Matt McCusker has ascended to another level.
Two years after self-releasing his debut special, the Philly-bred comic nicknamed “The Shaman” returned this month with A Humble Offering, an hour marking his Netflix debut.
This moment of mainstream validation is a big milestone for any comic, though of course, McCusker doesn’t necessarily need it. With Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, which he and Shane Gillis built into one of the biggest podcasts in comedy over the course of a decade, he’s already cultivated a diehard fanbase. And when he put out his special The Speed of Light in 2023, that audience showed up in force, helping him to rack up nearly four million views on YouTube.
Still, if McCusker was doing just fine on his own, a Netflix special offers an opportunity to reach his broadest audience yet — much like it did Gillis, who after the chart-topping release of his 2023 Netflix special Beautiful Dogs, rocketed off into comedy’s upper echelon of arena packers.
When A Humble Offering debuted, McCusker’s wife threw him a viewing party, much to his chagrin. “I stood in the kitchen, as far away as possible, and just watched people watch it. I would catch myself mouthing along. I’d be like talking along silently to myself. And I was like, this is just uncomfortable,” he recalls on our Comedy Means Business podcast. “But it was cool. You know, it went well enough.”
McCusker is one of those comics who, paradoxically, can rip through a room with his stand-up while in everyday life being somewhat anxious and introverted. It’s just one contradiction McCusker embodies, as a comedian who contains multitudes.
A family man with schooling in social work and a fascination for the darker corners of human behavior, who worked both blue- and white-collar jobs before breaking out, he’s a comic people relate to instantly — unpretentious, warm, and quick to laugh — someone as funny in conversation as he is on stage, who feels both familiar and unpredictable. One moment, he’ll be discussing philosophy and the metaphysical, and the next he’ll be talking the highs and lows of his drug-dealing days, or dissecting the lyrics of Bad Bunny.
Beyond his podcast and specials, McCusker has been busy of late rounding out a hodgepodge, direct-to-consumer career as a novelist and animator. Truthfully, he’d rather be writing novels than stand-up, citing Elmore Leonard and Don DeLillo as writers he admires. And with a gonzo radio play in the works, you can expect a continuing diversity from him, in terms of creative output.
Framing his career as a small business, McCusker says that there’s one core driver behind all of his work: “I just try to make people who are bored at their jobs laugh.”
