag-hearon"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Caleb-Hearon-on-Bringing-\u2018Model-Comedian-Special-to-Life-at.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2035596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2035596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2035596\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2035597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2035596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2035596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2035596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}