Summary
Bert Kreischer: Lucky is a Bert special through and through; topless, largely unfunny meandering that he nonetheless finds hilarious.
Bert Kreischer is one of the least funny people to have ever had a successful career in comedy, so it’s fitting that his fourth Netflix special, Lucky, is so-called because it’s largely about how all of his success is a product of sheer happenstance. This, beyond making me feel a little validated, is a good thing, since it’s easier to like Bert when he’s embracing how fortunate he is to make not just a living doing this, but one of the best livings that any comic has ever made.
Case in point: Bert’s 2024 tour was the sixth highest-grossing comedy tour worldwide, and the shows he shot in his hometown of Tampa, where he filmed this special, sold out in a day. People will queue around the block to see this guy take his shirt off and talk about drinking. It’s a remarkable accomplishment.
Lucky is not a remarkable accomplishment, but it’s a Bert Kreischer special through and through, and it did manage to make me cry (though admittedly not with laughter.) So, like Bert itself, it’s an odd beast, silly and scattershot but sometimes quite introspective and serious. On balance, I probably liked it more than Razzle Dazzle, but there’s only so much variation you get within a Bert special.
If nothing else Bert has lost 45 pounds, which he laughingly points out with the caveat, “I’m still fat though.” That’s his entire act in a nutshell, really. He emerges and quickly sheds his shirt – a gimmick that has somehow survived his entire career – before regaling the audience with stories that mostly all have the same structure; he did a good thing but he was drunk, or he said a bad thing but he meant well, or he ordered a preposterous amount of traffic cones, but it’s okay because he’s an idiot.
I think Bert’s reassuring self-deprecation is what people like about him. It’d be weird if he thought he was cooler or funnier than he is. Most of the laughs in this special come from him laughing at something that isn’t very funny, which in a strange way makes it funny. And his success – deserved or otherwise – puts him in situations to create more stories, some of them so outlandish they almost have to be true, which has been his stock in trade ever since the wild virality of the story about Russian mobsters calling him The Machine.
Consider the bit in Lucky about a misunderstanding with Snoop Dogg. The fact he was having dinner with Snoop Dogg in the first place is the kind of thing I’m talking about, but it’s reassuring that hanging out with him is just another excuse for Bert to embarrass himself. It’s all very on-brand.
But there is a bit that genuinely made me tear up. Admittedly, I had my dog put down fairly recently, so that was doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but there’s something about the way Bert recalls the story of losing a family dog that is very relatable. And maybe that’s the trick. His family factors so heavily into his act because he is, fundamentally, a family man. All he ever wants to talk about is his wife and his kids. Snoop Dogg only gets a passing mention. For a guy who can’t stop drinking, can’t keep his shirt on, and can’t stop making a fool of himself, he nonetheless seems to have his priorities in order.
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